Juha Janhunen | |
---|---|
Born | Juha Antero Janhunen 12 February 1952 Pori, Finland |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Linguist |
Institutions | University of Helsinki |
Main interests | Mongolic languages |
Juha Antero Janhunen (born 12 February 1952) [1] is a Finnish linguist whose wide interests include Uralic and Mongolic languages. Since 1994, he has been Professor in East Asian studies at the University of Helsinki. He has done fieldwork on Samoyedic languages and on Khamnigan Mongol. [2] More recently, he has collaborated with Chinese scholar Wu Yingzhe to produce a critical edition of two newly discovered Liao Dynasty epitaphs written in the Khitan small script.[ citation needed ] Janhunen has also worked along with Ekaterina Gruzdeva on revitalizing the Nivkh language. [3]
He is a critic of the Altaic hypothesis. [4]
The Altaic languages consist of the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families, with some linguists including the Koreanic and Japonic families. These languages share agglutinative morphology, head-final word order and some vocabulary. The once-popular theory attributing these similarities to a common ancestry has long been rejected by most comparative linguists in favor of language contact, although it continues to be supported by a small but 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 is sometimes called "Micro-Altaic", with the expanded group including Koreanic and Japonic labelled as "Macro-Altaic" or "Transeurasian".
Ural-Altaic, Uralo-Altaic, Uraltaic, or Turanic is a linguistic convergence zone and abandoned language-family proposal uniting the Uralic and the Altaic languages. It is now generally agreed that even the Altaic languages do not share a common descent: the similarities between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic are better explained by diffusion and borrowing. Just as in Altaic, the internal structure of the Uralic family has been debated since the family was first proposed. Doubts about the validity of most or all of the proposed higher-order Uralic branchings are becoming more common. The term continues to be used for the central Eurasian typological, grammatical and lexical convergence zone.
Mongolian is the principal language of the Mongolic language family that originated in the Mongolian Plateau. It is spoken by ethnic Mongols and other closely related Mongolic peoples who are native to modern Mongolia and surrounding parts of East and North Asia. Mongolian is the official language of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia and a recognized language of Xinjiang and Qinghai.
The Mongolic languages are a language family spoken by the Mongolic peoples in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, North Asia and East Asia, mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas and in Kalmykia and Buryatia. The best-known member of this language family, Mongolian, is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia and the Mongol residents of Inner Mongolia, with an estimated 5.7+ million speakers.
Nivkh, or Gilyak, or Amuric, is a small language family, often portrayed as a language isolate, of two or three mutually unintelligible languages spoken by the Nivkh people 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 Russian rendering of terms derived from the Tungusic "Gileke" and Manchu-Chinese "Gilemi" for culturally similar peoples of the Amur River region, and was applied principally to the Nivkh in Western literature.
The Paleo-Siberian languages are several language isolates and small language families spoken in parts of Siberia. They are not known to have any genetic relationship to each other; their only common link is that they are held to have antedated the more dominant languages, particularly Tungusic and latterly Turkic languages, that have largely displaced them. Even more recently, Turkic and especially Tungusic have been displaced in their turn by Russian.
The Tungusic languages form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered. There are approximately 75,000 native speakers of the dozen living languages of the Tungusic language family. The term "Tungusic" is from an exonym for the Evenk people (Ewenki) used by the Yakuts ("tongus").
Yurats (Yurak) was a Samoyedic language spoken in the Siberian tundra west of the Yenisei River. It became extinct in the early 19th century, due to the expansion of the Nenets people. Yurats was probably either a transitional variety connecting the Nenets and Enets languages of the Samoyedic family, or an archaic dialect of Enets. While it is marginally closer to Enets rather than Nenets, it does not show a majority of either Enets or Nenets features. Some eastern dialects of Tundra Nenets may have a Yurats substrate, as the Yurats were likely absorbed by the Tundra Nenets. The uncertainty regarding the language's status is due to the scarcity of information about the language. Nevertheless, Glottolog considers it to be a dialect of Tundra Nenets, as is the traditional assumption.
Khitan or Kitan, also known as Liao, is an extinct language once spoken in Northeast Asia by the Khitan people. It was the official language of the Liao Empire (907–1125) and the Qara Khitai (1124–1218). Owing to a narrow corpus of known words and a partially undeciphered script, the language has yet to be completely reconstructed.
The Khitan people were a historical nomadic people from Northeast Asia who, from the 4th century, inhabited an area corresponding to parts of modern Mongolia, Northeast China and the Russian Far East.
Middle Mongol or Middle Mongolian was a Mongolic koiné language spoken in the Mongol Empire. Originating from Genghis Khan's home region of Northeastern Mongolia, it diversified into several Mongolic languages after the collapse of the empire. In comparison to Modern Mongolian, it is known to have had no long vowels, different vowel harmony and verbal systems and a slightly different case system.
The Khitan small script was one of two writing systems used for the now-extinct Khitan language. It was used during the 10th–12th century by the Khitan people, who had created the Liao Empire in present-day northeastern China. In addition to the small script, the Khitans simultaneously also used a functionally independent writing system known as the Khitan large script. Both Khitan scripts continued to be in use to some extent by the Jurchens for several decades after the fall of the Liao dynasty, until the Jurchens fully switched to a script of their own. Examples of the scripts appeared most often on epitaphs and monuments, although other fragments sometimes surface.
Nova N 176 is an undeciphered manuscript codex held at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (IOM) of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The manuscript, of uncertain provenance, entered the collection of the IOM in 1954, and for more than fifty years nobody was able to identify with certainty what language or script the text of the manuscript was written in. It was only in 2010 that IOM researcher Viacheslav Zaytsev was able to demonstrate that the manuscript is written in the Khitan large script, one of two largely undeciphered writing systems used for the now-extinct Khitan language during the 10th–12th centuries by the Khitan people, who founded the Liao Empire in north-eastern China.
Khamnigan is a Mongolic language spoken by the Hamnigan people east of Lake Baikal.
Para-Mongolic is a proposed group of languages that is considered to be an extinct sister branch of the Mongolic languages. Para-Mongolic contains certain historically attested extinct languages, among them Khitan and Tuyuhun.
Vladimir Mikhailovich Sangi is a Nivkh writer and publicist from Sakhalin, Russia. He writes in Nivkh and Russian.
The Ainu languages, sometimes known as Ainuic, are a small language family, often regarded as a language isolate, historically spoken by the Ainu people of northern Japan and neighboring islands, as well as mainland, including previously southern part of Kamchatka Peninsula.
Serbi–Mongolic is a proposed group of languages that includes the Mongolic languages as well as the Para-Mongolic languages, a proposed extinct sister branch of the Mongolic languages.