LINGUIST List 5.911

Sun 21 Aug 1994

Disc: Altaic

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Message 1: Re: 5.910 Altaic

Date: Sat, 20 Aug 94 14:53:19 EDRe: 5.910 Altaic
From: <amrzeus.cs.wayne.edu>
Subject: Re: 5.910 Altaic

Victor Golla's posting about the Penutian panel touched a nerve, because what prompted my suggestion that we discuss Altaic was my discovery of the rumors that have been circulating at third or fourth hand about Altaic as a result of the so-called Altaic panel at Stanford in 1987. Notably, I fear that much damage has been done by Johanna Nichols' uncritical reliance on the report of this panel by Unger in the 1990 book ed. by Philip Baldi, Linguistic Change and Reconstruction Methodology, and by perhaps by Unger's report itself. (I refer to Nichols because her ebook has been so widely acclaimed and so presumably many linguists and non-linguists--it's even been reviewed in Science--who know little about Altaic will take what is said there as gospel.)

I say "so-called Altaic" panel, because Unger himself begins his report by saing that the term was inappropriate given the composition of the group, and Baldi has an editorial note explaining that some of the invitees who were supposed to make it more Altaic did not show up. Now, this panel consisted of three experts on Japanese and Korean, one expert on Uralic and miscellaneous language groups, and one person whose expertise I have not been able to trace who gave a presentation to the panel (unpublished in the proceedings) about not his own but rather Gerhard Doerfer's and Andras Rona- Tas's objections to the reconstructions of Proto-Altaic by Ramstedt and Poppe (which date the sixties and earlier!). No specific works of Doerfer's or Rona-Tas's are cited and ther is no discussion of the specific issues, and certainly no mention of the extensive debates that have been going on ever since Doerfer and Rona-Tas (following the lead of Clauson) started attacking Altaic some decades ago.

This panel then, which for example did not include anybody who is an expert on Turkic or anybody who has tried to work on Altaic, concluded that they liked Doerfer's and Rona-Tas's objections, and they also were skeptical of efforts by Roy Andrew Miller and John Street to relate Japanese to the "so-called" Altaic languages. However, two of the papers by two of the panelists that do appear in the proceedings (Whitman and Samuel Martin) do in fact take Korean and Japanese to be related, and Martin's paper, despite a snide remark about the "Altaicists" appears to endorse the connection of both these languages to Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic!

Now, I would like at some point in this discussion to address Doerfer's and Rona-Tas's (and Clauson's) arguments, and Ron Hahn has already made a beginning in this direction. I would like also to discuss Nichols proposal that the systematic correspondences between the pronominal systems of Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic are NOT due to a genealogical connection but to some kind of areal phenomenon. BUT, as St. Augustine said in another context, NOT YET.

I would first like to establish once and for all that one should read and cite the relevant literature if one is going to criticize a theory, rather that citing a panel report written by a non-specialist about a panel of nonspecialists' views of an unpublished paper reporting the work not of its author but those of other people entirely about this theory, when moreover the views of these other people (Doerfer and Rona-Tas) have been published in many many places over the decades and have been the subject of an extended debate, in which a number of distinguished linguists have in fact taken the other (that is, the pro-Altaic) point of view (but of course we won't mention these people or their work in our rush to condemn the theory!).

I would also like to establish once and for all that, whether Altaic is a valid language or not, it is NOT true that as Nichols claims "the received view now is that Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic are unrelated (UNger 1990)" (Nichols 1992, p. 4). Even Unger does not say this, and even his little panel did not conclude this, as noted. And even if they had, they would not in anybody's estimation represent the received view on a topic on which, among others, we have the published works of people like Hamp, Menges, Miller, Starostin, Vovin, Tsintsius, and many many others.

Moreover, the specific claim that Nichols makes about why these languages are supposedly now perceived to be unrelated,namely that there are "very few good potential cognates", aside from the pronouns, is also factually incorrect. Even Doerfer and Rona- Tas admit that there are many potential cognates, running into the hundreds, but what they question is whether these are cognates or borrowings. Moreover, Rona-Tas at least has often said that he is by no means sure whether the oldest layer of this "shared vocabulary" is due to borrowing or to inheritance!

On the other hand, of course, while there have been four or so major critics of Altaic, who keep propounding the borrowing thesis, there are many more experts who have argued cogently (whether we agree with them or not, an issue I want to leave to another time!) that these must be cognates, in part because of the formal and semantic properties of the forms of question and in partbecause, while one can conceive of massive borrowing from Turkic into Mongolian, it is less easy to see how these alleged loan words would have ended up in Japanese, and in part because it is difficult to see how such basic vocabulary AND morphology would have been borrowed (unless the sense of the word "borrowed" is watered down so that it subsumes "cognate").

It should also perhaps be pointed out that the arguments for borrowing and against a genealogical relationship by Clauson, Doerfer, and Rona-Tas, whether we accept them or not, are (as has been pointed out many times, e.g., by Hamp, Miller, and others) based on very unusual methodological premises, which are NOT (pace Ron Hahn) shared by comparative linguists working in any other field, esp. not Indo-European (Hamp I think made this very clear in the 1970's). Thus, we find the assumption that in order to be related two language (group)s HAVE to share numerals. Now, this is certainly NOT something assumdd by Indo-Europeanists, although it happens tobe true of the Indo-European languages! Also, Clauson, who started the whole attack on Altaic, took the very unusual tack of trying to "prove" that these languages are unrelated (which, as again noted by Hamp and many others) is not something that can be done by any standard method of comparative linguistixs, and as part of his "proof" made the further assumption (which other anti-Altaicists appear to share) that in related languages cognate forms should have THE SAME meanings, not merely related ones (so that if a Turkic word's Mongolian counterpart has a differetn meaning, then Clauson, Doerfer et al., will accept that there was a semantic shift but it has to be borrowing rather than a cognate). Clauson et al. make the further assumption that in related languages certain terms other than numerals, specifically body part terms, have to be shared WITH SEMMLA(that is, with complete semantic) identity, so that Turkic and Mongolian would have to have related forms for 'head' or 'hand' to be related. Now, as has often been pointed out, such an assumption is not made in any other field of comprative linguistics. The fact that French tete and main are unrelated to English head and hand is nOT taken as an argument against these being related languages!

So, in conclusion, before we go any further, I would like to see if we can at least agree that (a) critiques of Altaic should not be done on the basis of rumor or third- or fourth- hands reports, (b) we should not accept the findings of a panel of nonspecialists, esp. when some of them in their own work do support part or whole of the Altaic theory, whether they call it that or not, (c) we should once and for all stop pretending that there is any kind of consensus of specialists that Altaic is dead, when in fact only a handful of people have done the critical work and there are more people than ever actively working ON Altaic, (d) we should once and for all stop citing old criticisms of Altaic without mentioning the extensive literature that has been devoted to refuting these criticisms, (e) we should also not accept uncritically critiques of Altaic which are based on methodological principles which no one in any other area of linguistics seems to accept WITHOUT A CAREFUL JUSTIFICATION OF THESE SAME PRINCIPLES AND A CAREFUL REFUTATION OF THE ARGUMENTS given over the decades by Hamp, Ligeti, Krueger, Aalto, Poppe, Miller, and others.

That is, I have nothing against entertaining the possibility that Clauson, Doerfer, and Rona-Tas (together with the fourth major critic of Altaic, Shcherbak) might (a) be justified in using these new methodologies and (b) be right in using them to criticize Altaic. Or the possibility that Nichols might be right that languages get to share pronominal systems as an areal rather than genealogical phenomenon. Indeed, these are entertaining possibilities. But if I am going to accept these possibilities, then I want to get my money's worth. Instead of relying on Nichols' exaggerated report of Unger's report of a small panel of nonspecialists' reception of an unpublished paper by one Larry Clark about the work of Doerfer and Rona-Tas, I would like to see a response by Unger or Nichols to the decades worth of work by all the people mentioned above (Hamp, Krueger, Ligeti, Aalto, Menges, Poppe, Tsintsius), all the many others I have forgotten to mention, and (now this would really be entertaining) to the most recent work on Altaic, by, e.g., Starostin and Anna Dybo in Russia, or Alexander Vovin in this country.

-- Now just a few responses to specific points:

(a) Ron Hahn is right about the terminology, but 'Turkic' and 'Tungusic' are already accepted terms. 'Mongolic' would make a lot of sense, and I will use it in future.

(b) Ron is also right that numerals need not look related among related languages. Cf. Hebrew and Burji (a Cushitic language) below:

H B 1 exad d'ekki, micca 2 shtayim lama 3 shalosh fadiya 4 arba foola 5 xamesh umutta

(c) The latest work on Ainu (Alexander Vovin, "The origins of the Ainu language", Panasiatic Linguistics, II: 672-685, Bangkok, and his just published book "A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu") conclusively, to my mind, refute the idea that AInu might be Altaic and suggest a relationship with Austroasiatic that is at least suggestive.

(d) About Jao(I mean, Japanese) and Altaic, the latest work is Starostin's book Altajskaja problema i proisxozhdenie japonskogo jazyka, Moscow 1991, and Vovin's survey article in a recent issue of Diachronica (I am sorry I don't have reference handy).