Altaic languages
Encyclopedia
Altaic is a proposed language family
that includes the Turkic
, Mongolic
, Tungusic
, and Japonic
language families and the Korean
language isolate
. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia
through Central Asia
to Anatolia
and eastern Europe
(Turks, Kalmyks). The group is named after the Altai Mountains, a mountain range in Central Asia.
These language families share numerous characteristics. The debate is over the origin of their similarities. One camp, often called the "Altaicists", views these similarities as arising from common descent
from a proto-Altaic language spoken several thousand years ago. The other camp, often called the "anti-Altaicists", views these similarities as arising from areal interaction
between the language groups concerned. Some linguists believe the case for either interpretation is about equally strong; they have been called the "sceptics".
Another view accepts Altaic as a valid family but includes in it only Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. This view was widespread prior to the 1960s, but has almost no supporters among specialists today. The expanded grouping, including Korean and Japanese
, came to be known as "Macro-Altaic", leading to the designation by retronym
of the smaller grouping as "Micro-Altaic". Most proponents of Altaic continue to support the inclusion of Korean and Japanese. The assumption that Altaic is a valid family, but only consists of Japonic
, Korean
and Tungusic
, appears to be restricted to Unger (1990).
Micro-Altaic includes about 66 living languages, to which Macro-Altaic would add Korean, Japanese, and the Ryukyuan languages
for a total of about 74. (These are estimates, depending on what is considered a language and what is considered a dialect. They do not include earlier states of language, such as Old Japanese
or Ottoman Turkish language
.) Micro-Altaic has a total of about 348 million speakers today, Macro-Altaic about 558 million.
The idea that the Turkic
, Mongolic
, and Tungusic languages
are each others' closest relatives was allegedly first published in 1730 by Philip Johan von Strahlenberg
, a Swedish officer who traveled in the eastern Russian Empire
while a prisoner of war after the Great Northern War
. However, as has been pointed out by Alexis Manaster Ramer
and Paul Sidwell
(1997), Strahlenberg actually opposed the idea of a closer relationship between the languages which later became known as "Altaic".. Von Strahlenberg's classification was the first attempt at classification of a large number of languages some of which are Altaic. The term "Altaic", as the name for a language family, was introduced in 1844 by Matthias Castrén
, a pioneering Finnish philologist
who made major contributions to the study of the Uralic languages
. As originally formulated by Castrén, Altaic included not only Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus (=Tungusic) but also Finno-Ugric
and Samoyed
. Finno-Ugric and Samoyed are not included in later formulations of Altaic. They came to be grouped in a separate family, known as Uralic (though doubts long persisted about its validity). Castrén's Altaic is thus equivalent to what later came to be known as Ural–Altaic. More precisely, Ural–Altaic came to subgroup Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic as "Uralic" and Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic as "Altaic", with Korean
sometimes added to Altaic, and less often Japanese.
For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, many linguists who studied Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic regarded them as members of a common Ural–Altaic family, together with Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic, based on such shared features as vowel harmony
and agglutination
. While the Ural–Altaic hypothesis can still be found in encyclopedias, atlases, and similar general reference works, it has not had any adherents in the linguistics community for decades. It has been characterized by Sergei Starostin
as "an idea now completely discarded".
In 1857, the Austrian scholar Anton Boller suggested adding Japanese
to Altaic or more precisely to Ural–Altaic.
G.J. Ramstedt
and E.D. Polivanov in the 1920s advocated the inclusion of Korean. Ramstedt's two-volume magnum opus
, Einführung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft ('Introduction to Altaic Linguistics') was published in 1952–1957. He rejected the Ural–Altaic hypothesis, included Korean in Altaic, an inclusion followed by most leading Altaicists to date. The first volume, Lautlehre ('Phonology'), contained the first comprehensive attempt to identify regular correspondences between the sound systems of the Altaic language families. In 1960, Nicholas Poppe presented what was in effect a heavily revised version of Ramstedt’s volume on phonology that has since set the standard in Altaic studies.
Poppe considered the issue of the relationship of Korean to Turkic-Mongolic-Tungusic not settled. In his view, there were three possibilities: (1) Korean did not belong with the other three genealogically, but had been influenced by an Altaic substratum; (2) Korean was related to the other three at the same level they were related to each other; (3) Korean had split off from the other three before they underwent a series of characteristic changes.
Roy Andrew Miller
's 1971 book Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages convinced most Altaicists that Japanese also belonged to Altaic. Since then, the standard set of languages included in Altaic has comprised Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese.
An alternative classification, though one with much less currency among Altaicists, was proposed by John C. Street (1962), according to which Turkic-Mongolic-Tungusic forms one grouping and Korean-Japanese-Ainu another, the two being linked in a common family that Street designated as "North Asiatic". The same schema was adopted by James Patrie (1982) in the context of an attempt to classify the Ainu
language. The Turkic-Mongolic-Tungusic and Korean-Japanese-Ainu groupings were also posited by Joseph Greenberg
(2000–2002) who, however, treated them as independent members of a larger family, which he termed Eurasiatic
.
Anti-Altaicists Gerard Clauson
(1956), Gerhard Doerfer
(1963), and Alexander Shcherbak argued that the words and features shared by Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic were for the most part borrowings and that the rest could be attributed to chance resemblances. They noted that there was little vocabulary shared by Turkic and Tungusic but not Mongolic. They reasoned that if all three families had a common ancestor, we should expect losses to happen at random, not only at the geographical margins of the family, and that the observed pattern is consistent with borrowing. Furthermore, they argued that many of the typological
features of the supposed Altaic languages, such as agglutinative
morphology
and SOV word order, usually co-occur in languages. In sum, the idea was that Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic form a Sprachbund
– the result of convergence
through intensive borrowing and long contact among speakers of languages that are not necessarily closely related.
Doubt was also raised about the affinities of Korean and Japanese; in particular, some authors tried to connect Japanese to the Austronesian languages
.
Starostin (1991) defends Macro-Altaic. Unger (1990) advocates a family consisting of Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic but not Turkic or Mongolic, and Doerfer (1988) rejects all the genetic claims over these major groups. In 2003, Claus Schönig published a critical overview of the history of the Altaic hypothesis up to that time. He concluded:
In 2003, the An Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages was published by Starostin, Dybo, and Mudrak. It contains 2800 proposed cognate
sets, a set of sound laws based on those proposed sets, and a number of grammatical correspondences, as well as a few important changes to the reconstruction of Proto-Altaic. For example, while most of today's Altaic languages have vowel harmony
, Proto-Altaic as reconstructed by Starostin et al. lacked it—instead various vowel assimilations between the first and second syllables of words occurred in Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic. It tries hard to distinguish loans between Turkic and Mongolic and between Mongolic and Tungusic from cognates, and it suggests words that occur in Turkic and Tungusic but not Mongolic; all other combinations between the five branches also occur in the book. It lists 144 items of shared basic vocabulary (most of them already present in Starostin 1991), including words for such items as 'eye', 'ear', 'neck', 'bone', 'blood', 'water', 'stone', 'sun', and 'two'. This work has not changed the mind of any of the principal authors in the field, however. The debate continues unabated – e.g. S. Georg 2004, A. Vovin 2005, S. Georg 2005 (anti-Altaic); S. Starostin 2005, V. Blažek 2006, M. Robbeets 2007, A. Dybo and G. Starostin 2008 (pro-Altaic). E.g. next to criticizing a bulk of erroneous and misinterpreted data, Vovin states that the authors of EDAL even willfully ignored literature they were aware of.
in a scholarly race with his rival, the Germano-Russian linguist Wilhelm Radloff
. However, Radloff was the first to publish the inscriptions.
The prehistory of the peoples speaking these languages is largely unknown. Whereas for certain other linguistic groups, such as the speakers of Indo-European
, Uralic
, and Austronesian
, we are able to frame substantial hypotheses, in the case of the proposed Altaic family everything remains to be done. In the absence of written records, there are several ways to study the (pre)history of a people:
All of these methods remain to be applied to the languages attributed to Altaic with the same degree of focus and intensity they have been applied to the Indo-European family (e.g. Mallory 1989, Anthony 2007).
inventory has been reconstructed for the hypothetical Proto(-Macro)-Altaic language (taken from Blažek's [2006] summary of the newest Altaic etymological dictionary [Starostin et al. 2003] and transcribed into the IPA):
1 This phoneme only occurred at the beginnings of words.
2 These phonemes only occurred in the interior of words.
It is not clear whether /æ/, /ø/, /y/ were monophthong
s as shown here (presumably [æ œ~ø ʏ~y]) or diphthong
s ([i̯a~i̯ɑ i̯ɔ~i̯o i̯ʊ~i̯u]); the evidence is equivocal. In any case, however, they only occurred in the first (and sometimes only) syllable of any word.
Every vowel occurred in long and short versions which were different phoneme
s in the first syllable. Starostin et al. (2003) treat length together with pitch as a prosodic feature.
or tone
language; at least the first, and probably every, syllable could have high or low pitch.
s from loanword
s (in many cases). Such attempts have repeatedly been made. The latest version is reproduced here, taken from Blažek's (2006) summary of the newest Altaic etymological dictionary (Starostin et al. 2003) and transcribed into the IPA.
When a Proto-Altaic phoneme developed differently depending on its position in a word (beginning, interior, or end), the special case (or all cases) is marked with a hyphen; for example, Proto-Altaic /pʰ/ disappears (marked "0") or becomes /j/ at the beginning of a Turkic word and becomes /p/ elsewhere in a Turkic word.
¹ The Khalaj language
has /h/ instead. (It also retains a number of other archaisms.) However, it has also added /h/ in front of words for which no initial consonant (except in some cases /ŋ/, as expected) can be reconstructed for Proto-Altaic; therefore, and because it would make them dependent on whether Khalaj happens to have preserved any given root, Starostin et al. (2003: 26–28) have not used Khalaj to decide whether to reconstruct an initial /pʰ/ in any given word and have not reconstructed a /h/ for Proto-Turkic even though it was probably there.
² The Monguor language has /f/ here instead (Kaiser & Shevoroshkin 1988); it is therefore possible that Proto-Mongolian also had /f/ which then became /h/ (and then usually disappeared) in all descendants except Monguor. Tabgač and Kitan
, two extinct Mongolic languages not considered by Starostin et al. (2003), even preserve /p/ in these places (Blažek 2006).
³ This happened when the next consonant in the word was /lʲ/, /rʲ/, or /r/.
4 Before /i/.
5 When the next consonant in the word was /h/.
6 This happened "in syllables with original high pitch" (Starostin et al. 2003:135).
7 Before /æ/, /ø/ or /y/.
8 When the next consonant in the word was /r/.
9 When the preceding consonant was /r/, /rʲ/, /l/, or /lʲ/, or when the next consonant was /ɡ/.
10 Before /a/, /ə/, or any vowel followed by /j/.
11 Before /j/, or /i/ and then another vowel.
12 When preceded by a vowel preceded by /i/.
13 Before /a/.
14 Starostin et al. (2003) follow a minority opinion (Vovin 1993) in interpreting the sound of the Middle Korean letter as [nʲ] or [ɲ] rather than [z]. (Dybo & Starostin 2008:footnote 50)
15 Before /u/.
16 Before /a/, /o/, or /e/.
is pervasive in the languages attributed to Altaic: most Turkic and Mongolic as well as some Tungusic languages have it, Korean is arguably in the process of losing its traces, and it is (controversially) hypothesized for Old Japanese. (Vowel harmony is also typical of the neighboring Uralic languages
and was often counted among the arguments for the Ural–Altaic hypotheses.) Nevertheless, Starostin et al. (2003) reconstruct Proto-Altaic as lacking vowel harmony. Instead, according to them, vowel harmony originated in each daughter branch as assimilation of the vowel in the first syllable to the vowel in the second syllable (which was usually modified or lost later). "The situation therefore is very close, e.g., to Germanic
[see Germanic umlaut
] or to the Nakh languages
in the Eastern Caucasus, where the quality of non-initial vowels can now only be recovered on the basis of umlaut processes in the first syllable." (Starostin et al. 2003:91) The table below is taken from Starostin et al. (2003):
1 When preceded by a bilabial consonant.
2 When followed by a trill, /l/, or /lʲ/.
3 When preceded or followed by a bilabial consonant.
4 When preceded by a fricative (/s/, /ʃ/, /x/).
¹ "Proto-Mongolian has lost all traces of the original prosody except for voicing *p > *b in syllables with original high pitch" (Starostin et al. 2003:135).
² "[…] several secondary metatonic processes happened […] in Korean, basically in the verb subsystem: all verbs have a strong tendency towards low pitch on the first syllable." (Starostin et al. 2003:135)
es (or clitic
s) of the (Macro-)Altaic languages (taken from Blažek, 2006):
/V/ symbolizes an uncertain vowel. Suffixes reconstructed for Proto-Turkic, Proto-Mongolic, Proto-Korean, or Proto-Japonic, but not attested in Old Turkic, Classical Mongolian, Middle Korean, or Old Japanese are marked with asterisks.
As above, forms not attested in Classical Mongolian or Middle Korean but reconstructed for their ancestors are marked with an asterisk, and /V/ represents an uncertain vowel.
s in basic vocabulary across the Altaic family (from Starostin et al. [2003]).
1 Contains the Proto-Altaic dual suffix -/rʲV/: "both breasts" – "chest" – "heart".
2 Contains the Proto-Altaic singulative suffix -/nV/: "one breast".
3 Compare Baekje
*/turak/ "stone" (Blažek 2006).
4 This is in the Jurchen language. In modern Manchu it is usiha.
5 This is disputed by Georg (2004), who states: "The traditional Tungusological reconstruction *yāsa [ = /jaːsa/] cannot be replaced by the nasal-initial one espoused here, needed for the comparison." However, Starostin (2005) mentions evidence from several Tungusic languages cited by Starostin et al. (2003). Georg (2005) does not accept this, referring to Georg (1999/2000) and an upcoming paper.
, the numerals are remarkably stable. This is a rather exceptional case; especially words for higher numbers are often borrowed wholesale. (Perhaps the most famous cases are Japanese and Korean, which have two complete sets of numerals each – one native, one Chinese.) Indeed, the Altaic numerals are less stable than the Indo-European ones, but nevertheless Starostin et al. (2003) reconstruct them as follows:
1 Manchu
/soni/ "single, odd".
2 Old Bulgarian /tvi-rem/ "second".
3 Kitan
has /tʃur/ "2" (Blažek 2006).
4 -/uː/- is probably a contraction of -/ubu/-.
5 The /y/- of /ytʃ/ "3" "may also reflect the same root, although the suffixation is not clear." (Starostin et al. 2003:223)
6 Compare Silla
/mir/ "3" (Blažek 2006).
7 Compare Goguryeo
/mir/ "3" (Blažek 2006).
8 "third (or next after three = fourth)", "consisting of three objects"
9 "song with three out of four verses rhyming (first, second and fourth)"
10 Kitan has /dur/ "4" (Blažek 2006).
11 Kitan has /tau/ "5" (Blažek 2006).
12 "(the prefixed i- is somewhat unclear: it is also used as a separate word meaning ‘fifty’, but the historical root here is no doubt *tu-)" (Starostin et al. 2003:223). – Blažek (2006) also considers Goguryeo */uts/ "5" (from */uti/) to be related.
13 Kitan has /nir/ "6" (Blažek 2006).
14 Middle Korean has /je-(sɨs)/ "6", which may fit here, but the required loss of initial /nʲ/- "is not quite regular" (Starostin et al. 2003:224).
15 The Mongolian forms "may suggest an original proto-form" /lʲadi/ or /ladi/ "with dissimilation
or metathesis
in" Proto-Mongolic (Starostin et al. 2003:224). – Kitan has /dol/ "7".
16 /ɖirkup/ in Early Middle Korean(タリクニ/チリクヒ in 二中歴).
17 "Problematic" (Starostin et al. 2003:224).
18 Compare Goguryeo /tok/ "10" (Blažek 2006).
19 Manchu /dʒiri/, /dʒirun/ "a very big number".
20 Orok
/poːwo/ "a bundle of 10 squirrels", Nanai
/poã/ "collection, gathering".
21 "Hundred" in names of hundreds.
22 Starostin et al. (2003) suspect this to be a reduplication: */kɯr-kɯr/ "20 + 20".
23 /kata-ti/ would be expected; Starostin et al. (2003) think that this irregular change from /k/ to /p/ is due to influence from "2" /puta-tu/.
24 From */nʲam-ŋu-/.
25 Also see Tümen
. 26 Modern Korean – needs further investigations
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...
that includes the Turkic
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
, Mongolic
Mongolic languages
The Mongolic languages are a group of languages spoken in East-Central Asia, mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas plus in Kalmykia. The best-known member of this language family, Mongolian, is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia and the Mongolian residents of Inner...
, Tungusic
Tungusic languages
The Tungusic languages form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered, and the long-term future of the family is uncertain...
, and Japonic
Japonic languages
Japonic languages is a term which identifies and characterises the Japanese which is spoken on the main islands of Japan and the Ryukyuan languages spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. This widely accepted linguistics term was coined by Leon Serafim....
language families and the Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
language isolate
Language isolate
A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...
. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
through Central Asia
Central Asia
Central Asia is a core region of the Asian continent from the Caspian Sea in the west, China in the east, Afghanistan in the south, and Russia in the north...
to Anatolia
Anatolia
Anatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey...
and eastern Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
(Turks, Kalmyks). The group is named after the Altai Mountains, a mountain range in Central Asia.
These language families share numerous characteristics. The debate is over the origin of their similarities. One camp, often called the "Altaicists", views these similarities as arising from common descent
Genetic relationship (linguistics)
In linguistics, genetic relationship is the usual term for the relationship which exists between languages that are members of the same language family. The term genealogical relationship is sometimes used to avoid confusion with the unrelated use of the term in biological genetics...
from a proto-Altaic language spoken several thousand years ago. The other camp, often called the "anti-Altaicists", views these similarities as arising from areal interaction
Language contact
Language contact occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics.Multilingualism has likely been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual...
between the language groups concerned. Some linguists believe the case for either interpretation is about equally strong; they have been called the "sceptics".
Another view accepts Altaic as a valid family but includes in it only Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. This view was widespread prior to the 1960s, but has almost no supporters among specialists today. The expanded grouping, including Korean and Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, came to be known as "Macro-Altaic", leading to the designation by retronym
Retronym
A retronym is a type of neologism that provides a new name for an object or concept to differentiate the original form or version of it from a more recent form or version. The original name is most often augmented with an adjective to account for later developments of the object or concept itself...
of the smaller grouping as "Micro-Altaic". Most proponents of Altaic continue to support the inclusion of Korean and Japanese. The assumption that Altaic is a valid family, but only consists of Japonic
Japonic languages
Japonic languages is a term which identifies and characterises the Japanese which is spoken on the main islands of Japan and the Ryukyuan languages spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. This widely accepted linguistics term was coined by Leon Serafim....
, Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
and Tungusic
Tungusic languages
The Tungusic languages form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered, and the long-term future of the family is uncertain...
, appears to be restricted to Unger (1990).
Micro-Altaic includes about 66 living languages, to which Macro-Altaic would add Korean, Japanese, and the Ryukyuan languages
Ryukyuan languages
The Ryukyuan languages are spoken in the Ryukyu Islands, and make up a subgroup of the Japonic, itself controversially a subgroup of Altaic....
for a total of about 74. (These are estimates, depending on what is considered a language and what is considered a dialect. They do not include earlier states of language, such as Old Japanese
Old Japanese
is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language.This stage in the development of Japanese is still actively studied and debated, and key Old Japanese texts, such as the Man'yōshū, remain obscure in places.-Dating:...
or Ottoman Turkish language
Ottoman Turkish language
The Ottoman Turkish language or Ottoman language is the variety of the Turkish language that was used for administrative and literary purposes in the Ottoman Empire. It borrows extensively from Arabic and Persian, and was written in a variant of the Perso-Arabic script...
.) Micro-Altaic has a total of about 348 million speakers today, Macro-Altaic about 558 million.
History
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
, Mongolic
Mongolic languages
The Mongolic languages are a group of languages spoken in East-Central Asia, mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas plus in Kalmykia. The best-known member of this language family, Mongolian, is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia and the Mongolian residents of Inner...
, and Tungusic languages
Tungusic languages
The Tungusic languages form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered, and the long-term future of the family is uncertain...
are each others' closest relatives was allegedly first published in 1730 by Philip Johan von Strahlenberg
Philip Johan von Strahlenberg
Philip Johan von Strahlenberg was a Swedish officer and geographer of German origin who made important contributions to the cartography of Russia. Strahlenberg was born in Stralsund, which then belonged to Sweden, and his original name was Philip Johan Tabbert. He joined the Swedish army in 1694...
, a Swedish officer who traveled in the eastern Russian Empire
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
while a prisoner of war after the Great Northern War
Great Northern War
The Great Northern War was a conflict in which a coalition led by the Tsardom of Russia successfully contested the supremacy of the Swedish Empire in northern Central Europe and Eastern Europe. The initial leaders of the anti-Swedish alliance were Peter I the Great of Russia, Frederick IV of...
. However, as has been pointed out by Alexis Manaster Ramer
Alexis Manaster Ramer
Alexis Manaster Ramer is a Polish-born American linguist .He has published extensively on syntactic typology Alexis Manaster Ramer (born 1956) is a Polish-born American linguist (PhD 1981, University of Chicago).He has published extensively on syntactic typology Alexis Manaster Ramer (born 1956)...
and Paul Sidwell
Paul Sidwell
Paul Sidwell is a researcher and director at the Centre for Research in computational Linguistics and the Australian National University. Sidwell is a leading specialist in Mon-Khmer languages, especially the Katuic and Bahnaric branches.-Publications:...
(1997), Strahlenberg actually opposed the idea of a closer relationship between the languages which later became known as "Altaic".. Von Strahlenberg's classification was the first attempt at classification of a large number of languages some of which are Altaic. The term "Altaic", as the name for a language family, was introduced in 1844 by Matthias Castrén
Matthias Castrén
Matthias Alexander Castrén was a Finnish ethnologist and philologist.Castrén was born at Tervola, in Northern Finland, on the 20th of November...
, a pioneering Finnish philologist
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
who made major contributions to the study of the Uralic languages
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
. As originally formulated by Castrén, Altaic included not only Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus (=Tungusic) but also Finno-Ugric
Finno-Ugric languages
Finno-Ugric , Finno-Ugrian or Fenno-Ugric is a traditional group of languages in the Uralic language family that comprises the Finno-Permic and Ugric language families....
and Samoyed
Samoyedic languages
The Samoyedic languages are spoken on both sides of the Ural mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by approximately 30,000 speakers altogether....
. Finno-Ugric and Samoyed are not included in later formulations of Altaic. They came to be grouped in a separate family, known as Uralic (though doubts long persisted about its validity). Castrén's Altaic is thus equivalent to what later came to be known as Ural–Altaic. More precisely, Ural–Altaic came to subgroup Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic as "Uralic" and Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic as "Altaic", with Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
sometimes added to Altaic, and less often Japanese.
For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, many linguists who studied Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic regarded them as members of a common Ural–Altaic family, together with Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic, based on such shared features as vowel harmony
Vowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
and agglutination
Agglutinative language
An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...
. While the Ural–Altaic hypothesis can still be found in encyclopedias, atlases, and similar general reference works, it has not had any adherents in the linguistics community for decades. It has been characterized by Sergei Starostin
Sergei Starostin
Dr. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin was a Russian historical linguist and scholar, best known for his work with hypothetical proto-languages, including his work on the reconstruction of the Proto-Borean language, the controversial theory of Altaic languages and the formulation of the Dené–Caucasian...
as "an idea now completely discarded".
In 1857, the Austrian scholar Anton Boller suggested adding Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
to Altaic or more precisely to Ural–Altaic.
G.J. Ramstedt
Gustaf John Ramstedt
Gustaf John Ramstedt was a Swedish-speaking Finnish linguist and diplomat.-Biography:Ramstedt was born in Ekenäs in Southern Finland....
and E.D. Polivanov in the 1920s advocated the inclusion of Korean. Ramstedt's two-volume magnum opus
Magnum opus
Magnum opus , from the Latin meaning "great work", refers to the largest, and perhaps the best, greatest, most popular, or most renowned achievement of a writer, artist, or composer.-Related terms:Sometimes the term magnum opus is used to refer to simply "a great work" rather than "the...
, Einführung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft ('Introduction to Altaic Linguistics') was published in 1952–1957. He rejected the Ural–Altaic hypothesis, included Korean in Altaic, an inclusion followed by most leading Altaicists to date. The first volume, Lautlehre ('Phonology'), contained the first comprehensive attempt to identify regular correspondences between the sound systems of the Altaic language families. In 1960, Nicholas Poppe presented what was in effect a heavily revised version of Ramstedt’s volume on phonology that has since set the standard in Altaic studies.
Poppe considered the issue of the relationship of Korean to Turkic-Mongolic-Tungusic not settled. In his view, there were three possibilities: (1) Korean did not belong with the other three genealogically, but had been influenced by an Altaic substratum; (2) Korean was related to the other three at the same level they were related to each other; (3) Korean had split off from the other three before they underwent a series of characteristic changes.
Roy Andrew Miller
Roy Andrew Miller
Roy Andrew Miller is a linguist notable for his advocacy of Korean and Japanese as members of the Altaic group of languages....
's 1971 book Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages convinced most Altaicists that Japanese also belonged to Altaic. Since then, the standard set of languages included in Altaic has comprised Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese.
An alternative classification, though one with much less currency among Altaicists, was proposed by John C. Street (1962), according to which Turkic-Mongolic-Tungusic forms one grouping and Korean-Japanese-Ainu another, the two being linked in a common family that Street designated as "North Asiatic". The same schema was adopted by James Patrie (1982) in the context of an attempt to classify the Ainu
Ainu languages
The Ainu languages were a small language family spoken on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō, the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands, an island chain that stretches from Hokkaidō to the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula. They are alternately considered a...
language. The Turkic-Mongolic-Tungusic and Korean-Japanese-Ainu groupings were also posited by Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg was a prominent and controversial American linguist, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.- Early life and career :...
(2000–2002) who, however, treated them as independent members of a larger family, which he termed Eurasiatic
Eurasiatic languages
Eurasiatic is a language macrofamily proposed by Joseph Greenberg that includes many language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia. The eight branches of Eurasiatic are Etruscan, Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo–Aleut, spoken in...
.
Anti-Altaicists Gerard Clauson
Gerard Clauson
Sir Gerard Leslie Makins Clauson was an English civil servant, businessman, and Orientalist best known for his studies of the Turkish language....
(1956), Gerhard Doerfer
Gerhard Doerfer
Gerhard Doerfer was a German Turkologist, Altaist, and philologist best known for his studies of the Turkish language.Doerfer spent his childhood in Konigsberg and Berlin. After release from captivity following the World War II, from 1949 to 1954 he took in Berlin courses in Turkic and Altaic...
(1963), and Alexander Shcherbak argued that the words and features shared by Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic were for the most part borrowings and that the rest could be attributed to chance resemblances. They noted that there was little vocabulary shared by Turkic and Tungusic but not Mongolic. They reasoned that if all three families had a common ancestor, we should expect losses to happen at random, not only at the geographical margins of the family, and that the observed pattern is consistent with borrowing. Furthermore, they argued that many of the typological
Linguistic typology
Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages...
features of the supposed Altaic languages, such as agglutinative
Agglutinative language
An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...
morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
and SOV word order, usually co-occur in languages. In sum, the idea was that Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic form a Sprachbund
Sprachbund
A Sprachbund – also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related...
– the result of convergence
Language convergence
Language convergence is a type of contact-induced change whereby languages with many bilingual speakers mutually borrow morphological and syntactic features, making their typology more similar....
through intensive borrowing and long contact among speakers of languages that are not necessarily closely related.
Doubt was also raised about the affinities of Korean and Japanese; in particular, some authors tried to connect Japanese to the Austronesian languages
Austronesian languages
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...
.
Starostin (1991) defends Macro-Altaic. Unger (1990) advocates a family consisting of Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic but not Turkic or Mongolic, and Doerfer (1988) rejects all the genetic claims over these major groups. In 2003, Claus Schönig published a critical overview of the history of the Altaic hypothesis up to that time. He concluded:
- Generally, the more carefully the areal factor has been investigated, the smaller the size of the residue open to the genetic explanation has tended to become. According to many scholars it only comprises a small number of monosyllabic lexical roots, including the personal pronouns and a few other deictic and auxiliary items. For these, other possible explanations have also been proposed. Most importantly, the 'Altaic' languages do not seem to share a common basic vocabulary of the type normally present in cases of genetic relationship.
In 2003, the An Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages was published by Starostin, Dybo, and Mudrak. It contains 2800 proposed cognate
Cognate
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...
sets, a set of sound laws based on those proposed sets, and a number of grammatical correspondences, as well as a few important changes to the reconstruction of Proto-Altaic. For example, while most of today's Altaic languages have vowel harmony
Vowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
, Proto-Altaic as reconstructed by Starostin et al. lacked it—instead various vowel assimilations between the first and second syllables of words occurred in Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic. It tries hard to distinguish loans between Turkic and Mongolic and between Mongolic and Tungusic from cognates, and it suggests words that occur in Turkic and Tungusic but not Mongolic; all other combinations between the five branches also occur in the book. It lists 144 items of shared basic vocabulary (most of them already present in Starostin 1991), including words for such items as 'eye', 'ear', 'neck', 'bone', 'blood', 'water', 'stone', 'sun', and 'two'. This work has not changed the mind of any of the principal authors in the field, however. The debate continues unabated – e.g. S. Georg 2004, A. Vovin 2005, S. Georg 2005 (anti-Altaic); S. Starostin 2005, V. Blažek 2006, M. Robbeets 2007, A. Dybo and G. Starostin 2008 (pro-Altaic). E.g. next to criticizing a bulk of erroneous and misinterpreted data, Vovin states that the authors of EDAL even willfully ignored literature they were aware of.
Postulated Urheimat
The earliest known texts in any of the purported Altaic languages are the Orkhon Turkic inscriptions, dating from the 7th century AD. They were deciphered in 1893 by the Danish linguist Vilhelm ThomsenVilhelm Thomsen
Vilhelm Ludwig Peter Thomsen was a Danish linguist. In 1893, he deciphered the Turkish Orkhon inscriptions in advance of his rival, Wilhelm Radloff...
in a scholarly race with his rival, the Germano-Russian linguist Wilhelm Radloff
Vasily Radlov
Vasily Vasilievich Radlov or Friedrich Wilhelm Radloff was a German-born Russian founder of Turkology, a scientific study of Turkic peoples....
. However, Radloff was the first to publish the inscriptions.
The prehistory of the peoples speaking these languages is largely unknown. Whereas for certain other linguistic groups, such as the speakers of Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
, Uralic
Proto-Uralic language
Proto-Uralic is the hypothetical language ancestral to the Uralic language family. The language was originally spoken in a small area in about 7000-2000 BC , and expanded to give differentiated protolanguages. The exact location of the area or Urheimat is not known, but the vicinity of the Ural...
, and Austronesian
Austronesian languages
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...
, we are able to frame substantial hypotheses, in the case of the proposed Altaic family everything remains to be done. In the absence of written records, there are several ways to study the (pre)history of a people:
- Identification of archaeological cultureArchaeological cultureAn archaeological culture is a recurring assemblage of artifacts from a specific time and place, which are thought to constitute the material culture remains of a particular past human society. The connection between the artifacts is based on archaeologists' understanding and interpretation and...
s: the material remains found at dwelling sites, burial grounds, and other places where people left traces of their activity. - Physical anthropologyBiological anthropologyBiological anthropology is that branch of anthropology that studies the physical development of the human species. It plays an important part in paleoanthropology and in forensic anthropology...
, which studies the physical characteristics of peoples, ancient and modern. - GeneticsGeneticsGenetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....
, in particular the study of ancient DNA. - PhilologyPhilologyPhilology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
, which studies the evidence in language families for their primitive locations and the nature of their cultures. (For an example, see Proto-Uralic language.) Mythology and legend often contain important clues to the earlier history of peoples. - GlottochronologyGlottochronologyGlottochronology is that part of lexicostatistics dealing with the chronological relationship between languages....
, which attempts to estimate the time depth of a language family based on an assumed rate of change in languages. Related to this is lexicostatisticsLexicostatisticsLexicostatistics is an approach to comparative linguistics that involves quantitative comparison of lexical cognates. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language...
, which attempts to determine the degree of relation between a set of languages by comparing the percentage of basic vocabulary (words like "I", "you", "heart", "stone", "two", "be", "and") they share in common. - Developing a family tree of languages and noting the relative distance of the splits that occur in it.
- Observing evidence for contact between languagesLanguage contactLanguage contact occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics.Multilingualism has likely been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual...
, which may indicate approximately when and where they were adjacent to each other.
All of these methods remain to be applied to the languages attributed to Altaic with the same degree of focus and intensity they have been applied to the Indo-European family (e.g. Mallory 1989, Anthony 2007).
List of Altaicists and critics of Altaic
Note: This list is limited to linguists who have worked specifically on the Altaic problem since the publication of the first volume of Ramstedt's Einführung in 1952. The dates given are those of works concerning Altaic. For Altaicists, the version of Altaic they favor, if other than Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic–Korean–Japanese, is given at the end of the entry.Altaicists
- Pentti AaltoPentti AaltoPentti Aalto was a Finnish linguist who was the University of Helsinki Docent of Comparative Linguistics 1958–1980. Aalto was a student of G. J...
(1955). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic–Korean. - Anna V. DyboAnna V. DyboAnna V. Dybo is a Russian linguist, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and co-author of the Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages . She is a specialist in the Tungusic languages.-Works by Anna V. Dybo:...
(S. Starostin et al. 2003, A. Dybo and G. Starostin 2008). - Karl H. Menges (1975).
- Roy Andrew MillerRoy Andrew MillerRoy Andrew Miller is a linguist notable for his advocacy of Korean and Japanese as members of the Altaic group of languages....
(1971, 1980, 1986, 1996). - Oleg A. Mudrak (S. Starostin et al. 2003).
- Nicholas Poppe (1965). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic and perhaps Korean.
- Alexis Manaster RamerAlexis Manaster RamerAlexis Manaster Ramer is a Polish-born American linguist .He has published extensively on syntactic typology Alexis Manaster Ramer (born 1956) is a Polish-born American linguist (PhD 1981, University of Chicago).He has published extensively on syntactic typology Alexis Manaster Ramer (born 1956)...
. - Martine Robbeets (2004, 2005, 2007, 2008).
- G.J. RamstedtGustaf John RamstedtGustaf John Ramstedt was a Swedish-speaking Finnish linguist and diplomat.-Biography:Ramstedt was born in Ekenäs in Southern Finland....
(1952–1957). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic–Korean. - George StarostinGeorgiy StarostinGeorgiy Sergeevich Starostin 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...
(A. Dybo and G. Starostin 2008). - Sergei StarostinSergei StarostinDr. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin was a Russian historical linguist and scholar, best known for his work with hypothetical proto-languages, including his work on the reconstruction of the Proto-Borean language, the controversial theory of Altaic languages and the formulation of the Dené–Caucasian...
(1991, S. Starostin et al. 2003). - John C. Street (1962). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic and Korean–Japanese–Ainu, grouped as "North Asiatic".
- Talat Tekin (1994). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic–Korean.
Major critics of Altaic
- Gerard ClausonGerard ClausonSir Gerard Leslie Makins Clauson was an English civil servant, businessman, and Orientalist best known for his studies of the Turkish language....
(1956, 1959, 1962). - Gerhard DoerferGerhard DoerferGerhard Doerfer was a German Turkologist, Altaist, and philologist best known for his studies of the Turkish language.Doerfer spent his childhood in Konigsberg and Berlin. After release from captivity following the World War II, from 1949 to 1954 he took in Berlin courses in Turkic and Altaic...
(1963, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1981, 1985, 1988, 1993). - Stefan GeorgStefan GeorgStefan Georg is currently Privatdozent at the University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany, for Altaic Linguistics and Culture Studies.- Background :...
(2004, 2005). - Juha Janhunen (1992).
- Claus Schönig (2003).
- Alexander Shcherbak.
- Alexander VovinAlexander VovinAlexander V. Vovin is an American linguist and philologist in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where he is a Professor of East Asian Languages and the acting chair of the department from August 1, 2009.Alexander Vovin earned his M.A...
(2005). Formerly an advocate of Altaic (1994, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001), now a critic of it.
Alternate hypotheses
- Joseph GreenbergJoseph GreenbergJoseph Harold Greenberg was a prominent and controversial American linguist, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.- Early life and career :...
(2000–2002). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic and Korean–Japanese–Ainu, grouped in EurasiaticEurasiatic languagesEurasiatic is a language macrofamily proposed by Joseph Greenberg that includes many language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia. The eight branches of Eurasiatic are Etruscan, Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo–Aleut, spoken in...
. - James Patrie (1982). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic and Korean–Japanese–Ainu, grouped in a common taxonTaxon|thumb|270px|[[African elephants]] form a widely-accepted taxon, the [[genus]] LoxodontaA taxon is a group of organisms, which a taxonomist adjudges to be a unit. Usually a taxon is given a name and a rank, although neither is a requirement...
(cf. John C. Street 1962). - J. Marshall UngerJ. Marshall UngerJames Marshall Unger, , is a professor of Japanese at Ohio State University who specializes in historical linguistics and the writing systems of East Asia.- Works :...
(1990). Tungusic–Korean–Japanese ("Macro-Tungusic"), with Turkic and Mongolic as separate language families.
Reconstructed phonology
Based on the proposed correspondences listed below, the following phonemePhoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
inventory has been reconstructed for the hypothetical Proto(-Macro)-Altaic language (taken from Blažek's [2006] summary of the newest Altaic etymological dictionary [Starostin et al. 2003] and transcribed into the IPA):
Consonants
| Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:... |
Alveolar or dental Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth... |
Alveolopalatal Alveolo-palatal consonant In phonetics, alveolo-palatal consonants are palatalized postalveolar sounds, usually fricatives and affricates, articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate... |
Postalveolar Postalveolar consonant Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate... |
Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate... |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &... |
aspirated Aspiration (phonetics) In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ... |
/pʰ/ | /tʰ/ | /kʰ/ | |||
| voiceless Voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, this is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word "phonation" implies voicing, and that voicelessness is the lack of... |
/p/ | /t/ | /k/ | ||||
| voiced | /b/ | /d/ | /ɡ/ | ||||
| Affricates Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :... |
aspirated Aspiration (phonetics) In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ... |
/tʃʰ/ | |||||
| voiceless Voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, this is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word "phonation" implies voicing, and that voicelessness is the lack of... |
/tʃ/ | ||||||
| voiced | /dʒ/ | ||||||
| Fricatives Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
voiceless Voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, this is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word "phonation" implies voicing, and that voicelessness is the lack of... |
/s/ | /ʃ/ | ||||
| voiced | /z/-1 | ||||||
| Nasals Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
/m/ | /n/ | /nʲ/ | /ŋ/ | |||
| Trills Trill consonant In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Standard Spanish <rr> as in perro is an alveolar trill, while in Parisian French it is almost always uvular.... |
-/r/-2 | /rʲ/ | |||||
| Approximants Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no... |
/l/ | /lʲ/ | -/j/-2 | ||||
1 This phoneme only occurred at the beginnings of words.
2 These phonemes only occurred in the interior of words.
Vowels
| Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also... |
Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark... |
||
|---|---|---|---|
| unrounded Roundedness In phonetics, vowel roundedness refers to the amount of rounding in the lips during the articulation of a vowel. That is, it is vocalic labialization. When pronouncing a rounded vowel, the lips form a circular opening, while unrounded vowels are pronounced with the lips relaxed... |
rounded Roundedness In phonetics, vowel roundedness refers to the amount of rounding in the lips during the articulation of a vowel. That is, it is vocalic labialization. When pronouncing a rounded vowel, the lips form a circular opening, while unrounded vowels are pronounced with the lips relaxed... |
||
| Close Close vowel A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the... |
/i/ | /y/ | /u/ |
| Mid Mid vowel A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel... |
/e/ | /ø/ | /o/ |
| Near-open Near-open vowel A near-open vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a near-open vowel is that the tongue is positioned similarly to an open vowel, but slightly more constricted. Near-open vowels are sometimes described as lax variants of the fully open vowels... |
/æ/ | ||
| Open Open vowel An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue... |
/a/ | ||
It is not clear whether /æ/, /ø/, /y/ were monophthong
Monophthong
A monophthong is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation....
s as shown here (presumably [æ œ~ø ʏ~y]) or diphthong
Diphthong
A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...
s ([i̯a~i̯ɑ i̯ɔ~i̯o i̯ʊ~i̯u]); the evidence is equivocal. In any case, however, they only occurred in the first (and sometimes only) syllable of any word.
Every vowel occurred in long and short versions which were different phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s in the first syllable. Starostin et al. (2003) treat length together with pitch as a prosodic feature.
Prosody
As reconstructed by Starostin et al. (2003), Proto-Altaic was a pitch accentPitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
or tone
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
language; at least the first, and probably every, syllable could have high or low pitch.
Sound correspondences
If a Proto(-Macro)-Altaic language really existed, it should be possible to reconstruct regular sound correspondences between that protolanguage and its descendants; such correspondences would make it possible to distinguish cognateCognate
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...
s from loanword
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
s (in many cases). Such attempts have repeatedly been made. The latest version is reproduced here, taken from Blažek's (2006) summary of the newest Altaic etymological dictionary (Starostin et al. 2003) and transcribed into the IPA.
When a Proto-Altaic phoneme developed differently depending on its position in a word (beginning, interior, or end), the special case (or all cases) is marked with a hyphen; for example, Proto-Altaic /pʰ/ disappears (marked "0") or becomes /j/ at the beginning of a Turkic word and becomes /p/ elsewhere in a Turkic word.
Consonants
Only single consonants are considered here. In the middle of words, clusters of two consonants were allowed in Proto-Altaic as reconstructed by Starostin et al. (2003); the correspondence table of these clusters spans almost 7 pages in their book (83–89), and most clusters are only found in one or a few of the reconstructed roots.| Proto-Altaic | Proto-Turkic | Proto-Mongolic | Proto-Tungusic | Proto-Korean | Proto-Japonic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| /pʰ/ | 0-¹, /j/-, /p/ | /h/-², /j/-, -/b/-, -/h/-², -/b/ | /p/ | /p/ | /p/ |
| /p/ | /b/ | /b/-6, /h/-², /b/ | /p/-, /b/ | ||
| /b/ | /b/-, -/h/-, -/b/-9, -/b/ | /b/ | /p/, -/b/- | /p/-, /w/, /b/10, /p/11 | |
| /tʰ/ | /t/-, /d/-³, /t/ | /t/, /tʃ/4, -/d/ | /t/ | /t/ | /t/ |
| /t/ | /d/-, /t/ | /t/, /tʃ/4 | /d/-, /dʒ/-7, /t/ | /t/, -/r/- | /t/-, /d/-, /t/ |
| /d/ | /j/-, /d/ | /d/, /dʒ/4 | /d/ | /d/-, /t/-, /t/, /j/ | |
| /tʃʰ/ | /tʃ/ | /tʃ/ | /tʃ/ | /tʃ/ | /t/ |
| /tʃ/ | /d/-, /tʃ/ | /d/-, /dʒ/-4, /tʃ/ | /s/-, -/dʒ/-, -/s/- | /t/-, -/s/- | |
| /dʒ/ | /j/ | /dʒ/ | /dʒ/ | /d/-, /j/ | |
| /kʰ/ | /k/ | /k/-, -/k/-, -/ɡ/-5, -/ɡ/ | /x/-, /k/, /x/ | /k/, /h/ | /k/ |
| /k/ | /k/-, /k/, /ɡ/8 | /k/-, /ɡ/ | /k/-, /ɡ/-, /ɡ/ | /k/-, -/h/-, -0-, -/k/ | |
| /ɡ/ | /ɡ/ | /ɡ/-, -/h/-, -/ɡ/-5, -/ɡ/ | /ɡ/ | /k/, -/h/-, -0- | /k/-, /k/, 012 |
| /s/ | /s/ | /s/ | /s/ | /s/-, /h/-, /s/ | /s/ |
| /z/ | /j/ | /s/ | |||
| /ʃ/ | /s/-, /tʃ/-13, /s/ | /s/-, /tʃ/-13, /s/ | /ʃ/ | ||
| /m/ | /b/-, -/m/- | /m/ | /m/ | /m/ | /m/ |
| /n/ | /j/-, -/n/- | /n/ | /n/ | /n/ | /n/ |
| /nʲ/ | /j/-, /nʲ/ | /dʒ/-, /j/, /n/ | /nʲ/ | /n/-, /nʲ/14 | /m/-, /n/, /m/ |
| /ŋ/ | 0-, /j/-, /ŋ/ | 0-, /j/-, /ɡ/-15, /n/-16, /ŋ/, /n/, /m/, /h/ | /ŋ/ | /n/-, /ŋ/, 0 | 0-, /n/-, /m/-7, /m/, /n/ |
| /r/ | /r/ | /r/ | /r/ | /r/ | /r/, /t/4, 15 |
| /rʲ/ | /rʲ/ | /r/, /t/ | |||
| /l/ | /j/-, /l/ | /n/-, /l/-, /l/ | /l/ | /n/-, /r/ | /n/-, /r/ |
| /lʲ/ | /j/-, /lʲ/ | /d/-, /dʒ/-4, /l/ | /n/-, /s/ | ||
| /j/ | /j/ | /j/, /h/ | /j/ | /j/, 0 | /j/, 0 |
¹ The Khalaj language
Khalaj language
Khalaj is a Turkic language spoken in Iran.It is a member of the Azerbaijani subgroup of the Oghuz languages.There were approximately 42,000 speakers of this language as of 2000...
has /h/ instead. (It also retains a number of other archaisms.) However, it has also added /h/ in front of words for which no initial consonant (except in some cases /ŋ/, as expected) can be reconstructed for Proto-Altaic; therefore, and because it would make them dependent on whether Khalaj happens to have preserved any given root, Starostin et al. (2003: 26–28) have not used Khalaj to decide whether to reconstruct an initial /pʰ/ in any given word and have not reconstructed a /h/ for Proto-Turkic even though it was probably there.
² The Monguor language has /f/ here instead (Kaiser & Shevoroshkin 1988); it is therefore possible that Proto-Mongolian also had /f/ which then became /h/ (and then usually disappeared) in all descendants except Monguor. Tabgač and Kitan
Khitan language
The Khitan language is a now-extinct language once spoken by the Khitan people . Khitan is generally deemed to be genetically linked to the Mongolic languages. It was written using two mutually exclusive writing systems known as the Khitan large script and the Khitan small script...
, two extinct Mongolic languages not considered by Starostin et al. (2003), even preserve /p/ in these places (Blažek 2006).
³ This happened when the next consonant in the word was /lʲ/, /rʲ/, or /r/.
4 Before /i/.
5 When the next consonant in the word was /h/.
6 This happened "in syllables with original high pitch" (Starostin et al. 2003:135).
7 Before /æ/, /ø/ or /y/.
8 When the next consonant in the word was /r/.
9 When the preceding consonant was /r/, /rʲ/, /l/, or /lʲ/, or when the next consonant was /ɡ/.
10 Before /a/, /ə/, or any vowel followed by /j/.
11 Before /j/, or /i/ and then another vowel.
12 When preceded by a vowel preceded by /i/.
13 Before /a/.
14 Starostin et al. (2003) follow a minority opinion (Vovin 1993) in interpreting the sound of the Middle Korean letter as [nʲ] or [ɲ] rather than [z]. (Dybo & Starostin 2008:footnote 50)
15 Before /u/.
16 Before /a/, /o/, or /e/.
Vowels
Vowel harmonyVowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
is pervasive in the languages attributed to Altaic: most Turkic and Mongolic as well as some Tungusic languages have it, Korean is arguably in the process of losing its traces, and it is (controversially) hypothesized for Old Japanese. (Vowel harmony is also typical of the neighboring Uralic languages
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
and was often counted among the arguments for the Ural–Altaic hypotheses.) Nevertheless, Starostin et al. (2003) reconstruct Proto-Altaic as lacking vowel harmony. Instead, according to them, vowel harmony originated in each daughter branch as assimilation of the vowel in the first syllable to the vowel in the second syllable (which was usually modified or lost later). "The situation therefore is very close, e.g., to Germanic
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
[see Germanic umlaut
Germanic umlaut
In linguistics, umlaut is a process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. The term umlaut was originally coined and is used principally in connection with the study of the Germanic languages...
] or to the Nakh languages
Nakh languages
The Nakh languages are a small family of languages spoken chiefly by the Nakh peoples, in Russia , in Georgia, and in the Chechen diaspora ....
in the Eastern Caucasus, where the quality of non-initial vowels can now only be recovered on the basis of umlaut processes in the first syllable." (Starostin et al. 2003:91) The table below is taken from Starostin et al. (2003):
| Proto-Altaic | Proto-Turkic | Proto-Mongolic | Proto-Tungusic | Middle Korean | Proto-Japonic | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| first s. | second s. | first syllable | ||||
| /a/ | /a/ | /a/, /a/1, /ʌ/1 | /a/ | /a/ | /a/, /e/ | /a/ |
| /e/ | /a/, /ɯ/ | /a/, /i/ | /ə/ | |||
| /i/ | /ɛ/, /a/ | /a/, /e/ | /a/, /e/, /i/ | /i/ | ||
| /o/ | /o/, /ja/, /aj/ | /a/, /i/, /e/ | /ə/, /o/ | /a/ | ||
| /u/ | /a/ | /a/, /o/, /u/ | /a/, /ə/, /o/, /u/ | /u/ | ||
| /e/ | /a/ | /a/, /ʌ/, /ɛ/ | /a/, /e/ | /e/ | /a/, /e/ | /a/ |
| /e/ | /ja/-, /ɛ/, /e/2 | /e/, /ja/ | /a/, /e/, /i/, /ɨ/ | /ə/ | ||
| /i/ | /ja/-, /ɛ/, /e/2 | /e/, /i/ | /i/, /ɨ/, /a/, /e/ | /i/ | ||
| /o/ | /ʌ/, /e/ | /a/, /e/, /y/3, /ø/3 | /ə/, /o/, /u/ | /ə/, /a/ | ||
| /u/ | /ɛ/, /a/, /ʌ/ | /e/, /a/, /o/3 | /o/, /u/, /a/ | /u/ | ||
| /i/ | /a/ | /ɯ/, /i/ | /i/ | /i/ | /a/, /e/ | /a/ |
| /e/ | /ɛ/, /e/2 | /e/, /i/ | /i/, /ɨ/ | /i/ | ||
| /i/ | /i/ | /i/, /e/1 | /i/ | /i/ | ||
| /o/ | /ɯ/ | /i/ | /o/, /u/, /ɨ/ | /i/, /ə/ | ||
| /u/ | /ɯ/, /i/ | /i/, /ɨ/ | /u/ | |||
| /o/ | /a/ | /o/ | /o/, /u/ | /o/, /u/ | /a/, /e/ | /a/ |
| /e/ | /ø/, /o/ | /ø/, /y/, /o/ | /ɨ/, /o/, /u/ | /ə/ | ||
| /i/ | /ø/, /o/ | /ø/ | /o/, /u/ | /u/ | ||
| /o/ | /o/ | /u/ | /a/, /e/ | /ə/ | ||
| /u/ | /o/ | /o/, /u/ | /ə/, /o/, /u/ | /u/ | ||
| /u/ | /a/ | /u/, /o/ | /a/, /o/, /u/ | /o/, /u/ | /a/, /e/ | /a/ |
| /e/ | /y/ | /o/, /u/, /y/ | /u/ | /a/, /e/ | /ua/, /a/1 | |
| /i/ | /y/, /u/ | /y/, /ø/ | /o/, /u/, /ɨ/ | /u/ | ||
| /o/ | /u/ | /o/, /u/ | /o/, /u/ | /o/, /u/, /ɨ/ | /ə/ | |
| /u/ | /o/, /u/ | /u/ | ||||
| /æ/ | /a/ | /ia/, /ja/, /ɛ/ | /a/ | /ia/, /i/4 | /ə/, /a/3 | /a/ |
| /e/ | /ia/, /ja/ | /i/, /a/, /e/ | /i/ | /i/, /e/, /je/ | /ə/ | |
| /i/ | /ia/, /ja/, /ɛ/ | /i/, /e/ | /ia/, /i/4 | /ə/, /e/, /je/ | /i/ | |
| /o/ | /ia/, /ja/, /a/1 | /e/ | /o/, /u/ | /ə/, /o/, /u/ | /a/ | |
| /u/ | /e/, /a/, /ʌ/1 | /a/, /o/, /u/ | /o/, /u/, /e/, /je/ | /u/ | ||
| /ø/ | /a/ | /ia/, /ja/, /a/1 | /a/, /o/, /u/ | /o/, /u/ | /o/, /u/, /ə/ | /a/ |
| /e/ | /e/, /a/, /ʌ/1 | /e/, /ø/ | /o/, /u/, /je/ | /ə/, /u/ | ||
| /i/ | /ia/, /ja/, /a/1 | /i/, /e/, /ø/ | /o/, /u/, /ə/ | /i/ | ||
| /o/ | /o/, /u/ | /ø/, /y/, /o/, /u/ | /i/ | /i/, /e/, /je/ | /ə/, /a/ | |
| /u/ | /u/, /o/ | /e/, /i/, /u/ | /ia/, /i/4 | /ə/, /u/, /je/ | /u/ | |
| /y/ | /a/ | /ɯ/ | /o/, /u/, /i/ | /o/, /u/ | /a/, /e/ | /a/ |
| /e/ | /y/, /ø/, /i/2 | /ø/, /y/, /o/, /u/ | /y/, /u/1 | /a/, /e/, /ja/, /je/, /o/, /u/ | /u/, /ə/ | |
| /i/ | /y/, /ø/ | /i/, /u/1 | /ɨ/, /i/, /o/, /u/ | /i/ | ||
| /o/ | /u/, /o/ | /o/, /u/ | /y/ | /a/, /e/, /ja/, /je/, /o/, /u/ | /u/, /ə/ | |
| /u/ | /ɯ/ | /i/, /o/, /u/, /y/, /ø/ | /o/, /u/ | /o/, /u/, /i/, /ɨ/ | /u/ | |
1 When preceded by a bilabial consonant.
2 When followed by a trill, /l/, or /lʲ/.
3 When preceded or followed by a bilabial consonant.
4 When preceded by a fricative (/s/, /ʃ/, /x/).
Prosody
Length and pitch in the first syllable evolved as follows according to Starostin et al. (2003), with the caveat that it is not clear which pitch was high and which was low in Proto-Altaic (Starostin et al. 2003:135). For simplicity of input and display every syllable is symbolized as "a" here:| Proto-Altaic | Proto-Turkic | Proto-Mongolic | Proto-Tungusic | Proto-Korean | Proto-Japonic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| á | a | a1 | a | à2 | á |
| à | a | a | a | á | à |
| áː | aː | a1 | a | à2 | á |
| àː | a | a | aː | á | à |
¹ "Proto-Mongolian has lost all traces of the original prosody except for voicing *p > *b in syllables with original high pitch" (Starostin et al. 2003:135).
² "[…] several secondary metatonic processes happened […] in Korean, basically in the verb subsystem: all verbs have a strong tendency towards low pitch on the first syllable." (Starostin et al. 2003:135)
Morphological correspondences
Starostin et al. (2003) have reconstructed the following correspondences between the case and number suffixSuffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
es (or clitic
Clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...
s) of the (Macro-)Altaic languages (taken from Blažek, 2006):
| Case | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Proto-Altaic | Proto-Turkic (*), Old Turkic | Proto-Mongolic (*), Classical Mongolian | Proto-Tungusic | Proto-Korean (*), Middle Korean | Proto-Japonic (*), Old Japanese |
| nominative Nominative case The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments... : 0 |
0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| accusative Accusative case The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions... : /be/ |
/ba/, /be/ | /ba/, /wo/ | |||
| partitive Partitive case The partitive case is a grammatical case which denotes "partialness", "without result", or "without specific identity". It is also used in contexts where a subgroup is selected from a larger group, or with numbers.... : /ɡa/ |
-/ʁ/, -/ɯʁ/, -/ɡ/, -/iɡ/ | *-/ʁ/ (accusative) | /ɡa/ | /ɡa/ (possessive) | |
| genitive Genitive case In grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun... : -/nʲV/ |
-/ŋ/ | *-/n/ | -/ŋi/ | -/nʲ/ | /nə/, /na/, /ŋa/ |
| dative Dative case The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink".... -locative Locative case Locative is a grammatical case which indicates a location. It corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by"... : /du/, /da/ |
-/ta/, -/da/, -/te/, -/de/ (locative-ablative) | -/da/ (dative-locative), -/du/ (attributive) | /du/ (dative), -/daː/ (locative) | -/tu/ (attributive-locative) | |
| dative-instrumental Instrumental case The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action... : -/nV/ |
-/n/, -/ɯn/, -/in/ (instrumental) | /ni/ (dative-locative) | |||
| dative-directive: -/kʰV/ | -/qa/, -/ke/ (dative) | /kiː/ (directive) | |||
| comitative Comitative case The comitative case , also known as the associative case , is a grammatical case that denotes companionship, and is used where English would use "in company with" or "together with"... -locative: -/lV/ |
-/li/, -/lɯʁ/ | /laː/ (locative}}, -/liː/ (prolative Prolative case The prolative case is a declension of a noun or pronoun that has the basic meaning of "by way of".... ), -/luʁa/ (comitative) |
-/ro/ (instrumental-lative Lative case Lative is a case which indicates motion to a location. It corresponds to the English prepositions "to" and "into". The lative case belongs to the group of the general local cases together with the locative and separative case... ) |
||
| comitative-equative Equative case Equative is a case with the meaning of comparison, or likening. The equative case has been used in very few languages in history. It was used in the Sumerian language.... : -/tʃʰa/ |
-/tʃa/, -/tʃe/ (equative) | /tʃa/ (ablative), /tʃa/, /tʃaʁa/ (terminative) | -/tə/ (comitative) | ||
| allative Allative case Allative case is a type of the locative cases used in several languages. The term allative is generally used for the lative case in the majority of languages which do not make finer distinctions.-Finnish language:In the Finnish language, the allative is the fifth of the locative cases, with the... : -/ɡV/ |
-/ʁaru/, -/ɡery/ (directive) | *-/ʁa/, -/a/ | /ɡiː/ (allative) | -/ei/ | |
| directive: -/rV/ | -/ʁaru/, -/ɡery/ | -/ru/ | -/ro/ (lative) | ||
| instrumental-ablative: -/dʒV/ | *?-/ja/, -/a/ terminal dative | /dʒi/ | /ju/ (ablative) | ||
| singulative: -/nV/ | *-/n/ | -/n/ | |||
| Number | |||||
| dual Dual (grammatical number) Dual is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities identified by the noun or pronoun... : -/rʲV/ |
*-/rʲ/ (plural for paired objects) | -/r/ (plural) | *-/rə/ (plural for paired objects) | ||
| plural: -/tʰ/- | *-/t/ | -/d/ | -/ta/, -/te/, -/tan/, -/ten/ | *-/tɨr/ | *-/tati/ |
| plural: -/s/- | *-/s/ | -/sal/ | |||
| plural: -/l/- | *-/lar/ | *-/nar/ | -/l/, -/sal/ | *-/ra/ | |
/V/ symbolizes an uncertain vowel. Suffixes reconstructed for Proto-Turkic, Proto-Mongolic, Proto-Korean, or Proto-Japonic, but not attested in Old Turkic, Classical Mongolian, Middle Korean, or Old Japanese are marked with asterisks.
Personal pronouns
The table below is taken (with slight modifications) from Blažek (2006) and transcribed into IPA.| Proto-Altaic | Proto-Turkic | Proto-Mongolic (*), Classical Mongolian | Proto-Tungusic | Proto-Korean (*), Middle Korean | Proto-Japonic | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| "I" (nominative) | /bì/ | /be/ | */bi/ | /bi/ | /-i/ | /bà/ |
| "me" (oblique case Oblique case An oblique case in linguistics is a noun case of synthetic languages that is used generally when a noun is the object of a verb or a preposition... s) |
/mine/- | /men/ | */min/- | /min/- | ||
| "I" | Old Chinese Old Chinese The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC.... : */ŋa/ |
*/nad/-, -/m/- (oblique) | /nà/ (Korean Korean language Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing... : 나) /ú/ (Sino-Korean: */我/, */吾/), yi (矣)1 |
/a/- (Sino-Japanese: */我,吾/, わ- 私) | ||
| "thou Thou The word thou is a second person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in almost all contexts by you. It is used in parts of Northern England and by Scots. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee , and the possessive is thy or thine... " (nominative) |
/si/ and/or /tʰi/ | /se/ (Turkic Turkic languages The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken... : Sen, Сен) |
*/tʃi/ (Mongolian Mongolian language The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner... : чи) |
/si/ (Manchu Manchu The Manchu people or Man are an ethnic minority of China who originated in Manchuria . During their rise in the 17th century, with the help of the Ming dynasty rebels , they came to power in China and founded the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which... : Si, Nanai Nanai language The Nanai language is spoken by the Nanai people in Siberia, and to a much smaller extent in China's Heilongjiang province, where it is known as Hezhe... : Си) |
/-si/, /-sya/1 | /si/ |
| "thee Thou The word thou is a second person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in almost all contexts by you. It is used in parts of Northern England and by Scots. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee , and the possessive is thy or thine... " (oblique cases) |
/sin/- and/or /tʰin/- | /sen/ (Turkic Turkic languages The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken... : Sen, Сен) |
?*/tʃin/- | |||
| "thou" | Proto Tibeto-Burman /ná/ | -/ŋ/ | */nè/ (Korean Korean language Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing... : 너) |
/ná/ (Japanese Japanese language is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an... : な */那/) |
||
| "we" (nominative) | /bà/ | /bi-rʲ/ (Turkic Turkic languages The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken... : Biz, Біз) |
*/ba/ (Mongolian Mongolian language The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner... : Бид) |
/bue/ (Nanai Nanai language The Nanai language is spoken by the Nanai people in Siberia, and to a much smaller extent in China's Heilongjiang province, where it is known as Hezhe... : Буэ Manchu Manchu The Manchu people or Man are an ethnic minority of China who originated in Manchuria . During their rise in the 17th century, with the help of the Ming dynasty rebels , they came to power in China and founded the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which... : be) |
/ú-rí/ (Korean Korean language Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing... : 우리,울 */于尸/) |
/bà/ |
| "us" (oblique cases) | /myn/- | */man/- | /myn/- (Manchu Manchu The Manchu people or Man are an ethnic minority of China who originated in Manchuria . During their rise in the 17th century, with the help of the Ming dynasty rebels , they came to power in China and founded the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which... : muse) |
|||
| "ye" (nominative) | /sV/ and/or /tʰV/ | /s/ (Turkic Turkic languages The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken... : Siz, Сіз) |
*/ta/ (Mongolian Mongolian language The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner... : та нар) |
/suː/ (Manchu Manchu The Manchu people or Man are an ethnic minority of China who originated in Manchuria . During their rise in the 17th century, with the help of the Ming dynasty rebels , they came to power in China and founded the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which... : suwe) |
||
| "you" (oblique) | /sVn/- | /sun/- |
As above, forms not attested in Classical Mongolian or Middle Korean but reconstructed for their ancestors are marked with an asterisk, and /V/ represents an uncertain vowel.
Other basic vocabulary
The following table is a brief selection of further proposed cognateCognate
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...
s in basic vocabulary across the Altaic family (from Starostin et al. [2003]).
| Proto-Altaic meaning | Proto-Altaic | Proto-Turkic | Proto-Mongolic | Proto-Tungusic | Proto-Korean | Proto-Japonic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| that | /tʰa/ | /di/- or /ti/- | /te-re/ | /ta/ | /tjé/ | /tso-re/ |
| eye | /næ̀ː/ | /ni-dy/ | /nʲia-sa/5 | /nú-n/ | /mà/- | |
| neck | /móːjno/ | /boːjn/ | /moŋa-n/ | /mje-k/ | /nəmpV/ | |
| breast | /kòkʰè/ | /køky-rʲ/1 | /køkø-n/2 | /kuku-n/2 | /kokajŋi/ "pith; medulla; core" | /kəkə-rə/1 "heart" |
| stone | /tǿːlʲì/ | /diaːlʲ/ | /tʃila-ʁu/ | /dʒola/ | /toːrh/3 | /(d)ísì/ |
| star | /pʰǿlʲo/ | /jul-durʲ/ | /ho-dun/ | /osi/4 | /pjɨːr/ | /pə́tsí/ |
| oath, god, sky | /tàŋɡiri/ | /teŋri/ | /taŋgarag/ | /taŋgura/ | /tinkir/ |
1 Contains the Proto-Altaic dual suffix -/rʲV/: "both breasts" – "chest" – "heart".
2 Contains the Proto-Altaic singulative suffix -/nV/: "one breast".
3 Compare Baekje
Baekje
Baekje or Paekche was a kingdom located in southwest Korea. It was one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, together with Goguryeo and Silla....
*/turak/ "stone" (Blažek 2006).
4 This is in the Jurchen language. In modern Manchu it is usiha.
5 This is disputed by Georg (2004), who states: "The traditional Tungusological reconstruction *yāsa [ = /jaːsa/] cannot be replaced by the nasal-initial one espoused here, needed for the comparison." However, Starostin (2005) mentions evidence from several Tungusic languages cited by Starostin et al. (2003). Georg (2005) does not accept this, referring to Georg (1999/2000) and an upcoming paper.
Numerals and related words
In the Indo-European familyIndo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
, the numerals are remarkably stable. This is a rather exceptional case; especially words for higher numbers are often borrowed wholesale. (Perhaps the most famous cases are Japanese and Korean, which have two complete sets of numerals each – one native, one Chinese.) Indeed, the Altaic numerals are less stable than the Indo-European ones, but nevertheless Starostin et al. (2003) reconstruct them as follows:
| Proto-Altaic meaning | Proto-Altaic | Proto-Turkic | Proto-Mongolic | Proto-Tungusic | Proto-Korean | Proto-Japonic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | /byri/ | /bir/ | /byri/ "all, each" | /pìrɨ́/ "at first" | /pi-tə/ | |
| single | /nøŋe/ | /jaŋɯrʲ/ | /nige/ "1" | /noŋ/~/non/ "be the first, begin" | /nəmi/ "only" | |
| front | /emo/ | /øm-gen/ "upper part of breast" | /emy/- | /emu/~/ume/ "1" | /maen-/~/môn-chô "first of all"26 | /upe/ "upper" /mape/ "front" |
| single, one of a pair | /sǿna/ | /sɯŋar/ "one of a pair" | /son-du-/ "odd" | 1 | /hə̀nàh/ "1" or /hə̀t-/ 1 |
/sa/- "together, reciprocally" |
| 2 | /tybu/ | 2 | /dʒiw-rin/~/dʒui-rin/ "2 (feminine)"3 | /dʒube/ | /tuː/, /tuː-rh/4 | |
| pair, couple | /pʰø̀kʰe/ | /eki/ "2", /ekirʲ/ "twins"; ?/(j)ɛɡir-mi/ "20" | /(h)ekire/ "twins" | |||
| different, other | /gojV/ | /gojar/ "2" | /goj/~/gia/ | /kía/ | ||
| pair, half | /putʃʰu/ | /butʃ-uk/ | /ptʃa-k/ | /puta/- "2" | ||
| 3 | /ŋy/ | /o-turʲ/ "30"5 | /gu-rban/; /ɡu-tʃin/ "30" | 6 | /mi/-7 | |
| (footnote 8) | /ìlù/ | /øløŋ/9 | /ila-n/ "3" | /ùrù-pu/ "bissextile (year or month)" | ||
| object consisting of 3 parts | /séjra/ | /sere-ʁe/ "trident, pitchfork" | /seːi(h)/ "3" | /sárápi/ "rake, pitchfork" | ||
| 4 | /toːjV/ | /døː-rt/ | /dø-rben/; /dø-rtʃin/ "40"10 | /dy-gin/ | /də/- | |
| 5 | /tʰu/ | /ta-bun/; /ta-bin/ "50"11 | /tu-nʲɡa/ | /tà/- | /i-tu-/12 | |
| 6 | /nʲu/ | /dʒi-rɡu-/; /dʒi-ran/ "60"13 | /nʲu-ŋu-/ | 14 | /mu/- | |
| 7 | /nadi/15 | /jeti/ | /dolu-ʁan/; /dala-n/ "70"15 | /nada-n/ | /nìr-(kúp)/16 | /nana/- |
| 8 | /dʒa/ | /dʒa-pkun/ | /jè-t-/17 | /da/- | ||
| 9 | /kʰeɡVnV/ | /xegyn/ | /kəkənə/ | |||
| 10 | /tʃøbe/ or /tøbe/ | /dʒuba-n/ | /təwə/18,/-so/"-0"/i-so/50 | |||
| many, a big number | /dʒøːrʲo/ | /jyːrʲ/ "100" | 19 | /jér(h)/ "10" /jə̀rə̀/ "many" | /jə̀rə̀/- "10,000" /jə̀rə̀/ "many" |
|
| /pʰVbV/ | /oː-n/ "10" | /ha-rban/ "10", /ha-na/ "all" | 20 | -/pə/, -/pua/ "-00"21 | ||
| 20 | /kʰyra/ | /ɡɯrk/ or /kɯrk/ "40"22 | /kori-n/ | /xori-n/ | /pata-ti/23 | |
| 100 | /nʲàmò/ | ?/jom/ "big number, all" | /dʒaʁu-n/24 | /nʲamaː/ | /muàmuà/ | |
| 1000 | /tʃỳmi/ | /dymen/ or /tymen/ "10,000"25 | /tʃɨ̀mɨ̀n/ | /ti/ |
1 Manchu
Manchu language
Manchu is a Tungusic endangered language spoken in Northeast China; it used to be the language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus...
/soni/ "single, odd".
2 Old Bulgarian /tvi-rem/ "second".
3 Kitan
Khitan language
The Khitan language is a now-extinct language once spoken by the Khitan people . Khitan is generally deemed to be genetically linked to the Mongolic languages. It was written using two mutually exclusive writing systems known as the Khitan large script and the Khitan small script...
has /tʃur/ "2" (Blažek 2006).
4 -/uː/- is probably a contraction of -/ubu/-.
5 The /y/- of /ytʃ/ "3" "may also reflect the same root, although the suffixation is not clear." (Starostin et al. 2003:223)
6 Compare Silla
Silla
Silla was one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, and one of the longest sustained dynasties in...
/mir/ "3" (Blažek 2006).
7 Compare Goguryeo
Goguryeo language
The Goguryeo language was spoken in the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo , one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea. The language is also known as Old Koguryo, Koguryoic, and Koguryoan....
/mir/ "3" (Blažek 2006).
8 "third (or next after three = fourth)", "consisting of three objects"
9 "song with three out of four verses rhyming (first, second and fourth)"
10 Kitan has /dur/ "4" (Blažek 2006).
11 Kitan has /tau/ "5" (Blažek 2006).
12 "(the prefixed i- is somewhat unclear: it is also used as a separate word meaning ‘fifty’, but the historical root here is no doubt *tu-)" (Starostin et al. 2003:223). – Blažek (2006) also considers Goguryeo */uts/ "5" (from */uti/) to be related.
13 Kitan has /nir/ "6" (Blažek 2006).
14 Middle Korean has /je-(sɨs)/ "6", which may fit here, but the required loss of initial /nʲ/- "is not quite regular" (Starostin et al. 2003:224).
15 The Mongolian forms "may suggest an original proto-form" /lʲadi/ or /ladi/ "with dissimilation
Dissimilation
In phonology, particularly within historical linguistics, dissimilation is a phenomenon whereby similar consonant or vowel sounds in a word become less similar...
or metathesis
Metathesis (linguistics)
Metathesis is the re-arranging of sounds or syllables in a word, or of words in a sentence. Most commonly it refers to the switching of two or more contiguous sounds, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:...
in" Proto-Mongolic (Starostin et al. 2003:224). – Kitan has /dol/ "7".
16 /ɖirkup/ in Early Middle Korean(タリクニ/チリクヒ in 二中歴).
17 "Problematic" (Starostin et al. 2003:224).
18 Compare Goguryeo /tok/ "10" (Blažek 2006).
19 Manchu /dʒiri/, /dʒirun/ "a very big number".
20 Orok
Orok language
Orok is the Russian name for the language known by its speakers as Ulta or Ujlta. Similarly, the people are called Oroks or Ulta. It is counted among the Tungusic languages...
/poːwo/ "a bundle of 10 squirrels", Nanai
Nanai language
The Nanai language is spoken by the Nanai people in Siberia, and to a much smaller extent in China's Heilongjiang province, where it is known as Hezhe...
/poã/ "collection, gathering".
21 "Hundred" in names of hundreds.
22 Starostin et al. (2003) suspect this to be a reduplication: */kɯr-kɯr/ "20 + 20".
23 /kata-ti/ would be expected; Starostin et al. (2003) think that this irregular change from /k/ to /p/ is due to influence from "2" /puta-tu/.
24 From */nʲam-ŋu-/.
25 Also see Tümen
Tumen
Tumen or Tümen was a part of the decimal system used by Turkic and Mongol peoples to organize their armies. Tumen is an army unit of 10,000 soldiers...
. 26 Modern Korean – needs further investigations
See also
- Ainu languageAinu languageAinu is one of the Ainu languages, spoken by members of the Ainu ethnic group on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō....
- Classification of Japonic
- Eurasiatic languagesEurasiatic languagesEurasiatic is a language macrofamily proposed by Joseph Greenberg that includes many language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia. The eight branches of Eurasiatic are Etruscan, Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo–Aleut, spoken in...
- Korean languageKorean languageKorean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
- Nostratic languagesNostratic languagesNostratic is a proposed language family that includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, including the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic as well as Kartvelian languages...
- Ural–Altaic languages
Works cited
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- Anonymous. 2008. [title missing]. Bulletin of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, 2008 March 31, 264: ____.
- Anthony, David W. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Blažek, Václav. 2006. "Current progress in Altaic etymology." Linguistica Online, 30 January 2006.
- Boller, Anton. 1857. Nachweis, daß das Japanische zum ural-altaischen Stamme gehört. Wien.
- Clauson, Gerard. 1956. "The case against the Altaic theory." Central Asiatic Journal 2, 181–187 http://altaica.ru/LIBRARY/CLAUSON/Clauson_against.pdf
- Clauson, Gerard. 1959. "The case for the Altaic theory examined." Akten des vierundzwanzigsten internationalen Orientalisten-Kongresses, edited by H. Franke. Wiesbaden: Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, in Komission bei Franz Steiner Verlag.
- Clauson, Gerard. 1968. "A lexicostatistical appraisal of the Altaic theory." Central Asiatic Journal 13: 1–23.
- Doerfer, Gerhard. 1963. "Bemerkungen zur Verwandtschaft der sog. altaische Sprachen", 'Remarks on the relationship of the so-called Altaic languages'. In Gerhard Doerfer, Türkische und mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen, Bd. I: Mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen, 1963, 51–105. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.
- Doerfer, Gerhard. 1973. "Lautgesetze und Zufall: Betrachtungen zum Omnicomparativismus." Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 10.
- Doerfer, Gerhard. 1974. "Ist das Japanische mit den altaischen Sprachen verwandt?" Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 114.1.
- Doerfer, Gerhard. 1985. Mongolica-Tungusica. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
- Doerfer, Gerhard. 1988. Grundwort und Sprachmischung: Eine Untersuchung an Hand von Körperteilbezeichnungen. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.
- Dybo, Anna V. and Georgiy S. Starostin. 2008. "In defense of the comparative method, or the end of the Vovin controversy." Aspects of Comparative Linguistics 3, 109–258. Moscow: RSUH Publishers.
- Georg, Stefan, Peter A. Michalove, Alexis Manaster Ramer, and Paul J. Sidwell. 1999. "Telling general linguists about Altaic." Journal of Linguistics 35:65–98.
- Georg, Stefan. 1999 / 2000. "Haupt und Glieder der altaischen Hypothese: die Körperteilbezeichnungen im Türkischen, Mongolischen und Tungusischen" ('Head and members of the Altaic hypothesis: The body-part designations in Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic'). Ural-altaische Jahrbücher, neue Folge B 16, 143–182.
- Georg, Stefan. 2004. Review of Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages. Diachronica 21.2, 445–450.
- Georg, Stefan. 2005. "Reply [to Starostin 2005]." Diachronica 22(2), 455–457.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 2000–2002. Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, 2 volumes. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Manaster Ramer, Alexis and Paul Sidwell. 1997. "The truth about Strahlenberg's classification of the languages of Northeastern Eurasia." Journal de la Société finno-ougrienne 87, 139–160.
- Menges, Karl. H. 1975. Altajische Studien II. Japanisch und Altajisch. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.
- Mallory, J.P. 1989. In Search of the Indo-Europeans. London: Thames and Hudson.
- Miller, Roy Andrew. 1971. Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226527190.
- Miller, Roy Andrew. 1980. Origins of the Japanese Language: Lectures in Japan during the Academic Year 1977–1978. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ISBN 0295957662.
- Miller, Roy Andrew. 1986. Nihongo: In Defence of Japanese. London: Athlone Press. ISBN 0485112515.
- Miller, Roy Andrew. 1991. "Genetic connections among the Altaic languages." In Sydney M. Lamb and E. Douglas Mitchell (editors), Sprung from Some Common Source: Investigations into the Prehistory of Languages, 1991, 293–327. ISBN 0804718970.
- Miller, Roy Andrew. 1996. Languages and History: Japanese, Korean and Altaic. Oslo: Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture. ISBN 9748299694.
- Patrie, James. 1982. The Genetic Relationship of the Ainu Language. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0824807243.
- Poppe, Nicholas. 1960. Vergleichende Grammatik der altaischen Sprachen. Teil I. Vergleichende Lautlehre, 'Comparative Grammar of the Altaic Languages, Part 1: Comparative Phonology'. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. (Only part to appear of a projected larger work.)
- Poppe, Nicholas. 1965. Introduction to Altaic Linguistics. Ural-altaische Bibliothek 14. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
- Poppe, Nicholas. 1976. Review of Karl H. Menges, Altajische Studien II. Japanisch und Altajisch (1975). In The Journal of Japanese Studies 2.2, 470–474.
- Ramstedt, G.J. 1952. Einführung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft II. Formenlehre, 'Introduction to Altaic Linguistics, Volume 2: Morphology', edited and published by Pentti Aalto. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura.
- Ramstedt, G.J. 1957. Einführung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft I. Lautlehre, 'Introduction to Altaic Linguistics, Volume 1: Phonology', edited and published by Pentti Aalto. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura.
- Ramstedt, G.J. 1966. Einführung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft III. Register, 'Introduction to Altaic Linguistics, Volume 3: Index', edited and published by Pentti Aalto. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura.
- Robbeets, Martine. 2004. "Swadesh 100 on Japanese, Korean and Altaic." Tokyo University Linguistic Papers, TULIP 23, 99–118.
- Robbeets, Martine. 2005. Is Japanese related to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic? Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
- Robbeets, Martine. 2007. "How the actional suffix chain connects Japanese to Altaic." In Turkic Languages 11.1, 3–58.
- Schönig, Claus. 2003. "Turko-Mongolic Relations." In The Mongolic Languages, edited by Juha Janhunen, 403–419. London: Routledge.
- Starostin, Sergei A. 1991. Altajskaja problema i proisxoždenie japonskogo jazyka, 'The Altaic Problem and the Origin of the Japanese Language'. Moscow: Nauka.
- Starostin, Sergei A., Anna V. Dybo, and Oleg A. Mudrak. 2003. Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages, 3 volumes. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 9004131531.
- Starostin, Sergei A. 2005. "Response to Stefan Georg's review of the Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages." Diachronica 22(2), 451–454.
- Strahlenberg, P.J.T. von. 1730. Das nord- und ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia.... Stockholm. (Reprint: 1975. Studia Uralo-Altaica. Szeged and Amsterdam.)
- Strahlenberg, P.J.T. von. 1738. Russia, Siberia and Great Tartary, an Historico-geographical Description of the North and Eastern Parts of Europe and Asia.... (Reprint: 1970. New York: Arno Press.) English translation of the previous.
- Street, John C. 1962. Review of N. Poppe, Vergleichende Grammatik der altaischen Sprachen, Teil I (1960). Language 38, 92–98.
- Tekin, Talat. 1994. "Altaic languages." In The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 1, edited by R.E. Asher. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press.
- Unger, J. Marshall. 1990. "Summary report of the Altaic panel." In Linguistic Change and Reconstruction Methodology, edited by Philip Baldi, 479–482. Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Vovin, Alexander. 1993. "About the phonetic value of the Middle Korean grapheme ." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 56(2), 247–259.
- Vovin, Alexander. 1994. "Genetic affiliation of Japanese and methodology of linguistic comparison." Journal de la Société finno-ougrienne 85, 241–256.
- Vovin, Alexander. 2001. "Japanese, Korean, and Tungusic: evidence for genetic relationship from verbal morphology." Altaic Affinities (Proceedings of the 40th Meeting of PIAC, Provo, Utah, 1997), edited by David B. Honey and David C. Wright, 83–202. Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies.
- Vovin, Alexander. 2005. "The end of the Altaic controversy" (review of Starostin et al. 2003). Central Asiatic Journal 49.1, 71–132.
- Whitney Coolidge, Jennifer. 2005. Southern Turkmenistan in the Neolithic: A Petrographic Case Study. Oxbow Books.
Further reading
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1997. "Does Altaic exist?" In Irén Hegedus, Peter A. Michalove, and Alexis Manaster Ramer (editors), Indo-European, Nostratic and Beyond: A Festschrift for Vitaly V. Shevoroshkin, Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 1997, 88–93. (Reprinted in Joseph H. Greenberg, Genetic Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 325–330.)
- Hahn, Reinhard F. 1994. LINGUIST List 5.908, 18 August 1994.
- Janhunen, Juha. 1992. "Das Japanische in vergleichender Sicht." Journal de la Société finno-ougrienne 84, 145–161.
- Johanson, Lars. 1999. "Cognates and copies in Altaic verb derivation." Language and Literature – Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages: Studies in Honour of Roy Andrew Miller on His 75th Birthday, edited by Karl H. Menges and Nelly Naumann, 1–13. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. (Also: HTML version.)
- Johanson, Lars. 1999. "Attractiveness and relatedness: Notes on Turkic language contacts." Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Caucasian, Dravidian, and Turkic Linguistics, edited by Jeff Good and Alan C.L. Yu, 87–94. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
- Johanson, Lars. 2002. Structural Factors in Turkic Language Contacts, translated by Vanessa Karam. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press.
- Kortlandt, Frederik. 1993. "The origin of the Japanese and Korean accent systems." Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 26, 57–65.
- Martin, Samuel E. 1966. "Lexical evidence relating Korean to Japanese." Language 12.2, 185–251.
- Nichols, JohannaJohanna NicholsLinguist Johanna Nichols is a professor emerita on active duty in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include the Slavic languages, the linguistic prehistory of northern Eurasia, language typology, ancient linguistic...
. 1992. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - Robbeets, Martine. 2004. "Belief or argument? The classification of the Japanese language." Eurasia Newsletter 8. Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University.
- Ruhlen, Merritt. 1987. A Guide to the World's Languages. Stanford University Press.
- Sinor, Denis. 1990. Essays in Comparative Altaic Linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies. ISBN 0933070268.
External links
- Altaic languages page from the MultiTree Project at the LINGUIST List.
- Altaic family tree Ethnologue (Micro-Altaic)
- Swadesh vocabulary lists for Altaic languages (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)
- Altaic family trees LINGUIST List
- Monumenta altaica Altaic linguistics website, maintained by Ilya Gruntov
- Altaic Etymological Dictionary, database version by Sergei A. Starostin, Anna V. Dybo, and Oleg A. Mudrak (does not include introductory chapters)
- LINGUIST List 5.911 defense of Altaic by Alexis Manaster Ramer (1994)
- LINGUIST List 5.926 1. Remarks by Alexander Vovin. 2. Clarification by J. Marshall Unger. (1994)