Hit DEL key before reading

Douglas G. Wilson douglas at NB.NET
Thu Aug 15 12:26:02 UTC 2002


Crystal's "Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language", the big one with the pictures:

<<The Altaic family ... comprises about 40 languages, classified into three
groups: Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus. The common ancestry of these
groups is maintained by many scholars; but this hypothesis is contested by
those who feel that the linguistic similarities could be explained in other
ways ....>>

Some won't even admit these three branches of 'Altaic' as being definitely
of common ancestry. Of those who do, only some will accept Korean as an
outlying member (sometimes put in the Tungus-Manchu group, I think), and of
these relative radicals only some will go so far as to accept Japanese, as
an even more remote outlier. Joseph Greenberg, OTOH, accepted all of the
above with gusto, and Ainu too ... as well as Indo-European, Uralic, etc.,
etc., Eskimo-Aleut, and Etruscan as manifestly genetically related. The
broader the group asserted, the weaker the evidence for the relationship,
of course. I find these long-range conjectures amusing/interesting,
although when one looks closely at the evidence it sometimes starts to get
a little dubious .... IIRC, on the now-apparently-inactive Nostratic list
there was somebody who claimed to have shown systematic grammatical
correspondences of the convincing type (not mass-comparison stuff) between
Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut; it looked pretty good (to naive me) at a glance,
but I don't know whether it panned out.

-- Doug Wilson



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