Altaic languages
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Distribution of the Altaic languages across Eurasia.^{citation needed} The inclusion of Japanese and Korean, and to a lesser degree the existence of a single Altaic language family, is controversial.

Altaic is a proposed language family that includes 66 languages ^[1] spoken by about 348 million people, mostly in and around Central Asia and northeast Asia.^[2]

The proponents of Altaic traditionally consider it to include the Turkic languages, the Mongolic languages, and the Tungusic languages (also called the Manchu-Tungus languages). Some also include Korean or Japonic, though this is controversial. A few linguists add Ainu.^[3]

Sometimes hypotheses that include only Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic are called "Micro-Altaic" and ones that include additional language families are called "Macro-Altaic".

The relationships among these languages are currently a matter of debate among historical linguists. Some scholars consider the apparent similarity among these languages to indicate a genetic relationship. Others propose that they are not a family derived from a common ancestor but a Sprachbund, a group of languages that have become similar in some ways by massive borrowing because of long language contact.

Altaic is itself part of the still more controversial Eurasiatic and Nostratic hypotheses.

History of the hypothesis

The Altay Mountains ("High Mountain" ^[4] in Turkic) 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 by F.J. von Strahlenberg in 1730. However, as has been shown by A. Manaster Ramer and Paul Sidwell ("The truth about Strahlenberg's classification of the languages of Northeastern Eurasia", JSFOu 87, 1997, 139-160), Strahlenberg, who travelled in Russia as a prisoner of war after the Great Northern War, actually opposed the idea of a closer relationship between the languages which later became known as "Altaic".

The name "Altaic", as a designation of a large-scale language family which was initially also to comprise the Uralic languages, was coined in 1844 by M.A. Castrén.

As early as 1857, Anton Boller suggested adding Japanese. For Korean, G.J. Ramstedt and E.D. Polivanov put forward additional etymologies in the 1920s.

For much of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, those few linguists who studied these language families 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 ("an idea now completely discarded" – Starostin et al. [2003:8]).

As a result of decades-long work, G.J. Ramstedt's book Einführung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft, 'Introduction to Altaic Linguistics', was published in 1952 (two years after Ramstedt's death). It separated the Uralic languages (i.e. the Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic families) from the Altaic ones, added Korean and Japanese to the latter, and contained the first attempts to find regular correspondences in the sound systems and grammars of the Altaic language families.

Further contributions to Altaic studies, especially attempts to reconstruct the most recent common ancestor of the Altaic languages (the hypothetical Proto-Altaic language), were made in the 1950s and 1960s by linguists such as Nikolaus Poppe, K. Menges, Vera Cincius, Vladislav Illich-Svitych, Samuel Martin and Roy Andrew Miller. Most of these attempts did not include Korean or Japanese, judged to be too different from Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic.

The controversy over Altaic

There are two kinds of controversies about the Altaic languages: the first is whether the relationship is genetic or the similarities are the result of borrowing, while the second is which particular languages should be included in the rubric "Altaic". The focus of the inclusion controversy is whether Japanese and Korean (especially as part of a proposed Buyeo family) should be included. The inclusion of Japanese and Korean in Altaic is not generally accepted by either Japanese linguists or Western linguists.

Following Ramstedt's work and the subsequent developments in the 1950s, in the 1960s the pendulum swung in the other direction. G. Clauson, Gerhard Doerfer, and A. 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 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 supposedly 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 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 (defended by Roy Andrew Miller in 1971); in particular, some workers 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 the generally most popular point of view among historical linguists in the west, but hardly in the ex-USSR. (For a review see e.g. Georg et al. [1999]^[3].)

Starostin's (1991) lexicostatistical research^[5] showed that the 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%). Some of these probable cognates may look doubtful, but many of them seem quite stable and can hardly be the result of mutual borrowing. 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 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 S. Starostin, A. Dybo, and O. Mudrak in 2003. The result of some twenty years of work, it contains 2800 proposed cognate sets, a complete set of regular sound correspondences, 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. Importantly, 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 et aliorum "sincere […] hope that this publication will bring an end to this discussion" (Starostin et al. 2003:7) has not been fulfilled, however. The debate continues (e.g. Georg 2004, Vovin 2005^[6], Starostin 2005, Georg 2005, Blažek 2006, A. Dybo and G. Starostin 2008).

It has been suggested that the Japonic languages could be Altaic but have an Austronesian or generally Austric substratum^{citation needed}. This would (geographically) fit suggestions (e.g. Bengtson 2006^[7]) that Ainu is an Austric language.

Using the controversial method of multilateral comparison, Joseph Greenberg (2000) postulated a family consisting of Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic and a separate family consisting of Korean, Japanese, and Ainu.

Urheimat

Old Turkic inscription with the Orkhon script (c. 8th century). Kyzyl, Russia

Altaic languages in their diversity show a great depth, probably^{citation needed} going back deep into the Mesolithic or even Upper Paleolithic period in Central Asia, following the disappearance of the Mansiyskoe lake (also called West Siberian lake), which occupied practically the whole territory of the western Siberian flatlands up to the foothills of the Kuznetsk Alatau and Altai. With the Late Glacial warming, up to the Atlantic Phase of the Post-Glacial Optimum, Mesolithic groups moved northwards into this area from the Hissar (6000-4000 BCE) and Keltiminar (5500-3500 BCE) cultures, which introduced the bow and arrow and the hunting dog, within what Kent Flannery has called the "broad-spectrum revolution". The Keltiminar culture practised a mobile hunting, gathering, fishing, and over time, an introduced stockbreeding seasonal-round subsistence system while inhabiting the semi-desert, desert, and deltaic areas of the Kara and Kyzyl Kum deserts, and the lower Amu Darya and Zeravshan rivers.^[8]

Some^{citation needed} seek the origin of "Micro-Altaic" in the spread of the Karasuk culture, and the appearance of northern Mongol Dinlin elements. The Karasuk people lived in permanent settlements in frame-type houses. The economy was complex; they bred large-horned livestock, horses, and sheep. In the Karasuk period 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. The Karasuk culture is a result of migration of the eastern part of the Dinlins, and had an influence as far as the Ordos region of China and across into Manchuria and northern Korea. The split between the Turkic and Mongolian languages, it is proposed^{citation needed}, was the last division within the Proto-Altaic group, and it has been suggested that this occurred just prior to the Xiongnu period of Central Asian history.

Others, however, equate the Karasuk culture with the origin of the Karasuk languages, a recently proposed language family that includes the Yeniseian languages and Burushaski but not any possible members of Altaic. Associating languages with archeological discoveries in the absence of written evidence is never easy.

Reconstructed phonology

Based on the proposed correspondences listed below, the following phoneme inventory has been reconstructed for the 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

¹ This phoneme only occurred at the beginnings of words.

² These phonemes only occurred in the interior of words.

Vowels

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 and (so far) most successful 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.

• 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 In front of /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 When followed by /æ/, /ø/, /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 /g/.
• ¹⁰ When the following vowel was /a/, /ə/, or followed by /j/.
• ¹¹ When followed by /i/ and then another vowel, or by /j/.
• ¹² When preceded by a vowel preceded by /i/.
• ¹³ When followed by /a/.
• ¹⁴ Starostin et al. (2003) follow a minority opinion (Vovin 1993) in interpreting the sound of the Middle Korean letter ᅀ as [nʲ] or [ɲ] rather than [z]. (Dybo & Starostin 2008:footnote 50)
• ¹⁵ When followed by /u/.
• ¹⁶ When followed by /a/, /o/, or /e/.
• ¹⁷ When followed by /i/ or /u/.

Vowels

Vowel harmony is pervasive in 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):

• 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:

• 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

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):

/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

Personal pronouns are seldom borrowed between languages^{citation needed}. Therefore the many correspondences between Altaic pronouns found by Starostin et al. (2003) could be rather strong evidence for the existence of Proto-Altaic. The table below is taken (with slight modifications) from Blažek (2006) and transcribed into IPA.

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:

• 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 "Problematic" (Starostin et al. 2003:224).
• ¹⁷ Compare Goguryeo /tok/ "10" (Blažek 2006).
• ¹⁸ Manchu /dʒiri/, /dʒirun/ "a very big number".
• ¹⁹ Orok /poːwo/ "a bundle of 10 squirrels", Nanai /poã/ "collection, gathering".
• ²⁰ "Hundred" in names of hundreds.
• ²¹ Starostin et al. (2003) suspect this to be a reduplication: */kɯr-kɯr/ "20 + 20".
• ²² /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/.
• ²³ From */nʲam-ŋu-/.
• ²⁴ Also see Tümen.

Others

The following table is a brief selection of further proposed cognates 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 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."^[9] However, Starostin (2005)^[10] mentions evidence from several Tungusic languages cited by Starostin et al. (2003). Georg (2005)^[11] does not accept this, referring to Georg (1999/2000)^[12] and an upcoming paper. By that time, Starostin was already dead (Starostin 2005 was published posthumously).

Literature

• Blažek, V.: "Current Progress in Altaic Etymology", Linguistica Online 30 January 2006 (pdf).
• Doerfer, G.: Grundwort und Sprachmischung: Eine Untersuchung an Hand von Körperteilbezeichnungen (Münchener Ostasiatische Studien 47), Franz-Steiner-Verlag, 1988.
• Dybo, A.V., Starostin, G.S..: "In Defense of the Comparative Method, or the End of the Vovin Controversy", "Aspects of Comparative Linguistics", v. 3: 109-258, Moscow: RSUH Publishers, 2008.
• Georg, S.: "Reply [to Starostin 2005]", Diachronica 22(2):455–457, 2005.
• Greenberg, J.H.: Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1: Grammar, Stanford University Press, 2000.
• LINGUIST Mailing List, 18 Aug 1994, Reinhard F. Hahn.
• Kortlandt, F.: "The origin of the Japanese and Korean accent systems", Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 26 (1993): 57–65.
• Miller, R.A.: Languages and history. Japanese, Korean and Altaic, Inst. for Comparative Research in Human C, 1996, ISBN 974-8299-69-4.
• Ruhlen, M.: A Guide to the World's Languages, Stanford University Press (1987).
• Starostin, S.A., Dybo, A.V., Mudrak, O.A.: Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages, Brill Academic Publishers, June 2003. ISBN 90-04-13153-1.
• Starostin, S.A.: "Response to Stefan Georg's review of the Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages", Diachronica 22(2):451–454, 2005.
• Vovin, A.: "About the phonetic value of the Middle Korean grapheme ᅀ", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies LVI(2):247–259, 1993.

Further reading

• Sinor, D. (1990). Essays in comparative Altaic linguistics. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies. ISBN 0933070268.
• Poppe, N. N. (1965). Introduction to Altaic linguistics. Ural-altaische Bibliothek, 14. Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz.

References and notes

See also

• Language family
• Altay language (a Turkic language)
• Classification of the Japanese language
• Nostratic languages

External links

• Starling Databases: Altaic etymology section
• Monumenta Altaica - Altaic Linguistics
• Language article from Encarta
• Ethnologue