Altaic Languages

The Altaic languages are a group of languages and language families, widespread in and dominating parts of Central and Northern Asia. The name Altaic alludes to the Altai mountain range in Southern Siberia, where 19th century scholarship located the original habitat of the speakers of these languages in prehistoric times. Usually, the Turkic, Mongolian and Tungus languages are taken as the principal members of this group (often referred to as Micro-Altaic), Korean and Japanese are also often referred to as Altaic (Macro-Altaic). The inclusion of other Asian languages, such as Ainu, has won little or no scholarly support. While it is generally agreed that all these languages show a high degree of structural uniformity, as well as a sizable number of shared lexical and, to a lesser degree, morphological material, the Altaic Theory continues to be one of the most controversally debated issues in contemporary comparative linguistics. The gist of this debate is the question, whether these language families - or a subset of them - are to be viewed as members of a higher-level family of languages (often called a macro-family), for which thus a common linguistic ancestor (a Proto-Language) could be reconstructed, from which the attested languages diverged, or whether the common traits and elements found in them owe their existence to millennia-long processes of large-scale language contact, or areal convergence of originally unrelated languages.

The Altaic Debate

The high degree of structural similarity shared by the Altaic languages has been noticed as early as the late 18th century and led to the assumption of their genetic relationship in the first place. One of their more salient typological features is vowel harmony (words may contain only vowels belonging to one of two or more mutually exclusive classes, as e.g. front vs. back, or labial vs. illabial vowels). However, vowel harmony operates on

quite different principles in some Altaic languages (front/back in Turkic, Advanced vs. Retracted Tongue Root in Tungus etc.). The principal morphological technique found in Altaic languages is that of agglutination, i.e. largely monofunctional affixes (almost exclusively suffixes) are added to the root they modify, in a fixed order, and without the high degree of fusion, which is, e.g., common in Indo-European languages; The basic word order in Altaic languages in unmarked sentences is, as a rule, Subject Object - Verb, modifying constituents, like adjectives, always precede the constituent they modify, postpositions rather than prepositions are found etc. Typological similarities like these are no longer viewed as indicative for genetic relationship in modern linguistics, mostly because they are found to be quite amenable to change (especially in situations of intensive language contact), and because these and other phenomena, which have once been viewed as typically Altaic traits, are in fact more widespread on a global scale than it was known when the Altaic theory was first developed. Furthermore, critics of the Altaic hypothesis often point to the fact that some of the typological hallmarks of Altaic languages are historical innovations in some of them. So, e.g., the earliest Mongolian texts (13th c. CE) show a typological makeup, which is quite atypical for Altaic (when compared with, e.g., Old Turkic) with grammatical gender, no rigid verb-final word order, postponed determiners etc. Only during the attested history of Mongolian, the language developes into a typical Altaic language. A somehow comparable situation is found in Tungus, where the languages on the Northern and Western fringes of the territory occupied by the family (Ewenki and Ewen) are typologically much more divergent from the Altaic archetype than those, which are spoken in the center, resp. in the area, where they have been in contact with Mongolian for centuries. Proponents of the genetic relationship usually maintain that - the Altaic languages share a great number of lexical items, from all semantic spheres, including basic vocabulary,

- that these lexical commonalities are further characterized by highly regular phonological correspondences, thus fulfilling the most important criterion for genetic relationship, - that a considerable number of shared morphological elements (affixes) has been identified, and that all these observations render the conclusion that these languages share a common origin inevitable. Critics of the genetic approach to Altaic linguistics often argue along the following lines: - while the great number of lexical commonalities cannot be denied, most, if not all of them can be explained as early borrowings; within the domain of Micro-Altaic, the most readily identifyable layers of borrowings are Turkic loans in Proto-Mongolian and Mongolian loans in Proto-Tungusic; from Chingiskhanid times on, Mongolian elements begin to abound in Turkic languages; sometimes, a thin layer of Tungus loans in early Mongolian is acknowledged, too. Especially the fact that a sizable number of words common to Turkic and Mongolian show, in Mongolian, traits of one of the subgroups of Turkic, viz. the Bolgharic branch (of which modern Chuvash is the sole survivor) leads to the hypothesis that a strong proto-Bolgharian influence on proto-Mongolian is responsible for most commonalities the two language families share; - the borrowing hypothesis is further strengthened by the fact that the Altaic languages share few lexical items, which belong to those semantic spheres, which are generally thought to be diachronically stable and least amenable to linguistic borrowing; - the claim of the Altaicists that phonological correspondences between the languages are highly regular presupposes the acceptance of a great number of etymologies, which are problematical for a great array of reasons, which include, i.a., philological problems of determining the earliest Turkic, Mongolian etc. forms, which alone should enter any external comparison, problems of inexact or vague semantic mapping in forms and words compared etc.; - the systems of correspondences proposed by Altaicists contain gaps, i.e. some nonmarginal phoneme of language X may not have any reflexes in language Y (where /zero is of course counted as a positive reflex; in the situation described good examples for any reflex are lacking)

- morphological elements compared by the Altaicists are mostly confined to derivational morphology, and usually involve very short morphemes, often consisting of merely one phoneme, the functions of which may at times be rather vague. Some critics of the Altaic theory maintain that, once all comparisons, for which these and similar objections may be brought forward, are removed, the number of remaining potentially comparable items would be smaller than that of fortuitous resemblances which could be expected as having arisen due to pure chance. Others do not reject the Altaic theory completely, but insist that the evidence brought forward so far be sifted, and expect the remainder to be less than the more optimistic Altaicists believe, but still enough to justify a leaner version of the Altaic theory to be upheld. All the abovementioned points have been and continue to be addressed by proponents of the theory, both the methodological principles (e.g. the insistance to let internal reconstruction of Proto-Mongolian, Proto-Turkic etc. always preced external Altaic-level comparisons) and factual claims (regarding, e.g., the acceptability of individual etymologies, sound-correspondences based on them etc.) of their critics have in turn been challenged. Thus, the Altaic debate is still going on vigorously and has developed into an ideal testing ground for the methodology of assessing (or rejecting) the genetic relationship of languages in general.

Bibliography

Doerfer, Gerhard (1963) Trkische und mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen, Band I: Mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz (esp. pp. 51-106) Georg, Stefan (2000) Haupt und Glieder der Altaischen Hypothese: die Krperteilbezeichnungen im Trkischen, Mongolischen und Tungusischen, UralAltaische Jahrbcher, Neue Folge 16, 153-192 Georg, Stefan, Peter Michalove, Alexis Manaster Ramer, Paul J. Sidwell: Telling general linguists about Altaic, Journal of Linguistics 35, 65-98 Janhunen, Juha (1996) Manchuria. An Ethnic History, Helsinki: Finno-Ugrian Society Martin, Samuel Elmo (1996) Consonant Lenition in Korean and the Macro-Altaic Question, Honolulu: Center for Korean Studies Miller, Roy Andrew (1996) Languages and History. Japanese, Korean, and Altaic, Bangkok: White Orchid Press Poppe, Nicholas (1965) Introduction to Altaic Linguistics, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz

Suggestions for side-bar material

We have inspected and discussed (...) many of the more cogent reasons why the Altaic hypothesis is far from out-moded, and demonstrated why, to the contrary, it remains the best if not the only epistemological paradigm in terms of which we may explore the individual histories of Japanese and Korean. The classical (...) reconstruction of Altaic (...) has stood up splendidly against the challenge of its confrontation with a mass of newly explored (...) data. Miller 1996, 215

It is easy to assert a genetic relationship, but proving it can be a daunting task. Sets of phonetic correspondences are not enough, even in vocabulary thought to be persistent, nor is the retrieval here and there of bits and pieces of purported morphology. This year there there will be no Nobel Prize in comparative Altaic. Martin 1996, 63

(...) the fact that the Altaic languages share almost no basic vocabulary, nor do they possess any uncontroversial material parallels in their morphological systems. the only logical conclusion is that the Altaic entities were both genetically and geographically clearly seperate from each other, until (...) intensive contacts arose between Pre-ProtoBulgharic and Pre-Proto-Mongolic. Janhunen 1996, 241-2