Definition: Nostratic is the name of a controversial, hypothesized group of language families that includes the language families Indo-European, Uralic,
Altaic, Kartvelian, and sometimes others. The hypothesis of the Nostratic Hypothesis is that Proto-Nostratic was spoken at some point before the recognized language families branched out. This puts Proto-Nostratic in the paleolithic period. The Comparative Method in historical linguistics has been used to project what the ancestral language might be.
See: Nostratic Dictionary.
On the AegeaNet, Dr. Herb Stahlke, Professor emeritus of Linguistics, with a specialization in historical linguistics at Ball State University, writes (referring to another comparative linguist, Ringe), "the cognates proposed so far, pre-dictionary, were not more than might occur by chance. His math is pretty sophisticated, but it doesn't falsify Nostratic, merely raises reasonable doubts."
