Altaic languages

Altaic
Geographic
distribution:		 East, North, Central, and West Asia and Eastern Europe
Genetic
classification:		 Altaic
 Altaic
Subdivisions:
Mongolic
Tungusic
Korean and its extinct relatives (usually included)
Japonic and its extinct relatives (often included)
Ainu (occasionally included)
ISO 639-2: tut

Altaic is a grouping of languages and proposed language family that includes numerous languages mostly native to a broad geographical belt stretching from Asia Minor and the Caucasus, through central and into northeast Asia. Its precise delimitation is debated among linguists, as is the question of whether it forms a genetic language family in the true sense.[1] The group is named after the Altai Mountains, a mountain range in central Asia.

The Altaic group is considered to consist of at least the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families. On this basis, one estimate puts the total number it comprises at 66, spoken by about 348 million people.[2] According to various hypotheses, Korean, Japanese (Japonic), and possibly also Ainu,[3] may also be grouped with it. Sometimes the core grouping of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic is referred to as "Micro-Altaic", while the expanded grouping with either Korean or Korean and Japanese is referred to as "Macro-Altaic".

While it is generally agreed that the Altaic languages share a number of significant similarities, the precise historical nature of their relationship is debated (Poppe 1965:130-154). While some scholars consider the similarities as evidence of genetic relatedness, i.e. common descent from a single ancestor, others maintain that they may be merely the result of mutual borrowing through prolonged language contact. According to the first view, the Altaic languages are a language family; according to the second, a sprachbund. Scholars skeptical of the genetic unity of Altaic often prefer to speak of an "Altaic hypothesis", whereas its proponents tend to speak of the "Altaic theory" (Poppe 1965:3).

According to some hypotheses of genetic relationship, Altaic may itself be part of yet larger macrofamilies. Both the proposed Eurasiatic and Nostratic macrofamilies include Altaic. These hypotheses are are not widely accepted, even among those who accept Altaic as a valid genetic unit. In earlier scholarship, Altaic was also considered a component of Ural-Altaic along with the Uralic family. This hypothesis is today considered obsolete.

Distribution of the Altaic languages across Eurasia.

Contents

History of the Altaic idea

The Altai Mountains give their name to the proposed language family.

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 travelled in the eastern Russian empire while a prisoner of war after the Great Northern War. However, as has been shown 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".

Poppe (1965:125) presents the following nuanced view:

However, von Strahlenberg's classification deserves mentioning as 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 (Poppe 1965:126). 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 (ib. 127). 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" (Starostin et al. 2003:8).

In 1857, the Austrian scholar Anton Boller suggested adding Japanese to Altaic or more precisely to Ural-Altaic (Miller 1986:34). For Korean, G.J. Ramstedt and E.D. Polivanov put forward additional etymologies in favor of its inclusion in the 1920s.

The culmination of decades of research and publication on the part of the author, Ramstedt's two-volume work Einführung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft (Introduction to Altaic Linguistics) was published in 1952–1957. It rejected grouping the Uralic languages in a common family with the Altaic ones and included Korean as Altaic, an inclusion followed by most leading Altaicists to date. Ramstedt's first volume, Lautlehre (Phonology), contained the first comprehensive attempt to identify regular correspondences between the sound systems of the Altaic language families. The second volume was Formenlehre (Morphology). (The second volume was actually published first, in 1952, with the first volume following in 1957.)

Ramstedt did not live to see the publication of his great work. He passed away in 1950, and the work was edited and seen through the press by Pentti Aalto, a student of his. In 1960, Nicholas Poppe presented what was in effect a heavily revised version of Ramstedt’s volume on phonology (Miller 1991:298) that has since set the standard in Altaic studies. Further contributions to Altaic linguistics in the 1960s were made by scholars such as Karl H. Menges and, on particular points, by Vladislav Illich-Svitych and others.

In the meantime, knowledge of the branches of Altaic and the individual languages of which they are composed made great strides, thanks in large part to the efforts of Vera Cincius (also spelled Tsintsius) on Tungusic (Poppe 1965:97-98) and of Poppe himself on Mongolic, with contributions by many other scholars.

Ramstedt and Cincius each had several students who carried on and extended their work (Poppe 1965:136, 98), as did Poppe.[1]

Poppe (1965:148) considered the issue of the relationship of Korean to Turkic-Mongolic-Tungusic as not settled. In his view, there were three real 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. Poppe leaned toward the third possibility (ib.), but did not commit himself to it in this work.

Roy Andrew Miller's 1971 book Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages convinced most Altaicists that Japanese also belonged to Altaic (Poppe 1976:470). Since then, the standard set of languages included in the Altaic hypothesis 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.

A language family or a Sprachbund?

Even as Ramstedt's Einführung was making converts and generating the modern school of Altaic studies, a newly invigorated attack on the validity of the Altaic language family was taking shape. Gerard Clauson (1956), Gerhard Doerfer (1963), Alexander Shcherbak, and András Róna-Tas 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 argued that while there were words shared by Turkic and Mongolic, by Mongolic and Tungusic, and by all three, there were none shared by Turkic and Tungusic but not Mongolic. 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; on the other hand, we should expect exactly the observed pattern if borrowing is responsible. Furthermore, they argued that many of the typological features of the supposedly Altaic languages, such as agglutinative morphology and SOV word order, usually occur together 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. The proponents of this hypothesis are sometimes called "the Anti-Altaicists".

Doubt was also raised about the affinities of Korean and Japanese; in particular, some authors tried to connect Japanese to the Austronesian languages.

Since then, the debate has raged back and forth, with defenses of Altaic in the wide sense (e.g. Sergei Starostin 1991), advocacy of a family consisting of Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic but not Turkic or Mongolic ("Macro-Tungusic", J. Marshall Unger 1990), and wholesale rejections (e.g. Doerfer 1988) being published. The latter was generally the most popular point of view among historical linguists in the West. (For a review see Georg et al. 1999.[3])

Starostin's (1991) lexicostatistical research showed that the proposed Altaic groups shared about 15-20% of potential cognates within a 110-word Swadesh-Yakhontov list (e.g. Turkic-Mongolic 20%, Turkic-Tungusic 18%, Turkic-Korean 17%, Mongolic-Tungusic 22%, Mongolic-Korean 16%, Tungusic-Korean 21%). Altogether, Starostin concluded that the Altaic grouping was substantiated, though "older than most other language families in Eurasia, such as Indo-European or Finno-Ugric, and this is the reason why the modern Altaic languages preserve few common elements".

A further step in the debate was the publication of An Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages by Starostin, Anna V. Dybo, and Oleg A. Mudrak in 2003. The result of some twenty years of work, it contains 2800 proposed cognate sets, a complete set of regular sound correspondences 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 (Starostin et al. 2003:20); all other combinations between the five branches also occur in the book.

Starostin's 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, A. Dybo and G. Starostin 2008 (pro-Altaic).

A thorough critical overview of the history of the Altaic hypothesis can be found in Schönig 2003. He states, "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" (pg. 403).

Hypothesized Urheimat

Old Turkic inscription in the Orkhon script, c. 8th century, among the oldest known texts in an Altaic language. Kyzyl, Russia.

The earliest known texts in a proposed Altaic language are the Orkhon inscriptions, dating from the 8th century AD. They are written in a Turkic language. They were deciphered in 1893 by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen 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 Altaic-speaking peoples is largely unknown at the present time. Whereas for certain other linguistic groups, such as the speakers of Indo-European, Uralic, and Austronesian, we are able to frame substantial hypotheses, even if these are disputed, in the case of Altaic everything remains to be done since the grouping itself is not widely accepted as valid. As Roy Andrew Miller (1991:319-320) describes the situation:

No one knows the earliest histories of the Proto-Turkic, Proto-Mongolian, and Proto-Tungus speakers—where they lived, how frequently they changed sites, or how often their paths crossed and recrossed. There are no early written records. There are no genuinely early histories.

This problem in relation to the whole issue of Altaic is highlighted in the comment by Schönig 2003: "The Altaic Hypothesis tends to ignore the possibility of pre- and protohistorical contacts between the undocumented (reconstructed) proto- and pre-protolanguages underlying Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic" (pg. 404).

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 'Altaic' language groups with the same degree of focus and intensity they have been applied to the Indo-European family (e.g. Mallory 1989, Anthony 2007).

In the absence of more extensive studies in this area, most claims about the prehistory of the Altaic-speaking peoples must be viewed as extremely preliminary. This includes the following remarks.

According to one line of reasoning, if the languages grouped as Altaic are genetically related, their great differences from each other would point to a very ancient date for their proto-language, in the Mesolithic or even the Upper Paleolithic period. (Miller 1991 however emphasizes the commonalities of the 'Altaic' languages in all major areas: phonology, vocabulary, inflections, and syntax.)

Speakers of the hypothesized Proto-Altaic might have entered Central Asia following the disappearance of the West Siberian Glacial Lake, which almost completely covered the flatlands of western Siberia up to the foothills of the Kuznetsk Alatau and Altai mountain ranges. With the Late Glacial warming, up to the Atlantic Phase of the Post-Glacial Optimum, Mesolithic groups moved north into this area from the Hissar (6000-4000 BCE) and Keltiminar (5500-3500 BCE) cultures. These groups brought with them the bow and arrow and the dog, elements of what Kent Flannery has called the "broad-spectrum revolution". The Keltiminar culture practised a mobile hunting, gathering, and fishing subsistence system. Over time, they adopted stockbreeding. The Keltiminar culture occupied the semi-desert and desert areas of the Karakum and Kyzyl Kum deserts and the deltas of the Amu Darya and Zeravshan rivers (Whitney Coolidge 2005).

Some seek the origin of the proposed Micro-Altaic group in the spread of the Karasuk culture and the appearance of northern Mongol Dinlin elements. The Karasuk culture is the result of a migration of the eastern part of the Dinlins. Its influence extended as far as the Ordos region of China and across into Manchuria and northern Korea. The Karasuk people lived in permanent settlements in frame-type houses. The economy was complex. They bred large-horned livestock, horses, and sheep. They developed a high level of bronze metallurgy. Characteristic of the Karasuk culture are extensive cemeteries. Tombs are fenced with stone slabs laid on crest.

Others equate the Karasuk culture with the origin of the Karasuk languages, a recently proposed language family that includes the Yeniseian languages and Burushaski but none of the suggested members of Altaic. Associating languages with archeological discoveries in the absence of written evidence is always a delicate matter. This hypothesis was dealt a major blow when the Yeniseian languages were firmly linked to the Na-Dené languages of North America in a family now called Dené-Yeniseian.[4]

According to one view, Turkic and Mongolic are more closely related to each other than either is to Tungusic. If so, the split between Turkic and Mongolian would have been the last division within the Altaic group. It has been suggested that this occurred just prior to the Xiongnu period of Central Asian history. This would imply a considerably more shallow time depth for Proto-Altaic, or at least Proto-Micro-Altaic, than the late Stone Age. Such conflicts remain to be resolved. However, as Schönig (2003) states, "The early lexical contacts between Turkic and Mongolic have been studied in detail by several scholars...all of whom are sceptical [sic] of the Altaic Hypothesis" (pg. 404).

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 is given at the end of the entry.

Altaicists

Major critics of Altaic

Alternate hypotheses

Hypothetical Comparative grammar of the Altaic languages

Reconstructed phonology

Based on the proposed correspondences listed below, the following phoneme 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 Alveolar or dental Alveolopalatal Postalveolar  Palatal    Velar  
Plosives aspirated /pʰ/ /tʰ/ /kʰ/
voiceless /p/ /t/ /k/
voiced /b/ /d/ /g/
Affricates aspirated /tʃʰ/
voiceless /tʃ/
voiced /dʒ/
Fricatives voiceless /s/ /ʃ/
voiced /z/¹
Nasals /m/ /n/ /nʲ/ /ŋ/
Trills /r/² /rʲ/
Approximants /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 Back
unrounded rounded
Close /i/ /y/ /u/
Mid /e/ /ø/ /o/
Near-open /æ/
Open /a/

It is not clear whether /æ/, /ø/, /y/ were monophthongs as shown here (presumably [æ œ~ø ʏ~y]) or diphthongs ([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 phonemes 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 accent or tone 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 cognates from loanwords (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/
/tʰ/ /t/-, /d/-³, /t/ /t/, /tʃ/4, -/d/ /t/ /t/ /t/
/kʰ/ /k/ /k/-, -/k/-, -/g/-5, -/g/ /x/-, /k/, /x/ /k/, /h/ /k/
/p/ /b/ /b/-6, /h/-², /b/ /p/-, /b/ /p/ /p/
/t/ /d/-, /t/ /t/, /tʃ/4 /d/-, /dʒ/-7, /t/ /t/, -/r/- /t/-, /d/-, /t/
/k/ /k/-, /k/, /g/8 /k/-, /g/ /k/-, /g/-, /g/ /k/-, -/h/-, -0-, -/k/ /k/
/b/ /b/ /b/-, -/h/-, -/b/-9, -/b/ /b/ /p/, -/b/- /p/-, /w/, /b/10, /p/11
/d/ /j/-, /d/ /d/, /dʒ/4 /d/ /t/, -/r/- /d/-, /t/-, /t/, /j/
/g/ /g/ /g/-, -/h/-, -/g/-5, -/g/ /g/ /k/, -/h/-, -0- /k/-, /k/, 012
/tʃʰ/ /tʃ/ /tʃ/ /tʃ/ /tʃ/ /t/
/tʃ/ /d/-, /tʃ/ /d/-, /dʒ/-4, /tʃ/ /s/-, -/dʒ/-, -/s/- /tʃ/ /t/-, -/s/-
/dʒ/ /j/ /dʒ/ /dʒ/ /tʃ/ /d/-, /j/
/s/ /s/ /s/ /s/ /s/-, /h/-, /s/ /s/
/ʃ/ /s/-, /tʃ/-13, /s/ /s/-, /tʃ/-13, /s/ /ʃ/ /s/ /s/
/z/ /j/ /s/ /s/ /s/ /s/
/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/-, /g/-15, /n/-16, /ŋ/, /n/, /m/, /h/ /ŋ/ /n/-, /ŋ/, 0 0-, /n/-, /m/-7, /m/, /n/
/r/ /r/ /r/ /r/ /r/ /r/, /t/17
/rʲ/ /rʲ/ /r/ /r/ /r/ /r/, /t/
/l/ /j/-, /l/ /n/-, /l/-, /l/ /l/ /n/-, /r/ /n/-, /r/
/lʲ/ /j/-, /lʲ/ /d/-, /dʒ/-4, /l/ /l/ /n/-, /r/ /n/-, /s/
/j/ /j/ /j/, /h/ /j/ /j/, 0 /j/, 0

Vowels

Vowel harmony is pervasive in the 'Altaic' languages: 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):

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/
/a/ /e/ /a/, /ɯ/ /a/, /i/ /a/ /a/, /e/ /ə/
/a/ /i/ /ɛ/, /a/ /a/, /e/ /a/ /a/, /e/, /i/ /i/
/a/ /o/ /o/, /ja/, /aj/ /a/, /i/, /e/ /a/ /ə/, /o/ /a/
/a/ /u/ /a/ /a/, /o/, /u/ /a/ /a/, /ə/, /o/, /u/ /u/
/e/ /a/ /a/, /ʌ/, /ɛ/ /a/, /e/ /e/ /a/, /e/ /a/
/e/ /e/ /ja/-, /ɛ/, /e/² /e/, /ja/ /e/ /a/, /e/, /i/, /ɨ/ /ə/
/e/ /i/ /ja/-, /ɛ/, /e/² /e/, /i/ /e/ /i/, /ɨ/, /a/, /e/ /i/
/e/ /o/ /ʌ/, /e/ /a/, /e/, /y/³, /ø/³ /e/ /ə/, /o/, /u/ /ə/, /a/
/e/ /u/ /ɛ/, /a/, /ʌ/ /e/, /a/, /o/³ /e/ /o/, /u/, /a/ /u/
/i/ /a/ /ɯ/, /i/ /i/ /i/ /a/, /e/ /a/
/i/ /e/ /ɛ/, /e/² /e/, /i/ /i/ /i/, /ɨ/ /i/
/i/ /i/ /i/ /i/, /e/¹ /i/ /i/ /i/
/i/ /o/ /ɯ/ /i/ /i/ /o/, /u/, /ɨ/ /i/, /ə/
/i/ /u/ /ɯ/, /i/ /i/ /i/ /i/, /ɨ/ /u/
/o/ /a/ /o/ /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/ /a/, /e/ /a/
/o/ /e/ /ø/, /o/ /ø/, /y/, /o/ /o/, /u/ /ɨ/, /o/, /u/ /ə/
/o/ /i/ /ø/, /o/ /ø/ /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/ /u/
/o/ /o/ /o/ /u/ /o/, /u/ /a/, /e/ /ə/
/o/ /u/ /o/ /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/ /ə/, /o/, /u/ /u/
/u/ /a/ /u/, /o/ /a/, /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/ /a/, /e/ /a/
/u/ /e/ /y/ /o/, /u/, /y/ /u/ /a/, /e/ /ua/, /a/¹
/u/ /i/ /y/, /u/ /y/, /ø/ /u/ /o/, /u/, /ɨ/ /u/
/u/ /o/ /u/ /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/, /ɨ/ /ə/
/u/ /u/ /u/ /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/ /u/
/æ/ /a/ /ia/, /ja/, /ɛ/ /a/ /ia/, /i/4 /ə/, /a/³ /a/
/æ/ /e/ /ia/, /ja/ /i/, /a/, /e/ /i/ /i/, /e/, /je/ /ə/
/æ/ /i/ /ia/, /ja/, /ɛ/ /i/, /e/ /ia/, /i/4 /ə/, /e/, /je/ /i/
/æ/ /o/ /ia/, /ja/, /a/¹ /e/ /o/, /u/ /ə/, /o/, /u/ /a/
/æ/ /u/ /e/, /a/, /ʌ/¹ /a/, /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/, /e/, /je/ /u/
/ø/ /a/ /ia/, /ja/, /a/¹ /a/, /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/, /ə/ /a/
/ø/ /e/ /e/, /a/, /ʌ/¹ /e/, /ø/ /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/, /je/ /ə/, /u/
/ø/ /i/ /ia/, /ja/, /a/¹ /i/, /e/, /ø/ /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/, /ə/ /i/
/ø/ /o/ /o/, /u/ /ø/, /y/, /o/, /u/ /i/ /i/, /e/, /je/ /ə/, /a/
/ø/ /u/ /u/, /o/ /e/, /i/, /u/ /ia/, /i/4 /ə/, /u/, /je/ /u/
/y/ /a/ /ɯ/ /o/, /u/, /i/ /o/, /u/ /a/, /e/ /a/
/y/ /e/ /y/, /ø/, /i/² /ø/, /y/, /o/, /u/ /y/, /u/¹ /a/, /e/, /ja/, /je/, /o/, /u/ /u/, /ə/
/y/ /i/ /y/, /ø/ /ø/, /y/, /o/, /u/ /i/, /u/¹ /ɨ/, /i/, /o/, /u/ /i/
/y/ /o/ /u/, /o/ /o/, /u/ /y/ /a/, /e/, /ja/, /je/, /o/, /u/ /u/, /ə/
/y/ /u/ /ɯ/ /i/, /o/, /u/, /y/, /ø/ /o/, /u/ /o/, /u/, /i/, /ɨ/ /u/

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 ಠá
à a a a á à
áː aː a¹ a ಠá
àː a a aː á à

Morphological correspondences

Because grammar is less easily borrowed than words, grammar is usually considered stronger evidence for language relationships than vocabulary. Starostin et al. (2003) have reconstructed the following correspondences between the case and number suffixes (or clitics) 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: 0 0 0 0 0 0
accusative: /be/ /ba/, /be/ /ba/,/wo/
partitive: /ga/ -/ʁ/, -/ɯʁ/, -/g/, -/ig/ *-/ʁ/ (accusative) /ga/ /ga/ (possessive)
genitive: -/nʲV/ -/ŋ/ *-/n/ -/ŋi/ -/nʲ/ /no/
dative-locative: /du/, /da/ -/ta/, -/da/, -/te/, -/de/ (locative-ablative) -/da/ (dative-locative), -/du/ (attributive) /du/ (dative), -/daː/- (locative) -/tu/ (attributive-locative)
dative-instrumental: -/nV/ -/n/, -/ɯn/, -/in/ (instrumental) /ni/ (dative-locative)
dative-directive: -/kʰV/ -/qa/, -/ke/ (dative) /kiː/ (directive)
comitative-locative: -/lV/ -/li/, -/lɯʁ/ /laː/ (locative), -/liː/ (prolative), -/luʁa/ (comitative) -/ro/ (instrumental-lative)
comitative-equative: -/tʃʰa/ -/tʃa/, -/tʃe/ (equative) /tʃa/ (ablative), /tʃa/, /tʃaʁa/ (terminative) -/to/ (comitative)
allative: -/gV/ -/ʁaru/, -/gery/ (directive) *-/ʁa/, -/a/ /giː/ (allative) -/ei/
directive: -/rV/ -/ʁaru/, -/gery/ -/ru/ -/ro/ (lative)
instrumental-ablative: -/dʒV/ *?-/ja/, -/a/ terminal dative /dʒi/ /ju/ (ablative)
singulative: -/nV/ *-/n/ -/n/
Number
dual: -/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.

Selected cognates

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/[5] /bà/
"me" (oblique cases) /mine/- /men/ */min/- /min/-
"I" /ŋa/ */nad/-, -/m/- (oblique) /nà/
/ú/(吾), yi(矣)[5]		 /a/-
"thou" (nominative) /si/ and/or /tʰi/ /se/ */tʃi/ /si/ /-si//-sya/[5] /si/
"thee" (oblique cases) /sin/- and/or /tʰin/- /sen/  ?*/tʃin/-
"thou" /ná/ -/ŋ/ */nè/ /ná/
"we" (nominative) /bà/ /bi-rʲ/ */ba/ /bue/ /ú-rí/ /bà/
"us" (oblique cases) /myn/- */man/- /myn/-
"ye" (nominative) /sV/ and/or /tʰV/ /s/ */ta/ /suː/
"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.

Numerals and related words

In the Indo-European family, the numerals are remarkably stable. This is a rather exceptional case; especially words for higher numbers are often borrowed wholesale. (The perhaps 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" /upe/ "upper"
/mape/ "front"
single, one of a pair /sǿna/ /sɯŋar/ "one of a pair" /son-du-/ "odd" ¹ /hə̀nàh/ "1"
or /hə̀t-/ [5]		 /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)ɛgir-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/; /gu-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-nʲga/ /tà/- /i-tu-/12
6 /nʲu/ /dʒi-rgu-/; /dʒi-ran/ "60"13 /nʲu-ŋu-/ 14 /mu/-
7 /nadi/15 /jeti/ /dolu-ʁan/; /dala-n/ "70"15 /nada-n/ /nìr-(kúp)/
or /tarikuni/[6]		 /nana/-
8 /dʒa/ /dʒa-pkun/ /jè-t-/ 16 /da/-
9 /kʰegVnV/ /xegyn/ /kəkənə/
10 /tʃøbe/ or /tøbe/ /dʒuba-n/ /təwə/17,/-so/"-0"/i-so/50
many, a big number /dʒøːrʲo/ /jyːrʲ/ "100" 18 /jér(h)/ "10" /jə̀rə̀/- "10,000"
/jə̀rə̀/ "many"
/pʰVbV/ /oː-n/ "10" /ha-rban/ "10", /ha-na/ "all" 19 -/pə/, -/pua/ "-00"20
20 /kʰyra/ /gɯrk/ or /kɯrk/ "40"21 /kori-n/ /xori-n/ /pata-ti/22
100 /nʲàmò/  ?/jom/ "big number, all" /dʒaʁu-n/23 /nʲamaː/ /muàmuà/
1000 /tʃỳmi/ /dymen/ or /tymen/ "10,000"24 /tʃɨ̀mɨ̀n/ /ti/

Other cognates

The following table is a brief selection of further proposed cognates 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
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)ítsì/
neck /móːjno/ /boːjn/ /moŋa-n/ /mje-k/ /nəmpV/
star /pʰǿlʲo/ /jul-durʲ/ /ho-dun/ /osi/5 /pjɨːr/ /pə́tsí/
eye /næ̀ː/ /ni-dy/ /nʲia-sa/4 /nú-n/ /mà/-
that /tʰa/ /di/- or /ti/- /te-re/ /ta/ /tjé/ /tso-re/

References and notes

  1. ↑ Journal of Linguistics
  2. ↑ Ethnologue: Altaic languages
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Georg, S., Michalove, P.A., Manaster Ramer, A., Sidwell, P.J.: "Telling general linguists about Altaic", Journal of Linguistics 35 (1999): 65-98 Online abstract
  4. ↑ Bulletin of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, Volume 264, 31 March 2008
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 이기문, 국어사 개설, 탑출판사, 1991
  6. ↑ 二中歷 nichureki
  7. ↑ Georg, S. (2004). "[Review of Starostin et al. 2003]". Diachronica 21: 445–450. doi:10.1075/dia.21.2.12geo. 
  8. ↑ Starostin, S. (2005). "Response to Stefan Georg's review of the Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages". Diachronica 22: 451–457. doi:10.1075/dia.22.2.09sta. 
  9. ↑ Georg, S. (2005). "[reply to Starostin 2005]". Diachronica 22: 455–457. doi:10.1075/dia.22.2.10geo. 
  10. ↑ Georg, S. (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 N. F. 16: 143–182. 

Literature

See also

External links