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Altaic language theory

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maaku
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 Message 9 of 17
25 January 2010 at 11:32am | IP Logged 
Having been, for a brief few years, a Japanese histories major in college, I can tell you what the current thinking is from the archeological and anthropology perspective. I.e, what is near-universally accepted at conferences and what the professors will tell you about in office hours, although most history books haven't been updated yet:

The Japanese people come from the Korean peninsula. Of this there are heaps of archeological evidence, and it's growing year by year. The Japanese and Korean languages have a great deal in common. Not as much as, say, two Germanic or two Romance languages, but a lot when compared to other languages in the region, even the language of the Ainu (the indigenous peoples of Japan).

The most current theory I've heard (although this was a few years ago) is that the Ainu are descendants of the Jomon culture, which was largly displaced in Honshu around 2000 years ago by the Yayoi culture. This Yayoi culture was a migration of people from the Korean peninsula to the Japanese islands, and that the original Korean culture was distinct from but related to the ethnic majority that would become the modern Korean people (the Korean minority that the Japanese stem from are mentioned in ancient legends, but have long since been absorbed into the larger Korean culture). Keep in mind this is all in pre-historical times. The languages spoken by proto-Korean and proto-Japanese/Yayoi peoples were almost certainly related, albeit distinct at that time. Proto-Japanese then mixed with the native Japanese languages (possibly Ainu, but more likely a distinct but related language spoken by the now extinct inhabitants of south-west Honshu), as there is evidence that there was mixing of these cultures--most notably shared burial sites and a continuation of residence without signs of conflict. Presumably this is the source of the "native Japanese" words that can't be found in other Altaic languages.

I'll leave it to people more knowledgeable than I to prove or disprove the link from Korea to Turkey.
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Captain Haddock
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 Message 10 of 17
25 January 2010 at 1:49pm | IP Logged 
Well, there were three ancient civilizations in modern-day Korea: Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla. Goguryeo-Baekje
appears to have been a separate language family from Silla with little in common. Goguryeo-Baekje is now extinct,
and Silla has become the dominant culture and language of modern Korea, but it is with Goguryeo that Japanese
apparently has the most native vocabulary in common. This, along with obvious errors in all the supposed Altaic
cognate tables I've seen, leads me to favour the theory of a Buyeo language family that includes Japanese,
Okinawan, and the extinct Goguryeo-Baekje languages.
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elvisrules
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 Message 11 of 17
25 January 2010 at 2:18pm | IP Logged 
What about the comparitive tables in this pdf Captain Haddock?

This is the accompaniment to a lecture I had in October 2009 about how the idea, of the unicultural and unilinguistic Japan and how it has always been so, is false.
http://www.mediafire.com/?cmzgjnmyfv2

Also talked about, are the different Japanese cultures of Jomon and Yayoi, but warning, it's in Dutch. You don't need to know Dutch to look at the comparative tables though.
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Captain Haddock
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 Message 12 of 17
25 January 2010 at 3:24pm | IP Logged 
Well, I have just the usual complaints. It's a small collection of very vague, un-systematic coincidences of the sort
that you could find between any arbitrary group of languages. On top of that, the data looks fudged by adjusting
the conjugation as needed to make something that looks more similar. Otherwise, why compare the causative form
of "wear" instead of the normal non-inflected form? Why is an adjective "scarce" being compared to a Korean verb?
And why are no systematic, predictable sound changes being presented?

The bigger proof lies in what's missing. Look how nicely the patterns for numerals line up across all the Indo-
European languages, from French to Russian to Hindi, and then note how no one even tries comparing them in this
supposed Altaic family.
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Warp3
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 Message 13 of 17
25 January 2010 at 8:13pm | IP Logged 
Captain Haddock wrote:
Why is an adjective "scarce" being compared to a Korean verb?


In Korean, "adjectives" are really more like a collection of "descriptive verbs" instead, though you can convert them into "normal" noun-modifying adjectives with the proper word ending. You'll notice that the "Mongools" columns has a descriptive verb listed instead as well.
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Chung
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 Message 14 of 17
25 January 2010 at 9:10pm | IP Logged 
Captain Haddock wrote:
Well, I have just the usual complaints. It's a small collection of very vague, un-systematic coincidences of the sort
that you could find between any arbitrary group of languages. On top of that, the data looks fudged by adjusting
the conjugation as needed to make something that looks more similar. Otherwise, why compare the causative form
of "wear" instead of the normal non-inflected form? Why is an adjective "scarce" being compared to a Korean verb?
And why are no systematic, predictable sound changes being presented?

The bigger proof lies in what's missing. Look how nicely the patterns for numerals line up across all the Indo-
European languages, from French to Russian to Hindi, and then note how no one even tries comparing them in this
supposed Altaic family.


There has indeed been an attempt to reconstruct numerals in Proto-Altaic. However their reconstruction is open to a lot of dispute compared to Indo-European languages.

The Wikipedia article on Altaic languages provides a helpful summary of what's out there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages

On the reconstruction of Altaic numerals, see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages#Numerals_and_r elated_words

I have a general comment about comparative linguistic studies...

I think that part of the problem is that the scholars first involved in the reconstruction of what became known as the Indo-European family in a way spoiled a few generations of linguists afterward. Basically many scholars in Indo-European are spoiled and don't realize how fortunate in being able to use "scientific rigour" when compared to linguists who try to compare other languages with less or very little attested evidence from the past.

The methods used in Indo-European studies were then applied to compare other languages. One big problem is that attested evidence of many languages is non-existent, and it's rather hard to do research lacking so much attested evidence from the past. Uralic studies is an example of the difficulties inherent of trying to "shoe-horn" the methods of Indo-European studies into other languages.

Consider the following:

Despite the Uralic family's establishment, it's actually reliant on a lot more guesswork than Indo-European since the oldest attestations in Uralic languages (e.g. "Old Hungarian", "Old Karelian") are nowhere near as old as material in Classical Latin, Sanskrit etc. I once read in a monograph by a specialist on Finnish that scholars' reconstruction of Proto-Uralic depends largely on an assumption that since Fennic languages (e.g. Estonian, Finnish) are peripheral (i.e. spoken furthest away from the presumed ancient "homeland" of Uralic speakers), the forms in Estonian or Finnish tend to be more conservative and best reflect the forms that they consider to have existed in Proto-Uralic (NB the earliest (written) attestation/monument of anything distinctly Uralic comes from no earlier than 1200 AD in the form of a Hungarian funeral oration). The specialist commented further that such an assumption may have both limited and enhanced development of Uralic studies (especially in reconstructing the past). It seems to me like trying to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European with evidence no older than Early Middle English, ecclesiastical Latin, a medieval recension of Old Church Slavonic, or medieval Greek. Ancient languages and even those from the Dark Ages such as Gothic, Old English or Old Church Slavonic would be excluded in this scenario.

If you want, Cap'n, I'll see if I can track down exactly where I read this piece about the Fennic languages' role in reconstructing Proto-Uralic since I'm just going on memory right now.
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maaku
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 Message 15 of 17
26 January 2010 at 3:16am | IP Logged 
Captain Haddock wrote:
Well, there were three ancient civilizations in modern-day Korea: Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla. Goguryeo-Baekje
appears to have been a separate language family from Silla with little in common. Goguryeo-Baekje is now extinct,
and Silla has become the dominant culture and language of modern Korea, but it is with Goguryeo that Japanese
apparently has the most native vocabulary in common. This, along with obvious errors in all the supposed Altaic
cognate tables I've seen, leads me to favour the theory of a Buyeo language family that includes Japanese,
Okinawan, and the extinct Goguryeo-Baekje languages.

Thanks, Cap'n. The Goguryeo-Baekje was the Korean culture I was referring to. The story you're quoting is almost certainly the theory my professors were so enamored with in college. Do you have any references by chance? Everything I quoted was from memory and I'm kinda curious to read the latest work.
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Captain Haddock
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 Message 16 of 17
26 January 2010 at 9:02am | IP Logged 
There's quite a lot of info here: http://www.dai3gen.net/kg0.htm
But it's all in Japanese.


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