Altaic languages

Altaic is a proposed language family of central Eurasia and Siberia, now widely seen as discredited.
The Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic groups are invariably included in the family; some authors
added Korean and Japonic languages. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from
eastern Europe, through Central Asia to Anatolia and to the Korean Peninsula and Japanese
archipelago in East Asia. The group is named after the Altai mountain range in Central Asia.
Another view includes 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 sometimes Japanese, came to be known as "Macro-Altaic", leading to the
designation of the smaller grouping as "Micro-Altaic" by retronymy. Most proponents of Altaic
continue to support the inclusion of Korean.

History of the Altaic idea

The Altai Mountains in East-Central Asia give their name to the proposed language family.
The idea that the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages are closely related 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), von Strahlenberg actually opposed
the idea of a closer relationship among the languages that later became known as "Altaic". Von
Strahlenberg's classification was the first attempt to classify a large number of languages, some of
which are Altaic.
The term "Altaic", as applied to a language family, was introduced in 1844 by Matthias Castrn, a
pioneering Finnish philologist who made major contributions to the study of the Uralic languages. As
originally formulated by Castrn, Altaic included not only Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus
(=Tungusic), but also Finno-Ugric and Samoyed.
The original Altaic family came to be known as the UralAltaic. In the "UralAltaic" nomenclature,
Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic are "Uralic", whereas Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic are "Altaic", as
are Korean and Japanese if they are included at all.
For much of the 19th and the early 20th centuries, the theory of a common UralAltaic family was
widespread, based on such shared features as vowel harmony and agglutination. However, while the
UralAltaic hypothesis can still be found in encyclopedias, atlases, and similar general references, it
has generally been abandoned by linguists. For instance, it was characterized by Sergei Starostin as
"an idea now completely discarded".
In 1857, the Austrian scholar Anton Boller suggested adding Japanese to the UralAltaic family. In the
1920s, G.J. Ramstedt and E.D. Polivanov advocated the inclusion of Korean. However, Ramstedt's
three-volume, Einfhrung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft ('Introduction to Altaic Linguistics'),
published in 19521966, rejected the UralAltaic hypothesis and again included Korean in Altaic, an
inclusion followed by most leading Altaicists to date. The first volume of his
work, Lautlehre ('Phonology'), 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 Ramstedts 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.
Development of the Macro-Altaic theory
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 Macro-
Altaic has been 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 (20002002); however, he 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 languages 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 languages, though more shared with Mongolic
languages. They reasoned that, if all three families had a common ancestor, we should expect losses
to happen at random and 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 subjectobjectverb (SOV) word order, usually simultaneously
occur in languages. In sum, the idea was that Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages form
a Sprachbundthe 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's (1991) lexicostatistical research claimed that the proposed Altaic groups shared about 15
20% of potential cognates within a 110-word Swadesh-Yakhontov list (e.g. TurkicMongolic 20%,
TurkicTungusic 18%, TurkicKorean 17%, MongolicTungusic 22%, MongolicKorean 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".
Unger (1990) advocates a family consisting of Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic languages but not
Turkic or Mongolic; and Doerfer (1988) rejects all the genetic claims over these major groups. In
2003, Claus Schnig 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, An Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages was published by Starostin, Dybo, and
Mudrak. It contains 2,800 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, although 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 in 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 minds 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. Blaek
2006, M. Robbeets 2007, A. Dybo and G. Starostin 2008 (pro-Altaic).
According to Roy Andrew Miller (1996: 9899), the ClausonDoerfer critique of Altaic relies
exclusively on lexicon, whereas the fundamental evidence for Altaic comprises verbal morphology.
Lars Johanson (2010: 1517) suggests that a resolution of the Altaic dispute may yet come from the
examination of verbal morphology and calls for a muting of the polemic: "The dark age
of pro and contra slogans, unfair polemics, and humiliations is not yet completely over and done
with, but there seems to be some hope for a more constructive discussion" (ib. 17).

Postulated Urheimat
The earliest known texts in a Turkic language are the Orkhon inscriptions, 720735 AD. They were
deciphered in 1893 by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in a scholarly race with his rival, the
GermanRussian 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
(see List of Jurchen inscriptions).
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 and by the Secret History of the Mongols,
written in 1228 (see Mongolic languages). The earliest Para-Mongolic text is the Memorial for Yelu
Yanning, written in the Khitan Large Script and dated to 986 AD.
The prehistory of the peoples speaking these languages is largely unknown. Whereas for certain
other language families, 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 much remains to be
done.[25] In the absence of written records, there are several ways to study the (pre)history of a
people:

Identification of archaeological cultures: the material remains found at dwelling sites, burial
grounds, and other places where people left traces of their activity.
Physical anthropology, which studies the physical characteristics of peoples, ancient and
modern.
Genetics, particularly the study of ancient DNA.
Philology, 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.
Glottochronology, which attempts to estimate the time depth of a language family based on an
assumed rate of change in languages. Related to this is lexicostatistics, 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.
The development of a family tree of languages that notes the relative distance of the splits that
occur in it.
The observation of evidence for contact between languages, which may approximate 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 with which they have been applied to the Indo-European family (e.g. Mallory
1989, Anthony 2007). Some scholars bear in mind a possible Uralic and Altaic Urheimat in the Central
Asian steppes.
Macro-Altaic Urheimat
Japanese is first attested in a few short inscriptions from the 5th century AD, such as 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 that by the Man'ysh, 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 (57 BC668 AD), 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.
According to Juha Janhunen, the ancestral languages of Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and
Japanese were spoken in a relatively small area comprising present-day North Korea, Southern
Manchuria, and Southeastern Mongolia. However Janhunen (1992) is skeptical about an affiliation of
Japanese to Altaic, while Andrs Rna-Tas remarked that a relationship between Altaic and
Japanese, if it ever existed, must be more remote than the relationship of any two of the Indo-
European languages. Ramsey stated that "the genetic relationship between Korean and Japanese, if
it in fact exists, is probably more complex and distant than we can imagine on the basis of our
present state of knowledge". Recent studies show no genetic relation of Japanese and Koreans to
Altaic people (Turkic and Mongolian people).
Supporters of the Altaic hypothesis formerly set the date of the Proto-Altaic language at around
4000 BC, but today at around 5000 BC or 6000 BC. This would make Altaic a language family about
as old as Indo-European (4000 to 7,000 BC according to several hypotheses) but considerably
younger than Afroasiatic (c. 10,000 BC or 11,000 to 16,000 BC according to different sources).
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 Blaek'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 /p/ disappears (marked "0") or becomes /j/ at the beginning of a Turkic word and
becomes /p/ elsewhere in a Turkic word.