isolates

[Alexander Vovin]

I would like to offer some corrections for the following passage in Larry
Trask's posting, as some of the claims regarding the certain Asian
languages as isolates  are out of date, I am afraid.
 
    First, there is a general consensus nowadays among all linguists
working in
historical Korean and Japanese that Korean and Japanese are
related. Their link to the rest of Altaic remains more disputable, but
even here majority of the scholars lean toward the acceptance of genetic
relationship between Japanese, Korean, and Tungusic. In addition, none of
these proposals are long-range, in the sense of long-range proposals
concerning genetic affiliation of Basque or Nihali. Besides, both
"Japanese" and "Korean" are to a great extent sociolinguistic terms: under
"Japanese" we have a number of mutually unintelligible languages or
"dialects", as they are usually called, with the depth comparable to that
of Germanic. The same is true of "Korean": there are at least three Korean
languages, again normally called "dialects", mutually unintelligible and
with the depth comparable to that of Slavic. Thus, even if they were not
related (but they are), each of them would represent a mini-family, and
not a true isolate.
    Second, over last seven years there has been presented quite a chunk
of evidence allowing us tentatively to link Ainu with Austronesian and
Austroasiatic.
There is a consensus between anyone who ever tried to venture in this
field (late Murayama S., L. Reid, J. Bengtson, P. Sidwell, I.Pejros,
Yanagizaki Y. , and myself) that Austric connection is the likeliest for
Ainu. Although, none has yet come up with a proof beyond the reasonable
doubt, this is the only connection among proposed for Ainu that cannot be
easily disproved (contrary to the case, e.g., with Ainu and Altaic). Thus,
this is situation remarkably different from Basque situation, where
majority of specialists reject any remote proposals.
     Third, since both Ket and Yukaghir did have relatives in the recent
past, this very fact seems to work against Larry Trask point that there
are more isolates among us than we suppose. As a matter of fact, it shows
us how isolates come into being: by extinction of the other family
members. Thus, there are probably less true isolates than we suppose. In
particular, as I intended to demonstrate above, Larry Trask's Asia
list can be safely reduced to Gilyak, Nihali, and Burushaski. Among those
remaining three, Gilyak looks like a Nostratic language (although it has
yet to be proven), and I even will not be very surprised if ultimately it
turns out to be a very abberant member of Altaic family: after all,
scholars so far applied only internal reconstruction to Gilyak, but we
should not overlook the fact that what we call Gilyak actually consists of
three or four mutually untelligible and pretty much divergent languages,
the fact that allows comparative reconstruction that is yet to be done.
 
On Mon, 24 Mar 1997, Larry Trask wrote:
 
>
> In fact, there are perhaps more isolates around than we sometimes
> suppose, especially if we are cautious about accepting some of the
> remote proposals involving isolates.  Among living languages, we have
> only Basque in Europe, but Asia gives us (at least) Burushaski,
> Nihali, Gilyak, Ainu, Korean, Japanese, Yukaghir, and Ket, the last
> two being languages which had known relatives that died out only
> recently.  (Here I ignore several remote proposals which have not won
> general acceptance, as well as the Uralic-Yukaghir hypothesis, which
> seems better supported but perhaps not yet generally accepted.)
>
> Larry Trask
> COGS
> University of Sussex
> Brighton BN1 9QH
> UK
>
> larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
>