Altaic languages
The Altaic languages are a sprachbund comprising the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families, with some linguists having included the Koreanic and Japonic families. The grouping was previously proposed as a language family, a theory which found some support in the 20th century but is now rejected by linguists, who have concluded the similarities among Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages are better explained by areal convergence rather than a shared genetic lineage.
These languages share agglutinative morphology, head-final word order and some vocabulary. The once-popular theory attributing these similarities to a common ancestry has been questioned by most comparative linguists in favor of language contact, although it continues to be supported by a smaller, yet stable scholarly minority. Like the Uralic language family, which is named after the Ural Mountains, the group is named after the Altai mountain range in the center of Asia.
The core grouping of Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages is sometimes referred to as "Micro-Altaic" or "Core-Altaic," while an expanded grouping that includes Koreanic and Japonic is labeled "Macro-Altaic." A group of scholars divide the Macro-Altaic family into two related branches: Altaic family and Japano-Koreanic family which together are referred to as Transeurasian language family.
The Altaic family was first proposed in the 18th century. It was widely accepted until the 1960s and is still listed in many encyclopedias and handbooks, and references to Altaic as a language family continue to percolate to modern sources through these older sources. Since the 1950s, most comparative linguists have rejected the proposal, after supposed cognates were found not to be valid, hypothesized sound shifts were not found, and Turkic and Mongolic languages were found to have been converging rather than diverging over the centuries. The relationship between the Altaic languages is now generally accepted to be the result of a sprachbund rather than common ancestry, with the languages showing influence from prolonged contact.
Altaic has maintained a limited degree of scholarly support, in contrast to some other early macrofamily proposals. Continued research on Altaic is still being undertaken by a core group of academic linguists, but their research has not found wider support. In particular it has support from the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and remains influential as a substratum of Turanism, where a hypothetical common linguistic ancestor has been used in part as a basis for a multiethnic nationalist movement.
Earliest attestations
The earliest attested expressions in Proto-Turkic are recorded in various Chinese sources. Anna Dybo identifies in Shizi and the Book of Han several dozen Proto-Turkic exotisms in Chinese Han transcriptions. Lanhai Wei and Hui Li reconstruct the name of the Xiōngnú ruling house asPT *Alayundluğ 'piebald horse clan.'
The earliest known texts in a Turkic language are the Orkhon inscriptions, 720–735 AD. They were deciphered in 1893 by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in a scholarly race with his rival, the German–Russian linguist Wilhelm Radloff. However, Radloff was the first to publish the inscriptions.
The first Tungusic language to be attested is Jurchen, the language of the ancestors of the Manchus. A writing system for it was devised in 1119 AD and an inscription using this system is known from 1185.
The earliest Mongolic language of which we have written evidence is known as Middle Mongol. It is first attested by an inscription dated to 1224 or 1225 AD, the Stele of Yisüngge, and by the Secret History of the Mongols, written in 1228. The earliest Para-Mongolic text is the Memorial for Yelü Yanning, written in the Khitan large script and dated to 986 AD. However, the Inscription of Hüis Tolgoi, discovered in 1975 and analysed as being in an early form of Mongolic, has been dated to 604–620 AD. The Bugut inscription dates back to 584 AD.
Japanese is first attested in the form of names contained in a few short inscriptions in Classical Chinese from the 5th century AD, such as found on the Inariyama Sword. The first substantial text in Japanese, however, is the Kojiki, which dates from 712 AD. It is followed by the Nihon shoki, completed in 720, and then by the Man'yōshū, which dates from c. 771–785, but includes material that is from about 400 years earlier.
The most important text for the study of early Korean is the Hyangga, a collection of 25 poems, of which some go back to the Three Kingdoms period, but are preserved in an orthography that only goes back to the 9th century AD. Korean is copiously attested from the mid-15th century on in the phonetically precise Hangul system of writing.
History of the Altaic family concept
Origins
The earliest known reference to a unified language group of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages is from the 1692 work of Nicolaes Witsen which may be based on a 1661 work of Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur, Genealogy of the Turkmens.A proposed grouping of the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages was 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, he may not have intended to imply a closer relationship among those languages. Later proposals to include the Korean and Japanese languages into a "Macro-Altaic" family have always been controversial. The original proposal was sometimes called "Micro-Altaic" by retronymy. Most proponents of Altaic continue to support the inclusion of Korean, but fewer do for Japanese. Some proposals also included Ainuic but this is not widely accepted even among Altaicists themselves. A common ancestral Proto-Altaic language for the "Macro" family has been tentatively reconstructed by Sergei Starostin and others.
Micro-Altaic includes about 66 living languages, to which Macro-Altaic would add Korean, Jeju, Japanese, and the Ryukyuan languages, for a total of about 74. These numbers do not include earlier states of languages, such as Middle Mongol, Old Korean, or Old Japanese.
Uralo-Altaic hypothesis
In 1844, the Finnish philologist Matthias Castrén proposed a broader grouping which later came to be called the Ural–Altaic family, which included Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus as an "Altaic" branch, and also the Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic languages as the "Uralic" branch. The name "Altaic" referred to the Altai Mountains in East-Central Asia, which are approximately the center of the geographic range of the three main families. The name "Uralic" referred to the Ural Mountains.While the Ural-Altaic family hypothesis can still be found in some encyclopedias, atlases, and similar general references, since the 1960s it has been heavily criticized. Even linguists who accept the basic Altaic family, such as Sergei Starostin, completely discard the inclusion of the "Uralic" branch.
The term continues to be used for the central Eurasian typological, grammatical and lexical convergence zone. Indeed, "Ural-Altaic" may be preferable to "Altaic" in this sense. For example, Juha Janhunen states that "speaking of 'Altaic' instead of 'Ural-Altaic' is a misconception, for there are no areal or typological features that are specific to 'Altaic' without Uralic."
Korean and Japanese languages
In 1857, the Austrian scholar Anton Boller suggested adding Japanese to the Ural–Altaic family.In the 1920s, G.J. Ramstedt and E.D. Polivanov advocated the inclusion of Korean. Decades later, in his 1952 book, Ramstedt rejected the Ural–Altaic hypothesis but again included Korean in Altaic, an inclusion followed by most leading Altaicists to date. His book contained the first comprehensive attempt to identify regular correspondences among the sound systems within the Altaic language families.
In 1960, Nicholas Poppe published 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: Korean did not belong with the other three genealogically, but had been influenced by an Altaic substratum; Korean was related to the other three at the same level they were related to each other; 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 "Macro-Altaic" has been generally assumed to include Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese.
In 1990, Unger, emphasizing the need to establish language relationships rigorously "from the bottom up," advocated comparing Tungusic with the common ancestor of Korean and Japanese before seeking connections with Turkic or Mongolic.
However, many linguists dispute the alleged affinities of Korean and Japanese to the other three groups. Some authors instead tried to connect Japanese to the Austronesian languages.
In 2017, Martine Robbeets proposed that Japanese originated as a hybrid language. She proposed that the ancestral home of the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages was somewhere in northwestern Manchuria. A group of those proto-Altaic speakers would have migrated south into the modern Liaoning province, where they would have been mostly assimilated by an agricultural community with an Austronesian-like language. The fusion of the two languages would have resulted in proto-Japanese and proto-Korean.
In a typological study that does not directly evaluate the validity of the Altaic hypothesis, Yurayong and Szeto discuss for Koreanic and Japonic the stages of convergence to the Altaic typological model and subsequent divergence from that model, which resulted in the present typological similarity between Koreanic and Japonic. They state that both are "still so different from the Core Altaic languages that we can even speak of an independent Japanese-Korean type of grammar. Given also that there is neither a strong proof of common Proto-Altaic lexical items nor solid regular sound correspondences but, rather, only lexical and structural borrowings between languages of the Altaic typology, our results indirectly speak in favour of a “Paleo-Asiatic” origin of the Japonic and Koreanic languages."