Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin
Sergei Starostin Anatoljevich (Russian: Сергей Анатольевич Старостин; born March 24, 1953 in Moscow, † September 30, 2005 in Moscow) was a Russian linguist. He worked in the field of comparative linguistics and hypothesized an ent -Caucasian family on macro.
Life and work
Starostin worked mainly with the reconstruction of the proto- languages of several Eurasian language families, including Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic, Altaic, Sino-Tibetan, and Jenisseisch Nordkaukasisch. His extensive knowledge of these language families and their languages Proto led in 1984 to formulate the Sino -Caucasian hypothesis, summarized in the Sino-Tibetan Starostin, Jenisseisch and Nordkaukasisch to a genetic unit. This macro family was expanded in 1991 by Sergei Nikolayev at the North American Na - Dene languages , thereby extending the ent -Caucasian macro family. Later, the Basque and some ancient oriental languages were added by others.
In the year of his death (2005) was Starostin professor at the Russian State University of Moscow, visiting professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a frequent guest lecturer at the Dutch University of Leiden, where he received an honorary doctorate in June 2005. Since 1985 he worked at the Tower of Babel, a project to store huge amounts of data over etymological most Eurasian language families.
Sergei Starostin died unexpectedly on 30 September 2005 of a heart attack shortly after a lecture in Moscow.