Martine Robbeets | |
---|---|
Born | Martine Irma Robbeets 24 October 1972 |
Nationality | Belgian |
Occupation | Linguist |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Leiden University |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and University of Mainz |
Main interests | Historical linguistics |
Notable ideas | Transeurasian languages hypothesis |
Martine Irma Robbeets (24 October 1972) is a Belgian comparative linguist and japanologist. She is known for the Transeurasian languages hypothesis,which groups the Japonic,Koreanic,Tungusic,Mongolic,and Turkic languages together into a single language family.
Robbeets received a Ph.D. in Comparative Linguistics from Leiden University,and also received a master's degree in Korean studies from Leiden University. She also holds a master's degree in Japanese studies from KU Leuven.
In addition to being a lecturer at the University of Mainz,she is also a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena,Germany. [2]
In 2017,Robbeets proposed that Japanese (and possibly Korean) originated as a hybrid language. She proposed that the ancestral home of the Turkic,Mongolic,and Tungusic languages was somewhere in northwestern Manchuria. A group of those proto-Altaic ("Transeurasian") speakers would have migrated south into the modern Liaoning province,where they would have been mostly assimilated by an agricultural community with an Austronesian-like language. The fusion of the two languages would have resulted in proto-Japanese and proto-Korean. [3] [4]
In 2018,Robbeets and Bouckaert used Bayesian phylolinguistic methods to argue for the coherence of the Altaic languages,which they refer to as the Transeurasian languages. [5]
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".
The Turkic languages are a language family of more than 35 documented languages,spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia,East Asia,North Asia (Siberia),and West Asia. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning from Mongolia to Northwest China,where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken,from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium. They are characterized as a dialect continuum.
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.
Asia is home to hundreds of languages comprising several families and some unrelated isolates. The most spoken language families on the continent include Austroasiatic,Austronesian,Japonic,Dravidian,Indo-European,Afroasiatic,Turkic,Sino-Tibetan,Kra–Dai and Koreanic. Many languages of Asia,such as Chinese,Sanskrit,Arabic,Tamil or Telugu,have a long history as a written language.
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.
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").
Old Siberian Turkic,generally known as East Old Turkic and often shortened to Old Turkic,was a Siberian Turkic language spoken around East Turkistan and Mongolia. It was first discovered in inscriptions originating from the Second Turkic Khaganate,and later the Uyghur Khaganate,making it the earliest attested Common Turkic language. In terms of the datability of extant written sources,the period of Old Turkic can be dated from slightly before 720 AD to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. Old Turkic can generally be split into two dialects,the earlier Orkhon Turkic and the later Old Uyghur. There is a difference of opinion among linguists with regard to the Karakhanid language,some classify it as another dialect of East Old Turkic,while others prefer to include Karakhanid among Middle Turkic languages;nonetheless,Karakhanid is very close to Old Uyghur. East Old Turkic and West Old Turkic together comprise the Old Turkic proper,though West Old Turkic is generally unattested and is mostly reconstructed through words loaned through Hungarian. East Old Turkic is the oldest attested member of the Siberian Turkic branch of Turkic languages,and several of its now-archaic grammatical as well as lexical features are extant in the modern Yellow Uyghur,Lop Nur Uyghur and Khalaj;Khalaj,for instance,has (surprisingly) retained a considerable number of archaic Old Turkic words despite forming a language island within Central Iran and being heavily influenced by Persian. Old Uyghur is not a direct ancestor of the modern Uyghur language,but rather the Western Yugur language;the contemporaneous ancestor of Modern Uyghur was the Chagatai literary language.
The Turco-Mongol or Turko-Mongol tradition was an ethnocultural synthesis that arose in Asia during the 14th century among the ruling elites of the Golden Horde and the Chagatai Khanate. The ruling Mongol elites of these khanates eventually assimilated into the Turkic populations that they conquered and ruled over,thus becoming known as Turco-Mongols. These elites gradually adopted Islam,as well as Turkic languages,while retaining Mongol political and legal institutions.
Khalaj is a Turkic language spoken in Iran. Although it contains many old Turkic elements,it has become widely Persianized. Khalaj has about 150 words of uncertain origin.
The classification of the Japonic languages and their external relations is unclear. Linguists traditionally consider the Japonic languages to belong to an independent family;indeed,until the classification of Ryukyuan and eventually Hachijōas separate languages within a Japonic family rather than as dialects of Japanese,Japanese was considered a language isolate.
Afshar or Afshari is a Turkic dialect spoken in Turkey,Iran,Syria,and parts of Afghanistan by the Afshars. Ethnologue and Glottolog list it as a dialect of the South Azerbaijani language. The Encyclopædia Iranica lists it as a separate Southern Oghuz language.
Proto-Turkic is the linguistic reconstruction of the common ancestor of the Turkic languages that was spoken by the Proto-Turks before their divergence into the various Turkic peoples. Proto-Turkic separated into Oghur (western) and Common Turkic (eastern) branches. Candidates for the proto-Turkic homeland range from western Central Asia to Manchuria,with most scholars agreeing that it lay in the eastern part of the Central Asian steppe,while one author has postulated that Proto-Turkic originated 2,500 years ago in East Asia.
The Oghuric,Onoguric or Oguric languages are a branch of the Turkic language family. The only extant member of the group is the Chuvash language. The first to branch off from the Turkic family,the Oghuric languages show significant divergence from other Turkic languages,which all share a later common ancestor. Languages from this family were spoken in some nomadic tribal confederations,such as those of the Onogurs or Ogurs,Bulgars and Khazars.
Anna Vladimirovna Dybo is a Russian linguist,member of the Russian Academy of Sciences,and co-author of the Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages (2003),which encompasses some 3,000 Proto-Altaic stems.
The geographically proximate languages of Japanese and Korean share considerable similarity in syntactic and morphological typology while having a small number of lexical resemblances. Observing the said similarities and probable history of Korean influence on Japanese culture,linguists have formulated different theories proposing a genetic relationship between them,though these studies either lack conclusive evidence or were subsets of theories that have largely been discredited. There has been new research which has revived the possibility of a genealogical link,such as the Transeurasian hypothesis by Robbeets et al.,supported by computational linguistics and archaeological evidence,but this view has received significant criticism as well.
The Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages is a comparative and etymological dictionary of the hypothetical Altaic language family. It was written by linguists Sergei Starostin,Anna Dybo,and Oleg Mudrak,and was published in Leiden in 2003 by Brill Publishers. It contains 3 volumes,and is a part of the Handbook of Oriental Studies:Section 8,Uralic and Central Asian Studies;no. 8.
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.
The farming/language dispersal hypothesis proposes that many of the largest language families in the world dispersed along with the expansion of agriculture. This hypothesis was proposed by archaeologists Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew. It has been widely debated and archaeologists,linguists,and geneticists often disagree with all or only parts of the hypothesis.
Across the globe,two phonetic patterns of personal pronouns stand out statistically beyond accepted language families. These are the M–T pattern of northern Eurasia and the N–M pattern of western North America. Other phonetic patterns in pronouns are either statistically insignificant or are more localized.