lexical replacement in "Altaic" and other Eurasian languages

[Jess Tauber]

Recently I've been examining the expressive systems of the agglutinating
verb-final languages of South, East, and Central Asia. Mongolian, for
instance, seems quite top-heavy with phonosemantically transparent roots,
with a relatively restricted set of ideophones proper. Manchu, on the other
hand, has a relatively robust ideophonic set, little of which seems to have
percolated into the lexicon. Korean and Japanese both have quite large
expressive sets, with little in the lexicon proper. Dravidian languages have
very restricted ideophone sets, and much of the lexicon seems opaque
phonosemantically, while Munda languages are like Mongolian. I don't yet have
good enough data on Turkic languages to say that much, but dictionaries of
Turkish itself list good numbers of onomatopoeic forms.
Anyway, if anyone would like to discuss the typological, areal and other
implications of lexical attrition and replacement from the expressive stock
with regards to theories of suprafamilial relationships I would like to hear
from them. Thanks!

Sincerely,
Jess Tauber
zylogy at aol.com