Ural-Altaic languages - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Ural–Altaic or Uralo-Altaic is a former language-family

Language family

A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...

proposal uniting the Uralic

Uralic languages

The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...

and Altaic

Altaic languages

Altaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe...

languages.

Originally suggested in the 19th century, the hypothesis enjoyed wide acceptance among linguists into the mid 20th century. Since the 1960s, it has been controversial and widely rejected. From the 1990s, interest in a relationship between the Uralic and Altaic families has been revived in the context of the Eurasiatic

Eurasiatic languages

Eurasiatic is a language macrofamily proposed by Joseph Greenberg that includes many language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia. The eight branches of Eurasiatic are Etruscan, Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo–Aleut, spoken in...

hypothesis. Bomhard (2008) treats Uralic, Altaic and Indo-European

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...

as Eurasiatic daughter groups on equal footing.

History of the hypothesis

Philip Johan von Strahlenberg

Philip Johan von Strahlenberg was a Swedish officer and geographer of German origin who made important contributions to the cartography of Russia. Strahlenberg was born in Stralsund, which then belonged to Sweden, and his original name was Philip Johan Tabbert. He joined the Swedish army in 1694...

, Swedish explorer and war prisoner in Siberia, described Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Caucasian languages as sharing common features by 1730.

Rask described what he vaguely called "Scythian" languages in 1834, which included Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Samoyedic, Eskimo, Caucasian, Basque and others.

The hypothesis was elaborated at least as early as 1836 by W. Schott and in 1838 by F. J. Wiedemann.

The Altaic

Altaic languages

hypothesis, as mentioned by Finnish linguist and explorer Matthias Castrén

Matthias Castrén

Matthias Alexander Castrén was a Finnish ethnologist and philologist.Castrén was born at Tervola, in Northern Finland, on the 20th of November...

by 1844, included Finno-Ugric

Finno-Ugric languages

Finno-Ugric , Finno-Ugrian or Fenno-Ugric is a traditional group of languages in the Uralic language family that comprises the Finno-Permic and Ugric language families....

and Samoyedic

Samoyedic languages

The Samoyedic languages are spoken on both sides of the Ural mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by approximately 30,000 speakers altogether....

, collectively known as "Chudic", and Turkic

Turkic languages

The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...

, Mongolic

Mongolic languages

The Mongolic languages are a group of languages spoken in East-Central Asia, mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas plus in Kalmykia. The best-known member of this language family, Mongolian, is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia and the Mongolian residents of Inner...

, and Tungusic

Tungusic languages

The Tungusic languages form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered, and the long-term future of the family is uncertain...

, collectively known as "Tataric".

Subsequently, Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic were grouped together, on account of their especially similar features, while Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic were grouped as Uralic. Two contrasting language families were thereby formed, but the similarities between them led to their retention in a common grouping, named Ural–Altaic.

The Ural–Altaic family was widely accepted by linguists who studied Uralic and Altaic until well into the 20th century. In his article The Uralo-Altaic Theory in the Light of the Soviet Linguistics (1940), Nicholas Poppe attempted to refute Castren's views by concluding that the common agglutinating features may have arisen independently. Beginning in the 1960s, the hypothesis came to be seen as controversial, largely due to the Altaic family itself not being universally accepted. Today, the hypothesis that Uralic and Altaic are related more closely to one another than to any other family has almost no adherents (Starostin et al. 2003:8). There are, however, a number of hypotheses that propose a macrofamily

Macrofamily

In historical linguistics, a macro-family, also called a superfamily or phylum, is defined as a proposed genetic relationship grouping together language families in a larger scale clasification.However, Campbell regards this term as superfluous, preferring language family for those clasifications...

consisting of Uralic, Altaic and other families. None of these hypotheses has widespread support.

In his Altaic Etymological Dictionary, co-authored with Anna V. Dybo and Oleg A. Mudrak, Sergei Starostin

Sergei Starostin

Dr. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin was a Russian historical linguist and scholar, best known for his work with hypothetical proto-languages, including his work on the reconstruction of the Proto-Borean language, the controversial theory of Altaic languages and the formulation of the Dené–Caucasian...

characterized the Ural–Altaic hypothesis as "an idea now completely discarded" (2003:8).
In Starostin's sketch of a "Borean

Borean languages

Borean is a hypothetical linguistic macrofamily that traces the possible genetic relationships of the various languages of Eurasia and adjacent regions with languages spoken in the Upper Paleolithic in the millennia following the Last Glacial Maximum. The name "Borean", based on Greek βορέας,...

" super-phylum, he puts Uralic and Altaic as daughters of an ancestral language of ca. 9,000 years ago from which the Dravidian languages

Dravidian languages

The Dravidian language family includes approximately 85 genetically related languages, spoken by about 217 million people. They are mainly spoken in southern India and parts of eastern and central India as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, and...

and the Paleo-Siberian languages, including Eskimo-Aleut

Eskimo-Aleut languages

Eskimo–Aleut is a language family native to Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut, Greenland, and the Chukchi Peninsula on the eastern tip of Siberia...

, are also descended. He posits that this ancestral language, together with Indo-European

Indo-European languages

and Kartvelian, descends from a "Eurasiatic

Eurasiatic languages

" protolanguage some 12,000 years ago, which in turn would be descended from a "Borean" protolanguage via Nostratic

Nostratic languages

Nostratic is a proposed language family that includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, including the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic as well as Kartvelian languages...

.

Angela Marcantonio (2002) argues that the Finno-Permic

Finno-Permic languages

The Finno-Permic languages are a traditional but disputed ,group of the Uralic languages that comprises the Baltic-Finnic languages, Sami languages, Mordvinic languages, Mari language, Permic languages, and likely a number of extinct languages...

and Ugric languages

Ugric languages

Ugric or Ugrian languages are a branch of the Uralic language family. The term derives from Yugra, a region in north-central Asia.They include three languages: Hungarian , Khanty , and Mansi language...

are no more closely related to each other than either is to Turkic, thereby positing a grouping very similar to Ural–Altaic or indeed to Castrén's original Altaic proposal.

Relationship between Uralic and Altaic

The Altaic language family was generally accepted by linguists from the late 19th century up to the 1960s, but since then has been in dispute, and the dispute is not yet resolved. For simplicity's sake, the following discussion assumes the validity of the Altaic language family, although for linguists who do not accept Altaic a relation of Altaic to Uralic is obviously a non-starter, though some part of "Altaic" (e.g. Turkic) might be related to Uralic, in theory.

It is important to distinguish two senses in which Uralic and Altaic might be related.

Do Uralic and Altaic have a demonstrable genetic relationship
Genetic relationship (linguistics)
In linguistics, genetic relationship is the usual term for the relationship which exists between languages that are members of the same language family. The term genealogical relationship is sometimes used to avoid confusion with the unrelated use of the term in biological genetics...

?
If they do have a demonstrable genetic relationship, do they form a valid linguistic taxon
Taxon
|thumb|270px|[[African elephants]] form a widely-accepted taxon, the [[genus]] LoxodontaA taxon is a group of organisms, which a taxonomist adjudges to be a unit. Usually a taxon is given a name and a rank, although neither is a requirement...

? For example, Germanic
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

and Iranian
Iranian languages
The Iranian languages form a subfamily of the Indo-Iranian languages which in turn is a subgroup of Indo-European language family. They have been and are spoken by Iranian peoples....

have a genetic relationship via Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

, but they do not form a valid taxon within the Indo-European language family, whereas in contrast Iranian and Indic
Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages constitutes a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family...

do via Indo-Iranian
Proto-Indo-Iranian language
Proto-Indo-Iranian is the reconstructed proto-language of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. Its speakers, the hypothetical Proto-Indo-Iranians, are assumed to have lived in the late 3rd millennium BC, and are usually connected with the early Andronovo archaeological...

, a daughter language of Proto-Indo-European that subsequently calved into Indic and Iranian. In other words, showing genetic relationship does not suffice to establish a language family, such as the proposed Ural–Altaic family; it is also necessary to consider the family tree of the languages concerned to determine which language goes where.

This distinction is often overlooked but is fundamental to the genetic classification of languages (Greenberg 2005).

Evidence for a genetic relationship

Some linguists point out strong similarities in the pronouns of Uralic and Altaic languages. Since pronouns are among the elements of language most resistant to change and it is very rare if not unheard-of for one language to replace its pronouns wholesale with those of another, these similarities, if accepted as real, would be strong evidence for genetic relationship. It should be noted that the "s" in the Finnic second person pronoun "sinä" is a result of the ti→si sound law, and comes from earlier form *tinä, as in the plural form "te" and the Hungarian pronoun "te".
Other observations are that both Uralic and Altaic languages have vowel harmony

Vowel harmony

Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....

, are agglutinating

Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...

in structure (stringing suffixes, prefixes or both onto roots

Root (linguistics)

The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family , which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents....

), use SOV word order, and lack grammatical gender

Noun class

In linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional...

. However, typological

Linguistic typology

Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages...

similarities such as these do not constitute evidence of genetic relationship on their own, as they may be the result of regional influence

Sprachbund

A Sprachbund – also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related...

or coincidence. Thus other linguists argue that these typological similarities do not demonstrate a genetic relationship between Uralic and Altaic, ascribing these similarities instead to coincidence or mutual influence resulting in convergence

Language convergence

Language convergence is a type of contact-induced change whereby languages with many bilingual speakers mutually borrow morphological and syntactic features, making their typology more similar....

Vocabulary of common origin

To demonstrate the existence of a language family, it is necessary to find cognate

Cognate

In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...

words that trace back to a common proto-language. Shared vocabulary alone does not show a relationship, as it may be loaned from one language to another or through the language of a third party.

There are shared words between, for example, Turkic and Ugric languages, because borrowing has occurred. However, it has been difficult to find proto-Ural–Altaic words across both language families. Such words would be found in all branches of the Uralic and Altaic trees and should follow regular sound changes from the proto language to known modern languages. In addition, regular sound changes from Proto-Ural–Altaic to give Proto-Uralic and Proto-Altaic words should be found to demonstrate the existence of a Ural–Altaic vocabulary. So far, none of such words have been unambiguously demonstrated. In contrast, about 200 Uralic words are known and universally accepted.

Evidence for a Ural–Altaic taxon

The vowel-harmony argument has sometimes been used to justify the necessity of a Ural–Altaic family, but vowel harmony is found in other nearby languages as well, including Chukchi

Chukchi language

The Chukchi language is a Palaeosiberian language spoken by Chukchi people in the easternmost extremity of Siberia, mainly in Chukotka Autonomous Okrug...

and Nivkh

Nivkh language

Nivkh or Gilyak is a language spoken in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun , along the lower reaches of the Amur itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin. 'Gilyak' is the Manchu appellation...

, as well as in various languages of Africa and the Americas. Furthermore, vowel harmony is a typological feature, and, according to the predominant opinion among linguists, typological features do not provide evidence for genetic relationship.

Some linguists maintain that Uralic and Altaic are related through a larger family, such as Eurasiatic

Eurasiatic languages

or Nostratic

Nostratic languages

Nostratic is a proposed language family that includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, including the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic as well as Kartvelian languages...

, within which Uralic and Altaic are no more closely related to each other than either is to any other member of the proposed family, for instance than Uralic or Altaic is to Indo-European (e.g. Greenberg 2000:17).

External links

Något om rastänkandet i Sverige by Niclas Wahlgren
"The 'Ugric-Turkic battle': a critical review" by Angela Marcantonio, Pirjo Nummenaho, and Michela Salvagni (2001)
Review of Marcantonio (2002) by Johanna Laasko

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

History of the hypothesis

Relationship between Uralic and Altaic

Evidence for a genetic relationship

Vocabulary of common origin

Evidence for a Ural–Altaic taxon

See also

External links