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[Laurence Horn]

At 1:25 PM -0400 8/14/02, James A. Landau wrote:
>The "Uralic" or "Finno-Ugrian" languages such as Finnish and Hungarian share
>a number of striking grammatical features with the "Altaic" languages such as
>Turkish or Mongol.  This implies that they are related, being part of a
>"Ural-Altaic" language family.
>
>On the other hand, the Finno-Ugrian languages and the Altaic languages have a
>striking LACK of common vocabulary.  This implies that they are NOT related.
>(If you're a monogenesis fan, this implies that the common ancestor of
>Finno-Ugrian and Altaic was so long ago that the two families are about as
>closely related as English and Basque.)
>
>As best as I've been able to determine, the consensus today among linguists
>is the latter conclusion, that the Finno-Ugrian and Altaic families are as
>unrelated, or perhaps as distantly related, as either one is to
>Indo-European.  However, I've never been able to find anything telling why
>linguists so feel (if indeed they do.) All I can find is a few encyclopedia
>articles which make "hand-waving" arguments such as "the two peoples lived in
>the same area and picked up grammar [but not vocabulary] from each other."
>This I find very unsatisfying.
>
Sharing a corridor as I have with some quite (non-politically)
conservative historical linguists, who are almost invariably
skeptical of long-ranger hypotheses, I have come away with the sense
that it is indeed much more likely that grammatical features will be
lent and borrowed among unrelated languages within a Sprachbund (do
they still call it that?  basically meaning a geographical area in
which this sort of thing tends to happen) than the "basic" or "core"
lexicon, which is why the latter is still the sine qua non for
genetic relatedness, even if they don't (do they?) use the old
Swadesh List of 100 items (sun, moon, water, father, two, whatever)
anymore.  Examples are the Balkans, where a bunch of unrelated
languages have sworn off infinitives, or all those examples of
relatedness between Japanese and Korean, which of course begs the
question as to whether there's an Altaic group (much less
Ural-Altaic) that includes those two.  (I think everyone accepts an
Altaic proper that includes Korean, Mongolian, and Turkic, but the
addition of Japanese is what's controversial.)  Classifier systems
(in Africa or Southeast Asia) are another example of frequently
borrowed grammatical features, and phonological features (like the
vowel harmony found, in somewhat structurally different incarnations,
in Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian) and Altaic (Turkish), are also easily
shared.  If there are a number of examples of languages we're pretty
sure (partly on non-linguistic grounds) are unrelated but were thrown
together geographically and politically (Dravidian and Indic, for
example) that share grammatical (including phonological) features at
least one of them (say, Indic) does NOT share with its biological
cousins, and if little borrowing of core vocabulary occurs in such
cases, that would lead historical linguists to conclude that the
latter is a more reliable criterion for genetic relatedness than the
former.  This is to be taken with the usual grain of salt (and an
automatic parser for the last sentence)--I don't even play an
historical linguist on TV.  But I did use(d?) to follow the
Uralic/Altaic threads on Linguist.

larry