IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia

[Bomhard at aol.com]

John Colarusso has published a paper entitled "Phyletic Links between proto-
Indo-European and proto-Northwest Caucasian" in which he maintains, among
other things, that Northwest Caucasian once extended over a wider geographic
range than what one now finds.  To my knowledge, Colarusso's paper has been
published three times:  first in 1992 in Howard Aronson, "The Non-Slavic
Languages of the USSR", second in "Mother Tongue" (reprint of 1992), and
finally in JIES, vol. 25, no. 1/2 (1997).  Whether one accepts or rejects
Colarusso's views, he would most likely be considered a "serious specialist"
and has published extensively on Northwest Caucasian.

In my book "Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis" (1996), I discuss a
small number of striking lexical similarities between Northwest Caucasian and
Proto-Indo-European.  I consider these to be loans and not due to genetic
affiliation.  What they appear to show is that PIE and PNWC (or pre-PNWC) were
in geographical contact at one point in time.