Georgiy Starostin


Georgiy Sergeevich "George" Starostin is a Russian linguist and the son of the late historical linguist Sergei Starostin.
Starostin is also known as a self-published music reviewer, author of the Only Solitaire Blog, which he named after a Jethro Tull song.

Research

Starostin focuses almost exclusively on maintaining the following of his father's projects: the Evolution of Human Languages project; The Tower of Babel, a publicly searchable online database containing information about many Eurasia's language families; and STARLING, a software package to aid comparative linguists.

Evolution of Human Languages

The Evolution of Human Languages is an international project – of which Starostin inherited his father's membership – on "the linguistic prehistory of humanity" coordinated by the Santa Fe Institute. The project distinguishes about 6000 languages currently spoken around the world, and aims to provide a detailed classification similar to the accepted classification of biological species.
Their idea is that "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, while any two languages separated from a common source inevitably lose almost all superficially common features after some 6,000-7,000 years".

Tower of Babel project

The is an international etymological database project coordinated by the of the Russian State University for the Humanities. The project aims to "join efforts in the research of long range connections between established language families of the world. The Internet is used to combine these attempts and to build up a commonly accessible database of roots, or etyma reconstructed for the World's major linguistic stocks." Starostin's role specifically is for hosting the website.

Starling database program

The Starling database management system software program is part of his father's Tower of Babel project. This software program aims to support "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".

Publications

Starostin has written a number of articles on Dravidian, Yeniseian, Khoisan, and language isolates. A selection includes:
  • 1995,, with KY Reshetnikov, in: Ket Volume, issue 4.
  • 1995,, in: Ket Volume, issue 4.
  • 1997,, in: "Proceedings on South Asian Languages", Moscow.
  • 2002,, in: Mother Tongue, Vol. 7, 2002.
  • 2003,, in: Mother Tongue, Vol. 8, 2003.
  • 2005,, in: "Aspects of Comparative Linguistics", v. 1.
  • 2008