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J.Linguistics (), –. Printed in the United Kingdom
# Cambridge University Press
Telling general linguists about Altaic
STEFAN GEORG
University of Bonn
PETER A. MICHALOVE
University of Illinois
ALEXIS MANASTER RAMER
Wayne State University
PAUL J. SIDWELL
University of Melbourne
(Received December ; revised August )
The hypothesis of an Altaic language family, comprising the Turkic, Mongolic,
Tungusic, Korean and, in most recent versions, Japanese languages continues to be
a viable linguistic proposal, despite various published claims that it is no longer
accepted. A strong body of research continues to appear, developing and refining the
hypothesis, along with publications that argue against a demonstrated relationship
among these languages. This paper shows that many of the arguments against a
genetic relationship fail to address the criteria demanded in modern historical
linguistics, while many of the responses from proponents of the Altaic theory have
failed to address the criticisms raised. We hope that arguments focusing on the real
issues of phonological correspondences and morphological systems will shed greater
light on the relationship among these languages.
.I
The Altaic theory holds that the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic and Korean
(and in most recent versions, also Japanese) languages are genetically related
(and, for those who are inclined to accept even wider relationships, that they
are more closely related to each other than to any other language family now
known). A convenient terminology is to refer to the Turkic, Mongolic and
Tungusic languages as ‘micro-Altaic’; and to these languages with the
addition of Korean and Japanese as ‘macro-Altaic.’ Altaic is a controversial
theory today in the same way that the Algic or Afroasiatic hypotheses, or the
hypothesis of the Indo-European character of the Anatolian languages was
controversial well into this century. That is, it is accepted and worked on by
. .
a large number of recognized scholars, but it is either questioned or openly
rejected by a number of others.
The decades since World War II and especially the last few years have seen
an unprecedented growth in Altaic comparative work as well as an
unprecedented vigor in the debate over its validity. Nearly all of this work,
pro and con, is usually published in outlets which appeal to the specialists in
Central and East Asian languages and civilizations, rather than in ones
devoted to general linguistics. It is thus doubly disturbing that a series of
recent publications that aimed at general linguists purvey, in tones of
authority but without much basis in fact, a series of myths about the current
state of the Altaic hypothesis.
Among the more confusing treatments of the Altaic relationship in several
major recent encyclopedias of linguistics in English, German and Russian
are Tekin (), and the relevant articles in Jarceva () and Glu
$ck ().
Tekin () presents Altaic (by which he means Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic
and Korean) as an uncontroversial given and does not allude to Japanese at
all. In the case of Glu
$ck () and Jarceva (), what one would learn
depends on which of several articles one reads. For example, in Glu
$ck, the
(unsigned) article ‘Altaische Sprachen ’ (p. ) informs us that Altaic is a
‘Sprachbund’, without any mention of the hypothesis of a genetic
relationship (although the references are Benzing () and Poppe (),
the latter of which deals in detail with the hypothesis of a genetic
relationship among the Altaic languages). On the other hand, in the same
encyclopedia, the articles (signed by Meyer-Ingwersen) on ‘ Mongolisch ’
(pp. f.), ‘Tungusisch’ (p. ) and ‘Tu
$rksprachen’ (pp. f.) present
these languages without further ado as members of an ‘altaische Sprach-
familie’ (without mentioning any controversy or alluding to Korean or
Japanese), while the articles by Coulmas on ‘ Japanisch ’ (pp. f.) and
‘Koreanisch’ (p. ) tell us that Japanese shows typological similarities with
Korean and allege that it is precisely these features which might point to a
genetic relationship between these languages, and put the whole issue in the
concept of ‘mixed languages’.
Still more contradictory are the presentations in the relevant articles in
Jarceva (). Here the interested reader will learn that Altaic either is
purely hypothetical (Sanz
)eev, ‘Mongol’skie jazyki’, p. ; Gadz
)ieva,
‘Tjurkskie jazyki’, p. ) or an ongoing controversy (Xelimskij, ‘Tunguso-
Man’c
)z
)urskie jazyki’, p. ), but that the Nostratic macrofamily of
languages, which subsumes Altaic and which even most of its supporters will
admit has not gained wide acceptance (certainly nothing like the support for
Altaic) is a plain and incontrovertible fact (Dybo\Terent’ev, ‘Nostratic
)eskie
jazyki’, pp. f.). In same the work, one can also read (Koncevic
), ‘Korejskij
jazyk’, p. ) that Korean is an isolate, but that it is included by some
Altaicists within the Tungusic branch of Altaic. While there are many grains
of truth in all of these statements, the non-specialist will probably be left
confused about the present state of the Altaic discussion unless (s)he relies on
Kormus
)in’s article ‘Altajskie jazyki’, p. , where a much more balanced
presentation may be found.
.C
More consistent, but even more misleading is a series of recent publications
by influential linguists in Russia as well as the West telling general linguists
that the Altaic hypothesis, far from flourishing, or even being the subject of
an intense controversy, is quite simply dead (e.g., Vinogradov , Bateman
et al. , Nichols ).
Vinogradov (:) says that Altaic (by which he appears to mean
only Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic) is identified as a language group
mostly on typological grounds, ‘with only a scant quantity of Common
Altaic lexical and phonetic correspondences’ [translation ours]. If true, this
would mean that, by ordinary standards, there is no case for Altaic
(although, curiously, Vinogradov himself nonetheless seems to acknowledge
the relatedness of the Altaic languages). Similarly, although in considerably
more detail, Nichols (:) claims that, after eliminating purely
typological similarities between Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic,
the evidence [sc. for Altaic] was reduced to the pronominal root
resemblances and a set of putative cognates. When the cognates proved
not to be valid, Altaic was abandoned and the received view now is that
Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic are unrelated (see Unger [lour
Unger b]).
A few lines down she reiterates that ‘the lexical stock [sc. of Turkic,
Mongolic and Tungusic] proves to offer very few good potential cognates’.
She then proposes contact as the explanation for the similarities among the
pronouns of these three language groups (together with those of a number of
other language groups of Northern Eurasia, roughly those which are
sometimes classified as Nostratic or Eurasiatic).
Yet, even a reader with only a slight knowledge of the Altaic problem and
its history might feel that a theory to which so many of the best specialists in
Central and East Asian linguistics devoted a great part of their scholarly
activities during the last century and a half should deserve better than a
laconic remark like ‘the cognates proved not to be valid’. The idea that
Altaic has long been laid to rest is a less than accurate description of the
current state of the art. Given the highly interesting, although controversial,
new approach to linguistic diversity proposed in Nichols’ book, such a
statement may prove unduly influential among historical linguists who are
not familiar with the current state of Altaic studies.
First, it is obvious, even from a cursory glance at the primary literature
. .
that the debate over Altaic goes on. A thirty-year campaign of attacks on
Altaic by Doerfer (–,,,,,,,,,
,, and passim) had not only elicited numerous responses over the
years but more recently provoked Miller (a, b) into offering a
detailed rebuttal together with a survey of the twists and turns in this cycle
of the debate (going back to Clauson ). The attack itself, of course,
continues with undiminished vigor (e.g., Doerfer :–) and has
triggered another series of responses (e.g. Andreev & Sunik , Manaster
Ramer (), Manaster Ramer, Vovin & Sidwell () and Manaster
Ramer & Sidwell (a). Another vigorous exchange, focusing mostly on
the relatedness of Japanese to the rest of Altaic, has just concluded between
Janhunen (,a, b) on the one hand, and Miller () and Vovin
(a) on the other. Such criticisms and rebuttals and the continued
exposition of more marginally critical (or often merely skeptical) views about
Altaic (e.g., Ro
!na-Tas ), sometimes in the context of a more general
skepticism about the methods of comparative linguistics (e.g. Sinor ),
cannot be explained by the assumption that the controversy is now over and
that the Altaicists lost (or won, for that matter). Rather, the intensity of the
criticism has always been, and continues to be, an index of the undiminished
vigor of the Altaic comparative work.
It is precisely because we have had more Altaic work in recent decades
than ever before done by more people than ever before (T. Tekin, V. I.
Cincius, Roy A. Miller, John C. Street, S. A. Starostin, Alexander Vovin, A.
V. Dybo, to mention just a few) that we find so much critical literature. A
general linguist reading Nichols or Vinogradov might well think that the
Altaicists had closed up shop, at the very time when the Altaic enterprise is
branching out all over as never before.
Moreover, Vinogradov’s and Nichols’ work actually misrepresents the
very substance of the Altaic debate as it has been framed since the mid-’s
and actually earlier. Pace Vinogradov and Nichols, there is no dearth of good
potential cognates. Rather, it is precisely the exuberant abundance of shared
vocabulary (some obviously and universally recognized, some more subtle
and hence controversial) that has led to the two fundamentally opposed
points of view that are widely held: either that this vocabulary is inherited
from a common ancestor, Proto-Altaic; or that it involves extensive
borrowing in remote prehistory (cf. also the compromise possibilities
suggested by Ro
!na-Tas ,, and passim). If putative cognates
really were in short supply, or, for that matter, if most of the available
resemblances were the sort of superficial similarities to which most linguists
give little credence, it would be incomprehensible why the Altaic theory has
enjoyed such a long life without sharing the fate of such linguistic seven-day
wonders as ‘Maya-Altaic’ (Wikander –), ‘ Korean as Indo-European ’
(Eckardt ), or ‘the Dravidian and Manding substratum in Tocharian ’
(Winters ).
Even those well-known scholars who deny the validity of Altaic, notably
Clauson ( and passim), Doerfer ( and passim) and Janhunen (,
a, b) or express some skepticism about it, notably Ro
!na-Tas (e.g.,
and passim) and Sinor (e.g., ,), do not maintain that there is a
shortage of putative cognates. Rather what they claim is that most (or all) of
these are not cognates but borrowings. It is usually held, both by the
supporters and the opponents of the Altaic theory, that the Altaic languages
(or at least Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic) are best studied together,
precisely because specialists in the individual languages know that the
abundance of shared vocabulary among the languages called Altaic are an
important tool for the proper understanding of the (pre-)history of these
languages, and of the peoples who spoke them. Regardless of whether one
explains all (most, some, few) of these shared items as due to inheritance or
to borrowing, the Altaic debate has never been about the existence of truly
shared items, but about the proper interpretation of their very abundance.
Only in the case of Japanese have some critics of Altaic (notably Doerfer
) claimed that the lexical evidence for linking this group to Altaic (as
given in Miller ) could reflect mere chance. But even here those critics
who have actually worked on the problem (and who actually know
Japanese), e.g., Janhunen (,a, b) agree that many of the Japanese
forms in question are true shared forms and not chance resemblances; and
again the only question is whether they represent common inheritance or
widespread borrowings.
Nichols’ claim that ‘the evidence [sc. for Altaic] was reduced to the
pronominal root resemblances and a set of putative cognates’ (:)is
closer to the mark than Vinogradov’s, but it still does not convey an accurate
impression. In fact, it is quite ironic, because connections involving less basic
vocabulary are universally granted by critics and skeptics alike, whereas it is
the validity of the pronominal root resemblances which is usually questioned
by the critics or skeptics (e.g., Clauson ( :), Ro
!na-Tas ). Indeed,
Doerfer () rejects the significance of the Altaic pronominal roots in a
work in which he admits hundreds of lexical commonalities, and later
(Doerfer :) seeks to explain away the personal pronouns as belonging
‘zu den Babywo
$rtern, offenbar enstanden aus expressiven Urlauten ’, while
much of the anti-Altaic literature avoids dealing with the problem of the
pronouns.
However, we know of not a single Atalic scholar critical of the Altaic
theory who would agree with Nichols that the pronominal roots represent
borrowings among Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic. Moreover, what is at
issue is not merely the pronominal roots, but also the crucial suppletive
pattern (seen particularly in the first person forms), which proponents of
Altaic regard as crucial evidence of the relatedness of these languages:
. .
Early Written Tungusic (e.g.
Turkic Mongolian Evenki and Manchu)
First person singular:
nominative ba
Wnbi bi
oblique stem ma
Wn-min-min-
Second person singular:
nominative sa
Wnc
\i(*ti)si
oblique stem sa
Wn-c
\in-(*tin)sin-
Finally, despite Nichols’ claims, the Altaic literature abounds in
discussions of many other putative morphological parallels as well. To be
sure, the widespread morphological comparisons cited by Altaicists are no
less controversial than the rest of the theory, but it will not do to ignore the
extensive literature on this topic (see section .).
Given the vast gap between Vinogradov’s and Nichols’ statements on the
state of the Altaic question and the current vitality of the literature, whether
pro or con, the question arises of how their extraordinary claims arose.
Vinogradov’s source turns out to be Krueger (), which, paradoxically
enough, is actually a (mild) defense of Altaic. Vinogradov’s statement about
the dearth of lexical and phonetic correspondences turns out to be a
misunderstanding, perhaps due to language difficulties. Krueger in fact
maintains the validity of Altaic but remarks that little outside of typological
similarities is left ‘[a]s long as the anti-Altaicists insist vigorously that shared
vocabulary must only be explained as non-Altaic or extensive borrowing ’ (p.
). In other words, Krueger is not claiming any lack of putative lexical
cognates, but rather (and this is tautological) that one who assumes that the
Altaic languages are unrelated will consider them borrowings and find only
typological parallels.
As for Nichols, the only source she cites is Unger (b) and again some
kind of misunderstanding must have occurred, although presumably for
rather different reasons. Unger (b) turns out to be a very brief report on
an ‘Altaic panel’ held as part of the Workshop on Linguistic Change and
Reconstruction Methodology held at Stanford on July -August ,
and sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation. The Altaic panel
consisted of Samuel E. Martin, John Whitman, the late Robert Austerlitz,
Larry Clark, J. Marshall Unger, and is reported to have been ‘ particularly
impressed by the serious flaws in the Poppe\Ramstedt reconstruction of
Proto-Altaic brought to light by Gerhard Doerfer and Andra
!sRo
!na-Tas and
presented to the panel by Larry Clark’ and to have taken ‘note of a number
of problems in recent efforts by [sc. Roy Andrew] Miller and [sc. John C.]
Street to forge links between Japanese and the so-called ‘‘other Altaic
languages’’’.
There is nothing said here about any proof that the putative Altaic
cognates are few or even that they are due to borrowing, as the critics of
Altaic would maintain. In fact, the only strong criticism appears to be
directed at the claim that Japanese is Altaic. But as Unger notes in his own
(a) paper in this same collection, the membership of Japanese in Altaic
was not traditionally a claim of the Altaic theory and this issue does not in
any case bear on the validity of the claim that Turkic, Tungusic and
Mongolic (and also Korean) are related, which is the claim at issue in
Nichols’ work (and what is most often meant by the ‘Altaic hypothesis’).
Thus, Nichols’ characterization of the state of Altaic studies is based on a
misreading of Unger (b). Furthermore, the only basis referred to by
Unger for the very specific criticism of Altaic to which he does seem to
subscribe is a paper by Larry Clark, which was not published in the
proceedings, detailing the positions of Doerfer and Ro
!na-Tas. Thus, we are
dealing with a fourth-hand report: Nichols (mis)citing Unger citing Clark
citing Doerfer and Ro
!na-Tas. But of course Doerfer’s and Ro
!na-Tas’s works
on the topic of Altaic are well known and accessible and so we are in a
position to assess their actual positions on the subject. While Doerfer does
flatly reject the relatedness of Altaic languages, however, Ro
!na-Tas does not.
To be precise, they both clearly agree (as do the proponents of Altaic,
obviously) that there are indeed numerous lexical correspondences among
the Altaic languages. They also agree (pace the supporters of Altaic) that
most of these are loanwords, but, crucially, Ro
!na-Tas consistently refers to
a thin oldest layer of vocabulary which he concedes may very well reflect
common origin.
Moreover, there is a critical distinction between the hypothesis that the
Altaic languages are related and the ‘Poppe\Ramstedt reconstruction of
Proto-Altaic’, so that even if we, like Unger, were to be ‘particularly
impressed by the serious flaws in the Poppe\Ramstedt reconstruction of
Proto-Altaic brought to light by Gerhard Doerfer and Andra
!sRo
!na-Tas and
presented to the panel by Larry Clark’ (b:), we would not be entitled
to reject the relatedness of the Altaic languages. In fact, given Ro
!na-Tas’s
ambivalent position about Altaic, and assuming that Clark presented it
accurately, it is logically impossible that he could have presented evidence
against the relatedness of Altaic. Moreover, without access to Clark’s paper,
we do not even know whether these ‘flaws’ merely bear on particular
problems in the works of Ramstedt (e.g., ,,) and Poppe
() or the Altaic hypothesis is general.
Finally, an examination of the published papers from the panel shows that
the very specific skepticism expressed by Unger (b) on behalf of the
panel with regard to the Altaic reconstructions could not have constituted a
rejection by that panel of the relatedness of the Altaic languages. The only
one of these published papers which specifically disputes the Altaic hypothesis
is Unger (a), though no detailed arguments are given beyond a brief
response to Hamp’s () critique of Doerfer’s (–) critique of
Altaic, and the focus of the paper is on the question of whether Japanese is
. .
Altaic. It should also be noted that Unger’s (a) criticisms of the
Japanese-Altaic connection are – naturally – directed at pre- work
seeking to relate Japanese to Altaic. This work is now viewed by many pro-
Altaic scholars as superseded by Starostin (), making Unger’s criticisms
now primarily of historical interest.
A further paper in the same panel, Martin ( :), is also narrowly
focused on the Korean-Japanese relationship and does not address the
possible relationship of the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic families. More
recently, however, Martin ( :) states, ‘I am somewhat suspicious of
the Altaic hypothesis as it is currently enshrined ’ and ‘ I do not believe that
my paper proved the genetic relationship nor do I believe that Miller
proved [the Japanese language’s] relationship to the Altaic languages’
(here using ‘Altaic’ as a cover term for Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic,
whose relationship is not assumed). Referring to the possibility that these
three western Altaic families may go back independently to a Nostratic stage,
Martin (:) adds, ‘I am somewhat friendlier toward Altaic, feeling
that it is perhaps more than % likely (and Macro-Altaic rather less than
%)’. In personal correspondence Martin tells us that, ‘Those figures, of
course, are based on gut feelings, not on a sophisticated study of the evidence
presented up to the present.’
Thus, Unger’s panel can at best be said to have been ambivalent according
to the published record as to whether the Altaic languages are demonstrably
related, if it addressed this precise issue at all. In addition, whatever the
position of this panel might have been, it is our position that it had in any
case no claim to be taken as representing the ‘ received view ’, as Nichols calls
it and this for two reasons.
First, it is striking that the panel was heavily weighted towards specialists
in Korean and Japanese and that the only papers actually published are on
these languages. No aspect of Turkic, Mongolic or Tungusic is discussed in
any detail in any of these papers, something which is highly disturbing, since
for almost a century and a half, the whole Altaic controversy focused on the
possible relationships between these very three language families.
Second, both Unger (b: ) and the editor of the volume (Philip
Baldi, in fn. in Unger (b: )) acknowledge that the panel was quite
unrepresentative of the field, apparently because some of the invitees did not
attend, including (by a most unfortunate coincidence) all those who were
‘sympathetic to ‘‘Altaic’’’ (in Baldi’s words). The very fact that Unger and
Baldi acknowledged in print the existence of scholars ‘sympathetic to
‘‘Altaic’’’ and sought (however unsuccessfully) to include some of them in
the panel serves to confirm that there is no basis to Nichols’ claim that ‘Altaic
was abandoned,’ though, as we have seen, even this unrepresentative and
apparently un-‘sympathetic’ panel did not apparently reach such a
conclusion.
.P
Misleading in a different way is the statement about Altaic in Bateman et al.
(:):
The original concept of Altaic (comprising Turkic, Mongolian and
Tungusic) is now widely regarded as discredited; in contrast, an affiliation
of Japanese, Korean and possibly Tungusic is increasingly favoured.
The reference to a supposed specific alternative to Altaic suggests that the
Japanese-Korean-Tungusic theory has taken the place of the Altaic theory.
Yet, we know of no substantive work on the reconstruction of the
phonology, morphology, or lexicon of such a Japanese-Korean-Tungusic
family, while those who work on Altaic (e.g. Starostin, Vovin, Miller, etc.)
continue to do so without excluding Turkic and Mongolic. As a matter of
fact, although Bateman et al. cite Doerfer , Unger a and Whitman
(the latter two in prepublication form), none of these works asserts the
existence of a language family comprising Tungusic, Korean and Japanese to
the exclusion of Mongolic and Turkic.
To be sure, there are occasional statements in the literature, such as Martin
(:): ‘I believe the majority view today would hold that Japanese and
Korean are more likely to be related to each other than to any other language
and that the historically adjacent Tungusic languages are the likeliest
candidates for a further relationship’. However, this appears in a paper
concerned only with Japanese and Korean relationships (not with Altaic)
and does not refer to any specific proposals, published or otherwise. And we
should note that elsewhere (Martin :) he considers a relationship
among Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic to be ‘perhaps more than %
likely’, so that it cannot be taken to represent any claim about a supposed
language family including Tungusic, Japanese and Korean but excluding
Turkic and Mongolic.
Finally, even if the Japanese-Korean-Tungusic theory should gain support,
it would not necessarily contradict the idea of an Altaic language family,
since this grouping could simply be a node in the Altaic family tree. This
would be consistent with the very striking similarities (see especially Vovin
b) between the numeral systems and morphologies of Tungusic, Korean
and Japanese, although it is also possible that similarities shared by this
grouping to the exclusion of Turkic and Mongolic are archaisms surviving
from Proto-Altaic. Thus, such Japanese-Korean-Tungusic isoglosses are in
no way incompatible with the Altaic theory.
Equally misleading to the non-specialist is the claim (e.g. Comrie ,
Lyovin ) that the traditional Altaic theory connects only the western
languages (Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic), and that some combination of
Korean, Japanese and Ainu has been marginally associated with the western
languages by some scholars. In fact, the status of Korean, Japanese and Ainu
differs greatly in Altaic studies. While it is true that the oldest literature on
. .
Altaic dealt only with Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic, the fact is that
Korean has been an integral part of the Altaic theory for most of the post-
war period. Indeed, practically all scholars who have accepted the
relationship among the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages since
Poppe () have also included Korean in their definition of Altaic
(although in practice many Altaicists have not worked with Korean in any
depth until recently). On the other hand, the relationship with Japanese was
worked out more recently and still, while accepted by many Altaic scholars
(such as Miller, Starostin and Vovin) to be Altaic, is not granted by others
(e.g. Tekin and Baskakov).
Finally, the inclusion of Ainu in Altaic is not accepted by most serious
Altaic scholars, who in fact reject Patrie’s () arguments on this point.
One prominent Altaicist (Vovin ) tentatively suggests evidence for an
Austroasiatic origin of Ainu. Most other specialists continue to view Ainu as
a language isolate.
.H
Having reviewed some of the most glaring misrepresentations of the current
state of the Altaic debate in works intended for general linguists, we will now
offer a sketch of the history of Altaic linguistics, based to a large extent on
original research into this complex and controversial subject.
In order to understand the roots of the Altaic debate, it is crucial to realize
that the concept of Altaic emerged in the th century out of the significantly
earlier Ural-Altaic theory. The term ‘UralAltaic’ can easily be misleading,
since we naturally assume that it was intended to refer to a putative language
family composed of two subfamilies: Uralic (Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic)
and Altaic (Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic, without Korean or Japanese,
which were not considered at the time). But that is not how it was intended
at all, since the early writers on Ural-Altaic did not treat the three Altaic
families as being more closely related to each other than to Finno-Ugric or
Samoyedic, nor did they conceive of the latter two as forming a grouping of
their own. In fact, the Ural-Altaic theory was proposed, under the label of
‘Scythian’, in a posthumous and unfinished work of Rask (), who also
saw a connection to several more distant language groups (Basque,
Caucasian, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut). Moreover, some vague
idea similar to that of Ural-Altaic must have existed much earlier, because we
find Strahlenberg () offering arguments to refute the view which he says
was widely held in his time that all the peoples of High Asia, generally and
inaccurately called Ta(r)tars, were one ethnic and linguistic group.
As for the term ‘Ural-Altaic’, it was introduced (perhaps by Kellgren) in
place of ‘Scythian or ‘Tatar’ and referred the Ural and Altai mountains
rather than to any linguistic division into ‘Uralic’ and ‘Altaic’. As for the
term ‘Altaic’, when first introduced (around by Castre
!n (see Castre
!n
, col. [l:], :–[lb: ], a: )), it was
as yet another synonym for ‘Ural-Altaic’. The history of the term ‘Altaic’ in
its modern sense (excluding Uralic) is somewhat obscure. The earliest
quotable instance seems to be by Kellgren ( :), from whom it must
have been picked up by Schleicher ( :). However, due to Kellgren’s
early death in and Schleicher’s minor role in the (Ural-)Altaic field, it
took some time for this terminology to become widely accepted, and it is
possible that, when the term resurfaced some decades later, that it had been
coined afresh by someone else. At any rate, we do not find this term in many
much later works, such as Mu
$ller (:) and Munka
!csi (), though
it does appear in Mu
$ller (: and passim, ).
Moreover, it is not clear that Kellgren or Schleicher had any clear
conception of Altaic (in the sense of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic) as a
linguistic unit, nor can we be sure who first formulated this idea. To be sure,
Klaproth (:) remarked that, ‘[d]ie Tungusischen, Mongolischen und
Tu
$rkischen Dialecte zeigen unter sich einen sonderbaren Zusammenhang’
[The Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic dialects show a remarkable connection
with each other], but he spoiled this by finding ‘noch merkwu
$rdiger’ [even
more remarkable] the supposed resemblances between Manchu (a Tungusic
language) and the Indo-European languages of western Europe.
Undoubtedly, it was the discovery of compelling evidence that Finno-
Ugric and Samoyedic form a unit which came to be called Uralic (Donner
; first presented in ) which led to the fairly general acceptance of the
idea that Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic formed another unit.
In any case, for a generation or so, the term ‘ Altaic ’ was itself ambiguous
(the last attestation of it in the sense of Ural-Altaic that we have found is
Winkler ), thus helping to make the point that the relatedness of Turkic,
Mongolic and Tungusic languages was first postulated merely as part of a
larger scheme, encompassing Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic as well and that
the idea of Altaic in the modern sense took shape only gradually.
However, for three basic reasons there was a lack of consensus about the
validity of either of these classifications. First, despite the warnings of authors
such as Klaproth ( : ix–x, –) and Castre
!n(:) about the
distinction between typological and genealogical classification of languages,
much of the work of Ural-Altaic was based on contrasting some of the
supposed typological characteristics of these languages, such as agglutination,
rigid SOV-syntax, and vowel harmony, with the typologies typical of the two
best-known language families of the time, Indo-European and Semitic.
Second, the early work, despite warnings that go back to Abel-Re
!musat
(), did very little to establish that the forms being compared were really
inherited from a common ancestor, as opposed to being borrowed. Third, the
early work did not formulate any specific rules of sound correspondence
among the Ural-Altaic languages and so there were no constraints on what
forms could be compared, although this absence of constraints did not always
. .
make it easier to find ‘ cognates. ’ As a result of all this, there was
considerable skepticism among competent scholars about any of the forms of
the Ural-Altaic theory, even though Ural-Altaic, presented as a fait accompli,
made its way into numerous encyclopedias and reference works (no more
reliable than now) published in the early part of this century, very likely
as a result of the wide circulation of Winkler’s numerous book-length
concoctions – which, however, both proponents and critics of Altaic view(ed)
as rather clear examples of how comparative linguistics should be done.
This disconnect between the actual state of Ural-Altaic studies and the
presentation of it in works of general linguistics was, of course, a neat parallel
to what we have described in section as the present situation regarding
Altaic.
It is also of capital importance to note that, throughout, the Ural-Altaic
grouping was generally regarded as better established than Altaic proper
(Turkic-Mongolic-Tungusic), something which was clear both to the
enthusiastic proponents (Grunzel ) and to the skeptics (Bang ).
The same caution, not surprisingly, also characterizes the position initially
taken by Ramstedt (: III), the creator of Mongolic comparative studies
who would soon also become the creator of modern Altaic comparative
studies as well:
Der unter solchen umsta
$nden nutzlose meinungsaustausch u
$ber die sog.
altaischen und uralaltaischen sprachen dauert aber immer noch fort, und
hat unter den besten forschern unserer zeit einen berechtigten skeptizismus
hervorgerufen.
Indeed, such a position seemed quite justified given the lack of any
systematic work on sound laws, which seemed to be the necessary prerequisite
before one could be sure that the varying comparisons of vocabulary and
morphology could be validated (or rejected). The strongest argument
available at the time for Altaic was the pronominal system, which reveals
striking similarities between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic not, as is often
assumed, only regarding the nominative forms, but also in their suppletive
inflection patterns (Mu
$ller , Grunzel , Ramstedt ). But on the
other hand much of the existing work was of such poor quality as to
discourage rather than promote hope in Altaic (or Ural-Altaic), e.g., the
treatises by Winkler, Grunzel, or the embarrassing essays on the ‘close
affinity’ of Ural-Altaic numerals by Hale
!vy ().
But the breakthrough that would allow Altaic proper to be put on a firm
footing was around the corner, in the form of Ramstedt’s (\,\,
\, and passim) work on Mongolic-Turkic and Mongolic-
Tungusic sound correspondences, although, as is usually the case in the
history of science, some of this had been anticipated by others, whose work
received less attention because they published in journals (Schmidt )or
languages (Gombocz ) not widely accessible to the interested scholarly
public. In any event, it was primarily Ramstedt himself, seconded by Poppe
(), Pelliot () and a few others, who over the next half-century erected
a rather elaborate framework for Altaic, supported by a number of nontrivial
and regular sound correspondences and a growing set of lexical and
morphological cognates. It would also be Ramstedt (), as well as
Polivanov (), who would independently of each other add Korean to the
Altaic family and it was the two of them who also took the first, hesitant,
steps towards including Japanese in this modern theory of Altaic (although
we must admit that Polivanov regarded Japanese as an Altaic-Austronesian
Mischsprache). It was the rise of this (essentially modern) Altaic theory
which gradually made Altaic a far more appealing proposition than Ural-
Altaic, so much so that in the future the debate would concentrate on Altaic
alone.
As the pre-war years wore on, the Altaic theory thus assumed an ever more
definite and (to some) compelling shape. Then, however, the rise of Marrism
in the Stalin era made comparative linguistics anathema in the USSR,
resulting in Polivanov’s internal exile and death at the hands of Stalin’s
henchmen in and apparently almost cost Cincius her freedom for her
incredibly brave book on Tungusic comparative phonology (Cincius ),
which represents the sole real contribution to comparative Altaic in its time.
The war also interrupted Altaic work in the West, and Ramstedt died soon
after the war, while Poppe spent the first post-war years rebuilding his
research career, now in the US.
As of the end of World War II, no Altaic comparative grammar or
dictionary had yet been published and the future of Altaic studies did not
look at all promising. Although Ramstedt, Poppe (especially ) and
Vladimircov (together with Poppe, e.g. ) had laid the foundations of a
comparative phonology of the Altaic languages, the factual content of which,
i.e. the bulk of the lexical comparisons forming its basis, has by and large
ever since been accepted even by those scholars who prefer to interpret these
comparisons as due to borrowing, the Altaic theory was still widely perceived
as unproven (e.g. Deny , Bang ). Instead of discussing the crucial
issues, much of the work done on Turkic in particular simply ignored the
Altaic connections, while on the other hand a certain amount of work
comparing Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic was being done by linguists
who were not convinced that these comparisons involved a genealogical
relationship (notably Kotwicz ).
Yet, despite this ambivalence towards Altaic, no substantial body of work
seeking to refute the results of Ramstedt, Poppe, et al. seems to have
materialized between Ramstedt’s and Poppe’s first appearance on the scene
and Clauson (), although Ne
!meth () had come out with some strong
doubts about Ramstedt’s Turkic-Mongolic correspondences.
Although there were some discussions concerning the relationship of
Mongolic and Tungusic (Sanz
)eev, Kotwicz), the only exception to prove the
. .
rule seems to have been the work of Shirokogoroff (,a, b),
whose critique of Altaic was marred by such implausibilities as his insistence
(pace Ramstedt, Pelliot and Poppe) on reversing the direction of the sound
changes proposed by Schmidt, Ramstedt and Pelliot, so that initial \p\
comes ultimately from \h\or indeed from !, rather than the other way
around. The posthumous work of Kotwicz (), who had become perhaps
the second best-known name in Altaic studies as a result of a series of earlier
contributions (,,a, b and passim), made matters worse, since
it concludes with an inconsistent and confusing statement of the Altaic
problem, maintaining that the Altaic languages do form a language family
while at the same time proposing that they are not derived from a common
ancestor, but then adding that conceivably they are after all so derived (pp.
–). As we will see, this kind of confusion would come to inform much
of the subsequent debate about Altaic.
Ramstedt’s posthumous (,,) magnum opus was a mixed
blessing. For all its importance and erudition, it was marred by a host of
factual errors, which were apparently due to Ramstedt’s continued reliance
on what had once been a practically photographic memory for linguistic
forms in innumerable languages, but was failing by the end of his life; and
to his editor’s failure to verify the data before publishing it. Still, Ramstedt’s
work was thought by many (e.g. Collinder :, Posch :) to have
put an end to all doubts and to have made Altaic a fact which no one could
reasonably dispute.
But as it happens, it was Posch’s () off-hand comments, appearing in
a review of a work on Mongolian that failed to admit the validity of Altaic,
which sparked off the biggest round of anti-Altaic activity to date. Clauson
() was immediately moved to expound in broad strokes the reasons for
the opposition to Altaic which was apparently widely felt, he says, in
Turcological circles. For the next forty years, there would be a prodigious
outpouring of anti-Altaic writings by Clauson himself (a, b, ,),
S
)c
)erbak (,, and passim), Sinor () and various writers who
followed them, and above all by the dean of anti-Altaic studies, Gerhard
Doerfer (– and passim). Besides the frequency and intensity of the
attacks, what was new was that, while some of these authors did no more
than revive the skepticism characteristic of the earlier period, Clauson,
Doerfer, S
)c
)erbak and Serebrennikov went much further, seeking not merely
to cast doubt on the Altaic theory but to prove that the Altaic languages are
unrelated.
It is only apparently paradoxical that the same four decades have also seen
an unprecedented growth in the work on Altaic, such as a new comparative
Altaic phonology (Poppe ), a Tungusic comparative dictionary (finished
and published after another decade, Cincius –), a set of radical
changes in the Altaic reconstruction by Illic
)-Svityc
)(,), Baskakov’s
(b) comprehensive treatment of Altaic, especially the morphology,
Miller’s () and Starostin’s () work on Japanese as an Altaic
language, etc. Therefore, we shall try to bring into focus the central points in
the schism between Altaicists and anti-Altaicists.
.O
.Basic vocabulary
Gerard Clauson, the instigator of the post-World War II round of the
debate (Clauson ,) and at the same time the author of one of the
most outstanding achievements of th century Turkology (Clauson ),
began with a purely personal argument to the effect that, having been trained
in Turkic, he found few if any lexical parallels when he started looking at
Middle Mongolian texts. While it will be self-evident to most linguists today
that this impressionistic approach to linguistic relationship entertained by
Clauson in the early days of his attack on Altaic cannot be accepted, it is
clear that the critique of Altaic did not stop there.
Clauson’s () second argument involved a rather idiosyncratic adoption
of Swadesh’s lexicostatistics: he compared the Turkic, Mongolic and
Manchu Swadesh lists of ‘ basic vocabulary ’ and concluded that these
families were unrelated because much of their basic vocabulary did not
actually look related. He concluded that whatever lexical parallels existed
between these two families were due to rather recent borrowings. S
)c
)erbak
() continued in Clauson’s footsteps, basing his rejection of Altaic on a
survey of certain a priori lexical lists, but unlike Clauson he did not even
bother to select anything that could be considered basic vocabulary. Instead
he compared three word lists, comprising ‘celestial objects and phenomena’
(e.g. ‘sun’, ‘moon’, etc.), time intervals such as ‘ year ’, ‘ day ’, etc. and words
for domesticated animals.
Other authors have sought to advance more precise arguments against
Altaic involving particular subsets of ‘basic vocabulary’ (often defined quite
differently than in Swadesh’s work). Of particular importance in this debate
has been the role of numerals and body part terms. Time and again, going
back to Ne
!meth (), we find the argument that Altaic languages share
few, or no, lower numerals (‘’ through ‘’ or, according to Doerfer ()
only ‘’ through ‘’) or basic body part terms (such as ‘hand’, ‘heart’,
etc.), that all related languages do have cognate terms for these meanings and
that consequently the Altaic languages cannot be related. However, the fact
that lower numerals need not be shared between related languages and are
not shared by all Uralic languages in particular, has been noted repeatedly
in the literature (e.g. Collinder ), but this fact has usually been ignored
(e.g. S
)c
)erbak :–). On the other hand, when Doerfer (,)
did acknowledge this lack of shared lower numerals in Uralic and in Afro-
Asiatic, his solution was not to give up the opposition to Altaic or even
merely to give up this particular argument. Rather, he proposed that Uralic
. .
and Afro-Asiatic, both of them language families which he has never worked
on and whose validity among specialists is unquestioned, are themselves
spurious, i.e., that neither Samoyedic and Finno-Ugric, nor Cushitic and
Semitic are related!
.Personal pronouns
Another related sort of argument against Altaic has often involved the
personal pronouns of the first and second person. The observation that
Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic share a perfectly similar set of pronouns for
the st and nd persons, involving not only an outward resemblance of the
nominative forms, but also a quite strikingly similar suppletive pattern, had
been noticed from the very beginning of Altaic studies (Castre
!n,Mu
$ller
, Kotwicz ). It seems hard to avoid a thorough discussion of these
phenomena when dealing with the mutual relationships of the languages in
question, especially when one wants to convince the public that genetic
inheritance is out of the question, but nevertheless this is what is done all too
often. In fact, if mention is made at all of the pronouns, like in Doerfer ,
they are usually dismissed, because they are allegedly ‘ Babywo
$rter’ or
‘Lallwo
$rter,’ similar in a great variety of languages and therefore
insignificant for determining genetic relationships. This ‘ Lallworttheorie ’
seems to be at best an ad hoc claim to dismiss evidence which clearly stands
in the way of explaining all similarities between the Altaic languages as either
due to borrowing, mere chance, or universal tendencies towards similar
sounds for similar meanings (what German-speaking linguists refer to as
‘Elementarverwandtschaft’). To claim that the Altaic pronouns involve this
kind of ‘elementary resemblance’, on a par with the phenomenon underlying
such widespread lexical items as ‘ mama’, ‘papa’, ‘ata ’, ‘ ana ’ or the like –
these latter ones obviously the true ‘ Babywo
$rter’ – is tantamount to claiming
that personal pronouns should exhibit the latter kind of similarities across
languages, something which, of course, is not the case. One could as easily
imagine a theory of ‘baby-genitive’,‘baby-dative’, and so on as an
explanation for how Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and so on have such similar
morphologies, or ‘baby-suppletivism’ to explain away the ‘ be\was ’
relationship in Germanic, and so on. Any and all of the phenomena usually
taken to imply the relatedness of a set of languages would be subject to a
similar ‘explanation’, and no language families would need to be recognized
at all.
It is quite significant in this connection to consider the views of Ro
!na-Tas –
who, as we have noted, takes a rather skeptical attitude towards the Altaic
theory, but whose deep respect for the data has prevented him from declaring
it dead and undeserving of further study. Although he treats most of the com-
parisons made by Altaicists as borrowings, he regards these pronoun systems
(after explaining away certain details which might be explained otherwise), as
(in his usual cautious formulation) ‘possible candidates for genetic identity’
(). Needless to say, Nichols’ suggestion, mentioned above, that the
Altaic (and more generally Nostratic) pronominal parallels are due to
borrowing has not been entertained by any of the critics of Altaic.
.Phonological correspondences and phonetics
Another common form of argument against Altaic involves an excessive
concentration on phonetic reconstructions, rather than the more important
issue of phonological correspondences. The best-known example of this
approach has involved the pair of Proto-Altaic phonemes sometimes written
*\r#\and *\l#\. The crucial point here is that there are correspondences
between, on the one hand, Mongolic, Tungusic and Korean and Chuvash (a
divergent Turkic language) and, on the other, the rest of Turkic :
Chuvash, Mongolic,
Tungusic, Korean Non-Chuvash Turkic *Reconstructed
rr*r
"
rz*r
#
ll*l
"
ls
)*l#
Gombocz (,–) proposed that the original sounds here notated
*\r#\and *\l#\were sibilants *\z\resp. *\s
)\(i.e. that Chuvash, Mongolic
and Tungusic had innovated; Gombocz did not deal with Korean).
Ramstedt, on the other hand, proposed that the original sounds were rhotic
resp. lateral (i.e. that non-Chuvash Turkic had innovated). Ever since, there
has been an endless and essentially pointless debate over what came to be
known as ‘rhotacism’ vs. ‘zetacism’ and ‘lambdacism’ vs. ‘sigmatism’, that
is, whether Proto-Turkic (and Proto-Altaic, for those who accept it) had *\z\
and *\s
)\or whether it had some \r\-like and \l\-like sounds, often written
*\r#\and *\l#\. Advocates of the Altaic theory usually reconstruct *\r#\and
*\l#\, while opponents of the theory usually reject this reconstruction and
argue that the original phonemes in these case were *\z\and *\s
)\.
Now, it is always nice to deduce the actual phonetic values of
protophonemes when possible. But this is of only secondary interest to
comparative linguistics, which is more concerned with phonological
correspondence than with phonetic identities. Thus for Altaic, the issue is
only whether there exists a such a correspondence between non-Chuvash
Turkic vs. the other languages. The phonetic values are absolutely irrelevant,
as has been noted many times both by Altaicists (e.g., Polivanov [ :
,n.]), by skeptics (Ro
!na-Tas :) and by avowed anti-Altaicists
(Doerfer ). Nevertheless, the erroneous view of rhotacism and sigmatism
as the ‘main pillars of the Altaic theory’ (Tekin ) is still widely held.
Advocates of Altaic undoubtedly have contributed to the undeserved
. .
prominence of this issue within Altaic studies during the last decades, mostly
by tacitly assuming that only the assumption of primary *\r",r
#,l
",l
#\
deserves any consideration (cf. recently Starostin ).
.Borrowing
As we have noted, the primary controversy in the Altaic debate today
involves not any paucity of shared lexical and morphological material, but
the interpretation of common forms as cognates or borrowings. While all
scholars involved in the debate agree that extensive borrowing has occurred
among these languages, those who deny the affiliation of the Altaic languages
maintain that of the common material is the result of borrowing (or
chance resemblances), while those who favor the affinity of Altaic claim that
some or much of the shared material is the result of common inheritance and
that the traditional tools of historical linguistics allow us to distinguish most
instances of the two.
Unger (b, naming L. V. Clark as the source) cites a list of criteria, by
which Turkic loanwords in Mongolic are said to betray themselves. It may
be useful to quote this list here:
[A]n alleged match between Turkic and Mongolian is likely to be a loan,
if:
() The M(ongolic) word contains a sound due to a change in T(urkic)
that occurred after the period of presumed M-T unity.
() The M word refers to an item present in M culture only after the
presumed period of unity.
() A M or a T word can be shown to have been borrowed from some
third language group.
() M lacks a counterpart of a T root X and a T derivational suffix Y but
contains a derived form combining X and Y.
() A M word that matches a T word in form but has a more restricted
meaning coexists with a M word of different form but the same
meaning as the T word.
() Two M words are exact synonyms but only one seems to have a match
in T.
() The T member of a match can be traced back to pre-thirteenth-century
T.
() The T member has a reflex in all T witness languages but in only one
M language.
Of these criteria, () is obviously a truism which does not need any comment
here. Criterion () comes nearly as close to a truism as does (). It is of course
correct that especially the earlier period of Altaic research used a host of
words for culturally complex items of demonstrably late origin to ‘prove’ the
relationship, a vice which lasted well into the period of Ramstedt and Poppe.
But mainly thanks to the painstaking efforts of Doerfer (especially –),
most of these have been weeded out successfully. As Bloomfield (:
and passim) notes (somewhat obliquely), one would reconstruct Proto-
Algonquian *paagkesikani ‘gun ’ and *ekoteewaapoowi ‘whisky ’ if one did not
know that the objects referred to by these terms are post-Columbian. Meillet
(:) is more explicit that the sound correspondences between Greek
ka
Tnnabis ‘hemp’ and the Germanic words such as OHG hanaf are
indistinguishable from those found in Indo-European cognates, even though
archaeological and philological evidence indicates that these were in-
dependent borrowings into Greek and into Germanic from some unknown
non-Indo-European language of southeastern Europe.
Of () through (), Unger admits (b: ) that ‘ there is more room for
doubt’ (i.e. of their usefulness to pin down loanwords), since uncontroversial
language families, such as Indo-European contain clear cognates that exhibit
the traits described by these criteria. Unger states that criterion () ‘may not
have counterparts in other language groups ’, but again we can find examples
within Indo-European: within the Celtic branch of I.E. the inherited term for
‘daughter’ (*dhugHte
_r) appears only in inscriptional Gaulish, where,
however, its phonological shape alone rules out any possibility of borrowing
from some other Indo-European language.
Criterion () would seem more conclusive, but, as we have seen, the one
shibboleth within Turkic, which spells the difference between Common
Turkic and the only considerably divergent branch of this family – Chuvash
– namely \r\and \l\vs. \z\and \s
)\, fails to offer watertight evidence of the
kind required by this principle. Its very nature, not to speak of its
chronology, remains basically unclear, no matter how emphatically some
Turcologists have stood up for one of the other of the two possible
approaches. Of course, it goes without saying that a Mongolic form that
clearly shows features of a particular subgroup within Turkic could not be
regarded as an inherited cognate in both languages, but in fact, those cases
are quite rare and easily weeded out. The majority of the Mongolic-Turkic
matches, which according to most critics of Altaic fall under criterion (),
belong to what they call ‘ the oldest layer of Turkic loanwords in Mongolian ’,
allegedly dating from a time when virtually none of the sound changes which
divide the Turkic languages into subgroups had already occurred, with the
sole exception of rhotacism\lambdacism, which in turn is said to be reflected
by loanwords in Mongolian.
Criterion () is clearly false and the most pernicious. The thirteenth
century witnessed the powerful emergence of what was soon to be the Empire
of the Chingiskhanid Mongols. From that time on, a host of words of clearly
identifiable Mongolian origin penetrated the Turkic languages. Thus, a
Turkic form of only late attestation may well be a Mongolic loan and must
be verified carefully. But Clark\Unger turn this note of caution on its head,
suggesting that if a Turkic form is of attestation, before the th
. .
century, any Mongolic match of it can only be a loan from Turkic into
Mongolic (and often thence into Tungusic). Obviously, this ‘principle’
suggests that any match between Turkic and Mongolic must be a loan from
some period and betrays the preconception that there can have been no
Altaic proto-language, whatever the earliest data from the languages may
show. To assume that all parallels among these languages are in fact loans
from some period, and need only to be revealed as such, obviously begs the
question of whether they are genetically related or not.
.Morphology
Most of the discussion concerning the relationship of these languages has so
far centered on the lexicon and phonology as a guide to determining
inheritance vs. borrowing. Unfortunately, morphology, which would be
crucial in establishing a relationship, has received much less attention over
the years. While there is extensive literature on the morphology of each of the
language families involved, comparative work involving the full range of
languages under consideration needs considerably more study. Indeed there
is a plethora of shared grammatical formants among these languages and an
important task remaining in Altaic studies is to consider not simply
individual shared forms, but determine if we can construct entire shared
systems between the families. An example we have already alluded to is the
pronominal system in (micro-)Altaic, with its characteristic suppletive
patterning.
Although work on Altaic morphology may be said to have begun with
Ramstedt (), the real first milestone on the way to a comprehensive
comparative study of Altaic morphology is undoubtedly Ramstedt ().
This work, now dated and marred by frequent use of unreliable data, remains
a classic, which must be read as a starting point for all students of Altaic
morphology. It deals with Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic and Korean
morphology, but not with Japanese. Its Korean data is severely hampered by
the inaccessibility to the author of Middle Korean sources, so it is based
primarily on modern Korean forms. In addition, much of the data is in error,
due partly to the author’s failing memory at the time, as well as to the
inevitable problems of editing a posthumous manuscript.
Much subsequent work in Altaic morphology concentrated on only
Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic. Many of the specialists in these languages
had only a superficial knowledge of Korean and even those who considered
Korean to be Altaic, discussed the comparative aspects of Korean
morphology in only a cursory manner, if at all. Among those who did
address (micro-)Altaic morphology from this perspective, some of the best
work is Baskakov () on the pronominal system ; Baskakov (a, )
and Poppe () on the nominal system (primarily on case endings); and
Poppe (), Nasilov () and Baskakov () on verbal morphology.
On the eastern side of Altaic, such work as Martin () shows a large
body of common morphology between Japanese and Korean, but does not
extend its conclusions to the western languages. This lack of coordination
between specialists in the eastern and western languages has been a major
stumbling block to Altaic studies both in morphology and other aspects of
the endeavor.
Attempts at comparative work dealing with the five families together are
of course more difficult and the results have been highly suggestive, but
incomplete. Miller (), an important work in the conception of Altaic as
a family consisting of all five branches, makes a number of insightful
observations about morphological matters, but does not attempt to
reconstruct a comprehensive system of the kind that would demonstrate a
conclusive relationship. Itabashi (,,,) focuses specifically
on nominal case suffixes and does so primarily from the Japanese perspective,
but again shows a number of enlightening points about the relationship with
the western languages.
Most recently, Vovin (b) contains an extensive summary of shared
grammatical formants from the perspective of all of the branches. However,
as a review article of another work, it is merely a summary of the
reconstructed forms, without further explanation or illustration of the
supporting forms in the attested languages. In a more elaborate form, this
important work could well serve to flesh out the morphological parallels
among these languages and clarify their relationship.
.Indo-European and consistency
Another serious problem has been the prevalence of certain a priori
assumptions on which many critics of Altaic seem to differ crucially from
comparative linguists generally. One is the rather widespread belief that it is
legitimate to seek to disprove the relatedness of a given set of languages
(Doerfer –,, Janhunen ), a position justly lambasted by
Hamp (). In his words, ‘ we can only demonstrate relationship, never
non-relationship’ (p.). This, of course, should not be misunderstood as
rendering any criticism of Altaistic concepts a priori futile. In should be clear,
though, that any such activity can only be directed at the actual claims which
are thought to support the Altaic theory, e.g. trying to point out weaknesses
in the handling of data, internally contradictory assumptions, etc. to the
virtual effect that the theory in question might be regarded by some as ‘ yet
unproven’, ‘weakly founded’ or the like. Criticisms of this kind, which have
been accompanying Altaic studies throughout the decades, surely must be
welcomed by any adherent of Altaic, since, in a normal science, reliable
results are best achieved out of controversial discussions of both the data on
. .
which a given theory is based and the methods employed to explain them.
Pointing out the shortcomings of the existing models of Altaic reconstruction
is thus a necessary tool to further any progress in Altaic studies. Since,
however, ‘disproving’ the theory, i.e. actually showing the languages in
question to be unrelated, is intrinsically impossible, any attempt to this effect
is nonsensical in itself, but the burden of proof that there is a relationship
rests of course with the proponents of the theory.
A second dangerous assumption is the blanket rejection of, or at least
profound skepticism about, the very idea of reconstructed protolanguages
and protoforms (Shirokogoroff b: –,– and passim; Sinor
, etc.) and, among those who do accept such concepts, the rejection of
the possibility of comparing reconstructed proto-languages (e.g., Proto-
Turkic, Proto-Mongolic and Proto-Tungusic) among themselves (Doerfer
), overlooking the obvious fact that within Indo-European studies, for
example, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Slavic or Proto-Celtic are reconstructed as
well as confronted with each other to achieve better results than could be
hoped for if one confined the comparative work to the attested stages of the
respective language subfamilies only. A third is the belief that there may be
some third choice between borrowing and common descent, that it makes
some sense to speak of languages as related and forming families without
being derived from a common ancestor (Kotwicz , Doerfer ,).
A further such assumption is that features shared by the Indo-European
languages (or, less often, some other uncontroversial language family)
should be used as a standard against which Altaic is to be judged. Thus, if
the Indo-European languages, especially the older ones, such as Sanskrit,
Greek and Latin, exhibit certain similarities which the Altaic languages do
not, then this is considered in and of itself an argument against the validity
of an Altaic language family. The alleged absence of shared numerals, or
the impossibility of reconstructing a comparatively complete Proto-Altaic
morphological system have often been quoted in support of this. But a closer
look at the language families of the world makes it difficult to identify any
features which remain constant in every uncontroversial family.
The relationship of Samoyedic to Finno-Ugric might be considered as
rather distant, though ever since the times of Otto Donner (in fact, since
Castre
!n’s times) Uralic has been a textbook example of a valid language
family, as has Hamito-Semitic (Afroasiatic). In fact, the latter two families
do show some ‘weaknesses’ by Indo-European standards, such as a lack of
shared numerals, but this apparently has not led to the consequence that
these alignments have been abandoned, but rather to the sober insight that
shared numerals or, for that matter, any other specific subsystem of
language, do not necessarily constitute the indispensable core on which any
language family must be based. In fact, we have every reason to believe that
numerals should not be a particularly stable semantic field in languages, and
the Indo-European example is probably a misleading one. One of the
activities that promotes language contact is trade, and trade is an activity in
which numerals are essential and one must know the numerals of one’s
trading partners.
But in addition, we find that many of the claims made by anti-Altaicists do
not hold even by Indo-European yardsticks. First of all, some critics are
often inconsistent when they compare Altaic to Indo-European or some
other language family. A good example is Doerfer’s () comparison of
Altaic body part terminology with those of seven well-established language
families (in each case taking three languages or three branches into
consideration): Kartvelian (Georgian, Chan (Laz-Mingrelian), Svan), Indo-
European (Russian, German, Latin), Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac),
Dravidian (Tamil, Kui, Brahui), Uralic (Finnish, Ugric, Samoyed), Bantu
(Swahili, Kikongo, Nguni), Austronesian (Indonesian, Melanesian, Poly-
nesian). Doerfer claims that in each case we find that the control families
share a much higher percentage of the basic body terms than do the three
Altaic branches he examines. However, Doerfer rejects any putative Altaic
cognates if they exhibit even the most minor deviations from the sound
correspondences he rejects, e.g., Turkic *yu
Wrek ‘heart’ and Mongolic
*
\iru
Wken ‘id.’, where the vowels are (in his view) irregular. However, he
adopts a more lenient policy in dealing with Kartvelian ‘ tongue ’, where the
initial of Georgian ena vs. Mingrelian nina and Svan nun is irregular and
with Indo-European ‘tongue’, where the initials of Russian jazyk, Latin
lingua and German Zunge also do not correspond in the expected manner.
Moreover, Doerfer even has different ways of deciding what is a match
depending on the language family he is dealing with. For most language
families, he counts as matches only words which have a related form and the
same meaning. However, in the case of Uralic and Dravidian, this would
yield too few matches for his argument to stand up and so he silently changes
his criteria for a match, allowing words with completely different meanings
to count (e.g., Finnish alka- ‘ to begin ’ counts as matching words for ‘ head ’),
switching languages at will (e.g., replacing Finnish with Mordvin, Lapp,
Cheremis and\or Ziryan) and (in the case of the Dravidian language Brahui)
counting forms which are clearly not cognate (as he sometimes himself seems
to admit) but merely look-alikes. It is by this kind of gross inconsistency that
Doerfer arrives at the conclusion that Altaic languages share fewer core body
part terms than Dravidian or Uralic, when in fact by a consistent set of
criteria Uralic has one out of (‘eye’) and Dravidian has two, (‘ eye ’ and
‘ear’).
The number of body part terms shared in Altaic (as with others in fact)
depends on how one sets the criteria, but as claimed by Manaster Ramer,
Vovin & Sidwell () there may well be a significant number of shared
terms for body parts in Altaic. Again, the crucial point is not how many
terms Altaic shares for body parts or any other semantic field, since as we
have seen, there is no minimum number that is found in all widely recognized
. .
language families and it all depends on which forms we accept as a match.
The issue is rather that the data be evaluated in a consistent manner.
.Which version of Altaic?
An even more serious problem has been that some critics of Altaic do not
attack the actual Altaic theory, but invent their own ‘ Altaic ’ and criticize it
instead of the Ramstedt-Poppe theory or any subsequent version. Doerfer
(–, vol. I: –,–) offers his own set of phonological
correspondences which are supposed to hold within the set of words which
he considers to constitute the oldest layer of vocabulary shared by Turkic,
Mongolic and Tungusic. This is fine so far as it goes, but when it comes to
criticizing the Altaic theory, Doerfer has for three decades continued to use
exclusively his own proposed correspondences, not those of Ramstedt or
Poppe, to judge whether particular Turkic, Mongolic and Manchu-Tungusic
forms are matches. Thus, Doerfer () tries to show that the Altaic
languages do not share related basic body part terms, but his case in part
depends on not allowing the sound correspondences proposed in the Altaic
literature but substituting his own.
While we cannot go into all the details of how Doerfer’s straw-man system
differs from that of the Altaicists, one aspect may serve as an example. Poppe
() proposes a phonological system in which several different initial
consonants in proto-Altaic (including *d-, *
), *n- and *n
4) developed to *y-
in proto-Turkic. In Mongolic initial *d- (except before *i), *
)and *n-
remained unchanged, while initial *n
4- merged with *n-. Thus Poppe ()
cites such correspondences as Turkic yel ‘Ma
$hne ’ lMong. del ‘id. ’ ; Turk.
yu
Wk- ‘Last, Traglast, Gepa
$ck’ from yu
W- ‘ transportieren ’ lMong.
\o
Wge-
(Poppe (:) cites
\u
Wge-) ‘transportieren, fahren ’ ; Turk. ya
Wma
W‘noch,
auch, ebenfalls (urspru
$nglich wahrscheinlich ‘zusa
$tzlich ’) lMong. neme-
‘hinzufu
$gen’; Turk. yaz *ya
_r#‘Fru
$hling ’ lMong. nirai *na
_rai ‘neuge-
boren, frisch’. As a result, there are no native Turkic forms beginnings with
d-,
)n- (aside from the anomalous pronoun ne ‘ what ?’), or ng-, and Turkic
forms with initial d-,
)- and n- (other than ne) are borrowings or secondary
developments.
Doerfer (–, vol. I: ), which deals primarily with Mongolic and
Turkic, sets up a series of correspondences between these two families, which
he attributes entirely to borrowing, in which ‘ Urtu
$rkisch’ initial *q-, *k-, *t-
(and *d- (*\?)), *p-, *b-, *c
)- and *s- correspond only to the same values or
to phonemes differing only in voicing in Mongolic. In addition, he lists an
unstated ‘Urtu
$rkisch’ form (‘spa
$ter *
)’) corresponding to Old Turkic y- and
Mongolic -. Thus, Doerfer can (rightly) dismiss attested Turkic forms with
initial d-,
)- and n- (other than ne) as borrowings or secondary developments,
but he is relieved of the need to account for any Turkic equivalents to
Mongolic forms with these initials. (It is ironic that by insisting only on
correspondences that are phonetically similar, Doerfer seems to be in the
same camp with the more enthusiastic proponents of long-range relation-
ships, who look for superficial phonetic similarities among modern forms,
rather than for regular phonological correspondences that may have
phonetically quite different realizations.)
Since Doerfer’s straw-man correspondences are designed to account for
loanwords between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic, the fact that they
sometimes do not allow us to relate some of the basic vocabulary is not
surprising. We are dealing with a circular argument: Doerfer selects sets of
the most trivial phonetic correspondences among these language groups,
based precisely on words which are most clearly borrowings and then argues
that Altaic is an illusion because, predictably, under these correspondences,
we cannot relate the words for ‘ hand ’ or ‘ heart ’, or the like. By the same
logic we could ‘disprove’ the relationship of Germanic to other Indo-
European languages by refusing to admit the occurrence of Grimm’s Law or
Verner’s Law. It would then be impossible for anyone to treat English father,
mother and brother as cognate with, say, Latin pater,mater and frater and we
would only recognize obvious loans, such as paternal,maternal and fraternal.
This point is particularly important since Doerfer (–) begins his
attack on the Altaic theory, pointing out rightly (v. I : ) that, ‘ [d]ie
Beweislast obliegt dem Behauptenden, nicht dem Leugnenden’ (The burden
of proof rests with the one who asserts [the hypothesis of relationship], not
with the one who denies [it]). Yet it follows from this generally accepted
reasoning that one can only deny a case that has actually been asserted.
.C
To sum up, it seems clear that most of the principled and methodological
arguments of the opponents of the Altaic theory have little merit and do not
in almost any particular case rise to the standards of discourse in modern
comparative linguistics. The status of Altaic, although not quite the same as
that of families like Algonquian, Romance, or Indo-European, is perhaps
comparable to that of Austro-Asiatic or Afro-Asiatic: large families whose
relatedness is suggested by a great deal of evidence, but where a great deal of
work still remains to be done on even some very basic questions.
But if this is the case, then how can we explain the different perceptions of
the validity of Altaic on the part of a significant number of linguists? To a
large extent it is due to little more than the unusual tenacity, energy and
outspokenness of the opponents of the theory, together with the equally
unusual inability of its supporters to deal decisively with them. There have
only been a few attempts to answer the anti-Altaic attacks and these tended
to concentrate on the most superficial problems. Poppe, for example, a firm
supporter of the Altaic relationship, who was responsible for enormous
. .
progress in the field, was surprisingly reticent in his response to its
opponents. To be sure, Gercenberg (), Andreev () and Ligeti ()
did note that the Clauson-S
)c
)erbak method of comparing word lists in search
of dissimilarities is irrelevant to the question of whether the languages are
related, because similar lists of Indo-European languages show the same kind
of lexical divergences as the Altaic ones. Ligeti also demonstrates the
wealth of shared vocabulary that the Altaic languages do exhibit in the
semantic fields that Clauson compared. However, there has been little
response so far to the much more sophisticated arguments of Doerfer ().
Yet all this is not to say that the great Altaic debate has been wholly
unproductive. It may in fact have contributed to two developments, one
clearly positive, the other at least not entirely negative. The first is that, while
the controversy over the big picture has raged at one level, a considerable
amount of detailed technical work was done at a different level (even less
noticeable to nonspecialists) which resulted in Altaicists as well as their critics
giving up a number of questionable proposals in earlier work. For example,
Poppe () treats as loanwords from Mongolic into Tungusic a number of
forms he formerly () treated as cognates. Of course, this does not imply
any weakening of the Altaic theory, or of Poppe’s commitment to it. In this
manner, the actual Altaic theory created by Ramstedt and Poppe, has
thereby been refined and developed by the further work of scholars like Illic
)-
Svityc
), Starostin and Vovin.
On the other side of the ledger, we find that Doerfer, in particular, argues
strongly against Clauson’s naive assumption of recent borrowings and at
length accepts some of the central sound correspondences of Altaic. To be
sure, he still does not accept the central premise that these sound
correspondences reflect the different ways in which Turkic, Mongolic,
Tungusic, Korean and Japanese developed from Proto-Altaic and offers
instead the idea that, for example, Mongolic borrowed the forms at issue not
from any attested variety of Turkic, nor yet from Proto-Turkic, but
something he calls ‘Ur-Tu
$rkisch.’ This is a preprotolanguage which would
have the phonological distinctions needed to account for the forms found in
Mongolic (and in Tungusic), e.g. an initial *\p-\, as such only to be found
in some Southern Tungus languages such as Nanai (the intermediary stages
of the development ‘Urtu
$rkisch ’ *p- *f- h- !- are found in a variety
of Altaic languages, among them Manchu, Middle Mongolian, several
archaic Mongolic languages; Turkic data alone, however, would only allow
us to reconstruct Proto-Turkic *h-). As noted by Poppe (e.g. :), of
course, there is no Turkic evidence for this Ur-Tu
$rkisch, only Mongolic (and
Tungusic) evidence and concludes that, ‘ What Doerfer reconstructs as
Proto-Turkic is actually much older than Proto-Turkic. It is nothing but
common Altaic’. Nonetheless, the differences between Doerfer’s recon-
struction and that of the Altaicists, while by no means trivial (pace Poppe
:), have been shrinking.
In conclusion, opinions continue to be divided about the validity of the
Altaic theory, but even a cursory look at the relevant literature (including the
very sources cited by Vinogradov and Nichols) reveals that the issue is far
from being settled in the negative. The debate which began with Schott’s
() response to Abel-Re
!musat () is now in yet another cycle, whose
beginning may be dated to the publication of Clauson’s () critique of the
relationship between Turkic and Mongolic, although today the principal
focus seems to be the relationship of Japanese to the rest of Altaic. The
frankly poor quality of Ramstedt’s Korean-Altaic comparisons would have
made at least a superficial criticism very easy, but this was precluded by the
lack of scholars interested in Altaic and trained in Korean. At least this latter
situation has changed fortunately during the last decades. And some
convergence appears to be occurring e.g. in the views of Janhunen who, after
strongly rejecting Altaic (,a, b), now accepts the affiliation of
Mongolic and Tungusic ().
The work of Illic
)-Svityc
)(,) and Starostin (), among others,
has moved Altaic studies considerably beyond the stage it had reached with
Poppe (). This is not to minimize Poppe’s own accomplishments, of
course, without which the later work would not have been possible.
Especially the recent book-length treatise by Starostin surely displays some
serious weaknesses, including a number of errors in the forms cited, not to
mention its failure to cite (almost) any alternative positions on even the most
controversial issues of Altaic studies.
Nonetheless, for those who accept Altaic, the work seems a major step
forward on a number of points. Its reconstruction of three series of
obstruents and affricates, for example, makes a significantly more plausible
case than Poppe’s formulation. In addition, there is a more comprehensive
integration of Korean into the overall Altaic development. The treatment of
Japanese in light of these revisions in the reconstruction of the other branches
also marks an improvement over Miller ().
Comrie’s () review of Starostin () points out that when Starostin
cites competing (Austronesian vs. Altaic) etymologies for a Japanese form,
he frequently does no more than dismiss the Austronesian explanation as
‘doubtful,’ and therefore adopts the Altaic connection by default. Comrie is
right to note that, by the same logic, we could simply dismiss the Altaic
etymology without discussion and prefer the Austronesian. But Vovin
(b) compares the Altaic and Austronesian analyses of the affiliation of
Japanese in great detail and discusses precisely the specifics of how the Altaic
affiliation of Japanese gives a stronger accounting of the facts than the
Austronesian. Therefore this weakness in Starostin () is best remedied by
reading the book in conjunction with Vovin (b). Comrie also criticizes
the large number of errors in Starostin’s citations. Here Comrie’s review is
very helpful in pointing out some of the incorrect forms Starostin has used.
But notwithstanding these weaknesses, Comrie’s review fails to show what
. .
the book does accomplish and the real strengths of its progress over earlier
work.
Weeding out questionable etymologies is the first and foremost task for all
researchers in the field, be their inclination pro- or anti-Altaic. The future of
Altaic studies and of course the status of Altaic as a valid language family,
will then depend on the stock of etymologies which survive this process : good
etymologies, with all they imply, are what a valid language family is built
upon. Despite the great amount of work which has been done to this effect
(and most of the credit here surely must go to Doerfer –), this
enterprise still has far to go, especially as regards Korean and Japanese.
Many more researchers, though, are needed with a good knowledge of both
Micro-Altaic and Korean\Japanese. At the same time, the rather muted
response to the attacks on Altaic, by Poppe himself and by others, is no
longer the order of the day. Much clarity will be attained with the appearance
of a series of responses to those attacks (e.g. Manaster Ramer ,
Manaster Ramer & Sidwell b, Manaster Ramer, Vovin & Sidwell ).
But even on the basis of existing work, it is clear that the Altaic field is
flourishing and is the source of promising new research. Pronouncements of
the demise of the Altaic hypothesis, like that of Mark Twain, have been
greatly exaggerated.
Finally, we would like to note that the authors of this paper come from
different backgrounds and do not fully agree among themselves about the
ultimate fate of the Altaic hypothesis. Manaster Ramer, Michalove and
Sidwell accept the relatedness of macro-Altaic but question many specific
points of the reconstruction of Proto-Altaic as it currently stands. Georg
remains skeptical about the geneticity of either micro- or macro-Altaic and
is actively exploring the hypothesis of an areal solution to the problem, but
agrees with the criticism voiced here about the methodology of some
opponents of the Altaic theory.
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Authors’ addresses:
(Georg) (Michalove)
Heerstrasse , South McKinley Ave.,
D- Bonn, Champaign, IL ,
Federal Republic of Germany. U.S.A.
E-mail: Georg!home.ivm.de E-mail: peterm!hercules.geology.uiuc.edu
(Manaster Ramer) (Sidwell)
Walden Drive, Department of Linguistics & Applied
Ann Arbor, MI Linguistics
U.S.A. Babel Building,
E-mail: manaster!umich.edu University of Melbourne,
Parkville , Victoria,
Australia.
E-mail: p.sidwell!linguistics.unimelb.edu.au
