LINGUIST List 5.926

Sun 28 Aug 1994

Disc: Altaic

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  • , Re: 5.921 Altaic
  • "J. Marshall Unger", Altaic, Unger 1990

    Message 1: Re: 5.921 Altaic

    Date: Sat, 27 Aug 94 12:32:42 ESRe: 5.921 Altaic
    From: <AVVOVINMIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU>
    Subject: Re: 5.921 Altaic


    Dear colleagues,

    I have just recently subscribed to a LINGUIST again after my move, and have found out that there is a discussion on Altaic going on. Thanks to Alexis Manaster Ramer, who informed me about the discussion and to Bart Mathias and Leon Serafim who forwarded to me previous parts of the discussion. I would like to dwell on the following moments that caught my attention.

    1) I agree with Alexis Manaster Ramer and disagree with Reinhard Hahn regarding the methodology which is in use by anti-Altaicists. This methodology, in my opinion has nothing to do the traditional comparative method as used in IE linguistics and any other branch of comparative linguistics. None of the anti-Altaicists has ever tried to criticize the system of correspondences proposed by Altaicists. All arguments against Altaic are actually AGAINST THE the comparative method. At its best, anti-Altaic hypotheses employ a bizarre concept of loanwords, where all possible parallels between languages in ques- tion are claimed to be loanwords, whether or not it makes sense linguistically and/or historically and culturally. More often, however, readers of Clauson, Doerfer, Rona-Tas, and Shcherbak are intelectually rewarded by statements like: "when I was reading Mongolian, I could not find anything Turkish in it" (Clau- son) or "Man nehme zwei W"orterb"ucher und vergleiche drauf los" (Which is Doerfer's idea of how Altaicists work), which has failed to demonstrate any- thing but the level of literacy in comparative linguistics and emotional nature of attacks on Altaic. Moreover, both Doerfer and, more recently,, Juha Janhunen deny any possibility of comparing more than two languages at one time. The methodological grounds of this claim are unclear to me. But it is obvious that they have nothing to do with the comparative method as used by IEpeanists and other comparativists.

    2) I wholeheartedly support Reinhard Hahn with his proposal to use Turkic instead of Turkish. However, I personally prefer to use Manchu-Tungus instead "Tungusic", though the latter seems to be used more frequently nowadays. There is an internal justification for "Manchu-Tungus": Manchu stands quite separa- tely within this Altaic groups. For details of Manchu_Tungus classification please see my "Towards a New Classification of Tungusic Languages", Eurasian Studies Yearbook 65, 1993, pp. 99-113. I do not see special justification for changing "Mongolian" to "mongolic", either: we can use term Khalkha (Xalxa) when speaking about the language and not the whole group.

    3) I see no grounds in Reinhard Hahn's statement that Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus are rela- ted closer to each other than any of them to Korean and Japanese. Poppe is not an authority here, since his command of Korean and especially Japanese was far from being perfect. Any of the Altaicists, who has a direct acces to Proto_japanese and Proto-Korean data, will definitely disagree with Reinhard Hahn. All recent research done here suggests that Japanese and Korean are on the same level of relationship to Mongolian, Turkic and Manchu-Tungus, as those have between themselves. Also, it seems that Manchu-Tungus, Japanese and Korean may be an interdmediate node as opposed to Mongolian, and, especial- ly Turkic. The most recent state-of -art data can be found in Starostin's book on Altaic, cited before by Alexis Manaster Ramer and (a brief outline) in my article "Long-Distance Relationships, Reconstruction Methodology, and the Origins of Japanese", Diachronica XI-1, 1994, 95-114.

    4) It is true that presence or absence of a common numerals setdoes not prove or disprove genetic relationship between the two or more languages. The example from Uralic is, I believe, classic: Fenno-Ugric and Samoyedic numerals are not related. However, Altaic, is more lucky than Uralic: there is a set of PROTO_ALTAIC NUMERALS, which is preserved best of all in Manchu- Tungus and Japanese. It was first noticed by Murayama Shichiroo in 1962, and since then further improved and/or supplemented by Roy. A. Miller, Sergei Starostin and myself. Thre are two main reasons why it was not noticed earlier first, Japanese was considered at its best the step-child of Altaic,; and, second, the phonetic correspondences between the majority of these numerals are not trivial, so they do not look alike! The last circumstance definitely made Juha Janhunen claim that this system of numerals is an "evidence of how utterly inconvincing Altaic hypotheses is" WITHOUT examining the system of correspondences on which it stands. Certainly, Altaic numerals do not look alike, so down with Altaistic! That, I believe is THE METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE of anti-Altaicists. (PLease see the three-way discussion between R. A. Miller, Juha Janhunen, and myself in the forthcoming issue of the "Journal de la Societe Finno-Ougrienne, due this fall). The system of Altaic numerals is provided in my article cited in 3) on p. 106, please use the chart with correspondences on p. 100).

    5) There are quite a few body parts in Altaic. Again, if one does not take into consideration Japanese and Korean, there will be considerably less reconstructions of Altaic body parts. One of the reasons is, I believe, universal. How many of the IE body parts are we going to reconstruct on the basis of Celtic, Slavic and Albanian alone? The second is that though both Japanese and Korean (especially the latter) have many phonetic innovations, they are quite conservative lexically, considerably more than, let's say Turkic, which in my opinion shows maximum of lexical innovations within the Altaic. If there is interest, I can post a list of Altaic body terms, which could be reconstructed with support of Japanese and Korean data.

    6) A number of Turkic-Tungusic separate cognates (without Mongolian counter- parts)is provided in Starostin's book. I believe that separate Turkic-Korean and/or Turkic-Japanese parallels, without any counterparts in Mongolian and Manchu-Tungus will be even more important for the proof of Altaic.

    7) To sum up, I firmly support the Altaic hypothesis and I believe that it consists of the five languages groups: Turkic, Mongolian, Manchu-Tungus, Korean and Japanese. At the same time, I am very opposed to the idea of making Altaic a junk box of North-East Asia, by including into it Ainu, Gilyak, Chukchee-Kamchadal or Eskimo-Aleut. None of this languages, especial- ly Ainu, cannot be classified as Altaic.

    8) Answering Lloyd Anderson's question regarding possible connections of Ainu with the North, I can say the following. As Alexis Manaster Ramer menti- oned already, I thought at one point that Ainu may be related to Gilyak, but I believe that there is no ground for such a claim, and all Ainu-Gilyak paral- lels are better explained through contact. I do not think that Ainu may be related to Chukcee-Kamchadal either -- a comparison of my Proto-Ainu recon- struction with Irina Murav'ieva's Proto-Chukchee-Koryak reconstruction yiel- ded results which is on the level of chance resemblance: that is I do not find any regular correspondences. The same I can say about alleged Ainu- Amerindian connections: this possibility came to my mind several years ago, and I played with Na-Dene and Salishan, but I found no material which would permit any kind of regular correspondences. Refining further my reconstruction, I bumped into initial clusters, and that together with cultural data and prono minal stystem turned my attention to the South-East Asia. This time the results were quite different. I am far from stating conclusively at this stage that Ainu is related to Austroasiatic or even to Austric, but I think it is a good possibility. When I was writing my "A REconstruction of Proto-Ainu" (E. J. Brill 1993), my main goal was to reconstruct Proto-Ainu. My book contains about 700 reconstructed vocabulary items, and I think using this list it is very easy to demonstrate that Altaic connection is quite fallacious. Murayama Shichiroo recently published two books and several articles, where he pursues the Ainu-Austronesian hypothesis. I find many of his etymologies unappropriate but there are also some which deserve attention. Anyway, what Murayama and myself has done with Ainu, is just a tip of an iceberg, but I think it may be useful to continue investigation of southern roots for Ainu.

    9) Oono Susumu's Dravidian-Japanese theory, in my opinion, does not deserve even to be discussed on Linguist. Unfortunately, the majority of our Japanese colleagues ( the only exceptions known to me are Murayama Shichiroo, Hattori Shiroo, and Itabashi Yoshizoo) working on Comparative Japanese, hardly understand what Comparative Method is about. Roy A. Miller has quite a few publications on this subject, so I will mention it briefly. No attempt to provide REGULAR phonetic correspondences is ever made, what we get is "etymo- logies" produced with adding a syllable there, deleting syllable here, the method which completely agrees with the method of folk etymology. Ono Susumu is not an acception. Being one of the best Japan's experts on Classical Japa- nese and early texts, he, when it comes to comparativer linguistics, bestowes upon his readers a humongous amount of look-alikes etc. For another example of typical Japanese comparative linguist, Kawamoto Takao, who along with Paul Benedict tries to make Japanese have a genetic link with Austronesian please see my article "Is Japanese related to Austronesian?", forthcoming in the December 1994 issue of the "Oceanic linguistics".

    10) I was extremely happy to find out that there are so many people interes- ted in Altaic -- I did think that Altaic was considerably less popular.

    Sincerely yours,

    Alexander Vovin

    Message 2: Altaic, Unger 1990

     Date: Sat, 27 Aug 1994 10:33:25 Altaic, Unger 1990
    From: "J. Marshall Unger" <jungerdeans.umd.edu>
    Subject: Altaic, Unger 1990


    Copies of notes on this subject have been forwarded to me. Some clarifications seem to be in order. I tried to get Street, Pritsak, and Doerfer to participate in the panel. They all declined. It's too bad Clark didn't prepare his paper for publication, but that's the way it is. Neither I nor anyone on the panel denied that proto-Altaic _might_ be historically real. The question was whether it was wiser, given our current knowledge of the languages involved, to work with the pA hypothesis or to confine ourselves to what I called Macro-Tungusic. Remember that the panel was part of a group of panels dealing with methodological problems of the comparative method. In his memoirs, Poppe qualifies his support for Miller's Japanese-Altaic claims. Patrie's claims about Ainu are highly dubious because of numerous mistakes in Japanese. See my review in Papers in Linguistics (but watch out for the typos). It is regrettable that Nichols read too much into Unger 1990, but such things happen.

    J. Marshall Unger (jungerdeans.umd.edu) University of Maryland