Georgiy Starostin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Georgiy Sergeevich Starostin (Russian: Гео́ргий Серге́евич Ста́ростин, born July 4, 1976) is a Russian linguistics researcher at the Center of Comparative Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, and a participant at the Santa Fe Institute's Evolution of Human Languages project. He is the son of the late Sergei Starostin (1953-2005), and carries on several of his father's projects. He also is a prolific self-published Internet music critic.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Work 2.1 Evolution of Human Languages 2.2 The Tower of Babel project 2.3 The Starling database program 3 Music criticism 4 Publications 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Biography

George Starostin was born on 4 July 1976^[1]. He is the son of the late Sergei Starostin (1953-2005), formerly Russia's leading specialist in comparative linguistics and head of the so-called 'Moscow school' of that field.

Since the early 2000's^{[citation needed]} he has worked at the Center of Comparative Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, where he also teaches, as well as serves as head of the Department of Far Eastern Philology at the same institution; specializing in Dravidian, general Nostratic, Sino-Tibetan (mainly Chinese), Yenisseian, and Khoisan studies. ^[2] He carries on several of his father's projects, including the participation at the Santa Fe Institute^[3].

With John Bengtson, Starostin edited the journal Mother Tongue in 2003.

[edit] Work

Starostin's research focuses on the Evolution of Human Languages project^[4]; The Tower of Babel, a publicly searchable online database containing huge amounts of information on almost all of Eurasia's language families^[5][6]; and STARLING, a software package to aid comparative linguists^[7][2].

[edit] Evolution of Human Languages

The Evolution of Human Languages (EHL) is an international project on the linguistic prehistory of humanity coordinated by the Santa Fe Institute. There are currently about 6000 languages on our planet, some of them spoken by millions and some by only a few dozen people. A primary goal of EHL researchers is to provide a detailed classification of these languages, organizing them into a genealogical tree similar to the accepted classification of biological species. Since all representatives of the species Homo sapiens presumably share a common origin, it would be natural to suppose - although this is a goal yet to be achieved - that all human languages also go back to some common source. Most existing classifications, however, do not go beyond some 300-400 language families that are relatively easy to discern. This restriction has natural reasons: languages must have been spoken and constantly evolving for at least 40,000 years (and quite probably more), while any two languages separated from a common source inevitably lose almost all superficially common features after some 6,000-7,000 years.^[8]

George Starostin's research within this project is centered around one of the more distinctive language families of the world - Khoisan (or, formerly, Bushman-Hottentot) languages of South Africa. While some important work on Khoisan languages has been done in the past century, mostly in the descriptive and taxonomic area, not much progress has been achieved in establishing regular phonological correspondences between the main branches of Khoisan and reconstructing the phonological and morphological system of Proto-Khoisan. This is partially due to a lack of consistently well transcribed language data, but even more so to the extreme complexity and uniqueness of Khoisan phonetics, primarily its high reliance on the use of so-called "click" (injective) phonemes which do not occur in any other language family.^[9]

[edit] The Tower of Babel project

The Tower of Babel is an International Etymological Database Project coordinated by the Center of Comparative Linguistics of the Russian State University of the Humanities. The main goal of the project is to join efforts in the research of long range connections between established linguistic families of the world. Internet is a brilliant way to combine our attempts and to build up a commonly accessible database of roots, or etyma reconstructed for the World's major (and minor) linguistic stocks.^[10]

[edit] The Starling database program

The Starling database program is part of the The Tower of Babel project. STARLING is a software package designed by Sergei Starostin for various types of linguistic text and database processing, including handling of linguistic fonts in the DOS and WINDOWS operating systems, operations with linguistic databases and Internet presentation of linguistic data.^[11]

[edit] Music criticism

Since 1998, Starostin has also written a large number of extensive reviews of rock music groups and albums on his site, Only Solitaire, named after a Jethro Tull song.^[12] Until April 2006 the site was frequently updated, and covers in detail the music of most of the major rock groups and musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, although he has reviewed less material of groups primarily associated with the 1980s and beyond. He has said that the main reason for this is because he believes that rock music has been becoming steadily worse since the 1960s to the point that it is now "dead"^[13], and cites Mark Prindle as the original insipiration for him becoming an online music critic.^[1]

After more than a year without updates, Starostin announced that he would not continue his work on Only Solitaire.

[edit] Publications

Starostin wrote some articles about Dravidian -, Yenissei -, Khoisan -, and Isolated - languages: A selection ^[14]:

• 1995, "The Structure of the Ket Verbal Form", with KY Reshetnikov, in: Ket Volume, issue 4 (1995, Moscow). (Russian language)
• 1995, "The Morphology of the Kott Verb and the Reconstruction of the Proto-Yenisseian Verbal System", in: Ket Volume, issue 4 (1995, Moscow). (Russian language)
• 1997, "Alveolar Consonants in Proto-Dravidian: One or More?", in: "Proceedings on South Asian Languages" (July 1-4, 1997), Moscow .
• 2002, "On The Genetic Affiliation Of The Elamite Language", in: Mother Tongue, Vol. 7, 2002.
• 2003, "A lexicostatistical approach towards reconstructing Proto-Khoisan", in: Mother Tongue, Vol. 8, 2003.
• 2005, "Some Aspects Of The Historical Development Of Clicks In Khoisan Languages", in: "Aspects of Comparative Linguistics", v. 1 (2005, Moscow, RSUH Publishers). (Russian language)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Webpage about Georgiy Starostin at the Santa Fe Institute.
• Only Solitaire: George Starostin's music reviews at Starling.rinet.ru.
• Notes on the Moscow Conference on Long-Range Comparison