The Unity and Diversity of Altaic

Abstract

In popular conception, Altaic is often assumed to constitute a language family, or perhaps a phylum, but in reality, it involves a historical, areal, and typological complex of five separate language families of different origins—Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic—to which Uralic also adheres in the transcontinental context of Ural-Altaic. The similarities between the individual Altaic language families are due to prolonged contacts that have resulted in both lexical borrowing and structural interaction in a number of binary patterns. The historical homelands of the Altaic language families were located in continental Northeast Asia, but secondary expansions have subsequently brought these languages to most parts of northern and central Eurasia, including Anatolia and eastern Europe. The present review summarizes the basic facts concerning the Altaic language families, their common features, their patterns of interaction with each other and with other languages, and their historical and prehistorical context.

Postglacial genomes from foragers across Northern Eurasia reveal prehistoric mobility associated with the spread of the Uralic and Yeniseian languages

“…Despite the fact that Uralic languages, distributed from Western Siberia to Central Europe, are geographically separated from languages of the Eastern Steppes and far Northeast Siberia, linguists have discovered traces of ancient contact with Yukagiric and Eskimo-Aleut languages on the one hand [89][90][91][92] , and members of the "Altaic" language area (Mongolic, Tungusic, and especially Turkic) on the other. In 14 the latter case, the high level of typological similarity with Uralic languages has been repeatedly emphasized 93,4,94,92,95 . As a resolution to these conundrums, linguists have suggested a recent eastern origin of the population associated with the later expansions of Uralic speakers (e.g., A "pre-proto-Uralic spoken further east… probably somewhere… near both Mongolia and the watershed area between the Yenisei and the Lena, possibly as recently as 3000BC" 89 )-a scenario very compatible with our results.…”

Selectively manipulating softness perception of materials through sound symbolism

“…Japanese and Turkish sound symbolic words have discrepancies due to different vowel and consonant systems ( Topbaş, 2007 ; Janhunen, 2023 ), or distinct combinations for word formation ( Sakamoto and Watanabe, 2018 ; Kahraman and Akdağ, 2023 ) in two languages. For this reason, it is neither straightforward to compare our findings to previously reported literature nor is it in the scope of the current study.…”