r and s in Turkic (long and focussing on Altaic)

[H.M.Hubey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote:
>
 
> But there is another argument here, which is simply dangerous: that of
> geography. Well, Bulghar is the Westernmost branch of Turkic, so what ?
 
Is it not a fundamental principle in genetics as well as historical
linguistics, that the region in which one finds the greatest variety
must be the ancestral homeland?
 
Is this not this principle which people like Cavalli-Sforza (and other
geneticists as well as historical linguists) use to posit that Africa
is the homeland of hominids and that the region in which the largest
number of languages of a family cluster in the Urheimat?
 
If Bulgharic is in the west, Khalaj is in the west, Oguz is in
the west, Kipchak is in the west, where does that point?
 
Is there Khalaj or anything in that family (assuming it can
be considered a family) in the east? Is any Bulgharic ever found
in the east?
 
> Iranian loanwords are present in a variety of Finno-Ugric languages, Baltic
> loanwords are to be found as far east as Mordva, it is linguistics which
> can *claim* that for these borrowings previous contact *has* to be assumed
> (and it is, in the case of Baltic in the East, seconded by toponymy). You
> don't assume that Bulghar Turkic speaking people have always been living on
> the Volga, do you ?
 
Maybe they lived there long enough to have other people name the river
after them :-)
 
 
> To put it more precisely, changing seats for argument's sake: given the
> Altaic theory were correct, and an original proto-Altaic speech community
> split up somewhere in Asia: we don't have to assume that the Japanese end
> up on the Japanese islands immediately after that, as well as the Bulghar
> Turks on the Volga, do we ???
 
It does not follow. Assuming that Altaic is a family and that it did
split
up, we don't know where the split occurred and where the Turkic branch
developed or when.
 
Even for IE for which much more data is in existence, the Urheimat still
ranges from the Balkans to Central Asia or Anatolia. But nobody wants to
name someplace where there are no IE speakers the outlying regions where
there were only one or two languages. That cuts out Indo-Iranian
regions,
the British Isles, or Germany, France, etc. Even if Altaic homeland is
given as Mongolia, it does not follow that Turkic homeland is the same
place.
 
 
 
The disintegration of an original speech
> community is a complicated process, certainly allowing for a great deal of
> inter-branch borrowing going on for some time, at least as long as
> geographical contiguity is maintained or contacts are not blocked by social
> and other reasons. *Of course*, the Bulghar loan hypothesis *does* make a
> strong claim for prehistoric contacts between Bulghar Turkic and Mongolian,
> that's its strength, that's where the linguist's work becomes interesting
> for historians, that's part of the success story of I.E. linguistics in
> Western Universities, I'd say. The only thing we can say that Bulghar
> *writing* started in the West. There is a host of early Inner Asian nomad
> confederacies which are linguistically "unlumpable" into one of the known
> language families.
 
Bulghar-Mongolian contacts (even if it happened) imply that Bulghar
Turkic
originated in the East or any other Turkic originated in the east. There
are
different intensities of language mixing. If we normalize this intensity
as
a number between 0 and 1 (i.e the interval [0,1]) then there are two
favorite
types of mixtures. One is at one extreme, say 0, in which the
superstratum
language disappears almost totally (like Mongols in Iran, or Russia or
the Turkic Moguls in India). At the other extreme, say 1, is where the
superstratum's language eventually becomes dominant (the changes all
allegedly
having nothing to do with the substratum). This is the linguists'
equivalent
of the 'ideal gases' of physics. What about a mixture of type 0.5? What
kind
would that produce?
 
That is rather easy to guess for me. It would produce a language which
is
full of quasi-regularity or partial-regularity. For example Semitic is
exactly
this kind of a language. It has 15-20 "regular" thingamajics called
"binyanim".
It is the English regular-irregular verb formation to the nth degree.
The language
"froze" at a point in which it could not go to one or the other extreme
but
got stuck in between. The Hittite "grades" of verbs is the same
phenomena. So that
adds more evidence to a rather thorogh mixing process happening over a
period of
severall millenia in that region. That came out of a mixture of the
previous non-IE
and non-AA languages with some other intruders.
 
The Ural-Altaic-Dravidian languages share traits which are left over
from many
millenia ago and also borrowed from each other. Of course, nothing like
this
can be "proven" because nothing in linguistics can be proven. You can
only
convince people. Similar things (modelable by similar differential
equations)
happen to things like creation of steel alloys. What determines the
properties
of the resulting steel alloy is not only what was added to iron but also
the rate
of cooling. Slow cooling produces soft metals, because it has more time
for the
diffusion processes to settle and the stresses to relieve themselves.
Rapid
cooling by quenching in water produces hard steels. A thorough mixture
of 2 or
more languages intensely over a period of time in which many people
become
bilingual or even trilingual is probably a rare occurrence but it is the
type
of mixture which can cause great changes in all aspects of langauge
including
its phonology, syntax, and typology.
 
The present conventional wisdom that relationships can be classified as
genetic, typological and areal is doing an injustice to languages and is
an
affront to science. Alas, things persist. There is the long story about
why the British railroads are so narrow. It apparently goes back to the
standard for Roman roads. That is how slowly some things change.
 
 
There can be no reason to exclude that one or some of
> them contained a "Bulgharoid" element (though I don't dare to forward a
> specific hypothesis on which one). And: given that most pro-Altaicists
> locate the Altaic "homeland" pretty far in the East (you say yourself that
> the Mongols probably entered the steppe from the east), the Bulghars had to
> find *some* way to their present habitats through all that landmass, hadn't
> they ?
 
Without doing a thorough statistical analysis of what kinds of sounds
changes
have taken place over centuries and accross the world, it is difficult
to
make strong statements, however, there must certainly be something to
why
m>k occurs in Sumerian >Turkic, and Dravidian > Turkic, or why n >y
occurs in Sumerian > Turkic and Mongolian > Turkic. I think there is
also
l>y in Dravidian>Turkic etc. All of this has to be also put in the
context of
phonological systems of the world's languages circa 12,000-8,000 years
ago
because very important things were happening around that time.
 
> OK, my apologies for getting verbose (as always when things Altaic are at
> stake), I'll leave this thread to itself now and see what happens (I'm
> ready to continue with you, Sasha, or anyone else interested on the other
> fora, we are subscribed to).
 
One good turn deserves another. Since this can't be discussed on
Altainet,
it is probably better to discuss it in the context of sound changes that
occur in the main theater of history; Eurasia and North Africa and in
terms of IE, AA and Altaic, Uralic, and the isolates like Basque.
 
 
--
Best Regards,
Mark
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