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Altaic is a controversial proposed language family that would include the Turkic,Mongolic and Tungusic language families and possibly also the Japonic and Koreanic languages. The hypothetical language family has long been rejected by most comparative linguists,although it continues to be supported by a small but stable scholarly minority. Speakers of the constituent languages are currently scattered over most of Asia north of 35°N and in some eastern parts of Europe,extending in longitude from the Balkan Peninsula to Japan. The group is named after the Altai mountain range in the center of Asia.
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 generally now agreed that even the Altaic languages do not share a common descent:the similarities among Turkic,Mongolic and Tungusic are better explained by diffusion and borrowing. Just as Altaic,internal structure of the Uralic family also 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,or Tamil,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 languages of East Asia belong to several distinct language families,with many common features attributed to interaction. In the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area,Chinese varieties and languages of southeast Asia share many areal features,tending to be analytic languages with similar syllable and tone structure. In the 1st millennium AD,Chinese culture came to dominate East Asia,and Classical Chinese was adopted by scholars and ruling classes in Vietnam,Korea,and Japan. As a consequence,there was a massive influx of loanwords from Chinese vocabulary into these and other neighboring Asian languages. The Chinese script was also adapted to write Vietnamese,Korean and Japanese,though in the first two the use of Chinese characters is now restricted to university learning,linguistic or historical study,artistic or decorative works and newspapers,rather than daily usage.
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").
Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan,sometimes also Japanic,is a language family comprising Japanese,spoken in the main islands of Japan,and the Ryukyuan languages,spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists,and significant progress has been made in reconstructing the proto-language,Proto-Japonic. The reconstruction implies a split between all dialects of Japanese and all Ryukyuan varieties,probably before the 7th century. The Hachijōlanguage,spoken on the Izu Islands,is also included,but its position within the family is unclear.
Old Turkic is the earliest attested form of the Common Turkic languages,first found in Second Turkic Khaganate then in Uyghur Khaganate inscriptions. In marked contrast to Middle Turkic,the geographic extent of (East) Old Turkic is rather confined,being limited mainly to East Turkistan and Mongolia. 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. Orkhon Turkic and Old Uyghur are considered to be dialects of East Old Turkic,Orkhon Turkic being the earliest attested dialect of (East) Old Turkic. There is a difference of opinion among linguists with regard to Karakhanid Turkic,some classify it as another dialect of East Old Turkic,while others prefer to include Karakhanid among Middle Turkic languages;nonetheless,Karakhanid is extremely close to Old Uyghur so much so that a single grammatical description will fit both of them. East Old Turkic and West Old Turkic together comprise the Old Turkic proper. 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 Standard Uyghur language;the contemporaneous ancestor of Modern Uyghur was one of the Middle Turkic languages,later giving rise to 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 as 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.
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.
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.
References
- ↑ CV Martine Robbeets 2021 uni-mainz.de
- ↑ "Language in the anthropocene" . Retrieved 26 February 2024.
- ↑ Martine Irma Robbeets (2017): "Austronesian influence and Transeurasian ancestry in Japanese: A case of farming/language dispersal". Language Dynamics and Change, volume 7, issue 2, pages 201–251, doi : 10.1163/22105832-00702005
- ↑ Martine Irma Robbeets (2015): Diachrony of verb morphology – Japanese and the Transeurasian languages. Mouton de Gruyter.
- ↑ Robbeets, M.; Bouckaert, R.: Bayesian phylolinguistics reveals the internal structure of the Transeurasian family. Journal of Language Evolution 3 (2), pp. 145 - 162 (2018) doi : 10.1093/jole/lzy007, Robbeets, Martine et al. 2021. Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages, Nature 599, 616–621.
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