4 ms·

This is all mentioned in the first three paragraphs of the article btw. Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and Turkic languages could be from

by culi 5y ago

This is all mentioned in the first three paragraphs of the article btw. Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and Turkic languages could be from a common origin I think the debate around it points to an interesting issue in the quest of trying to taxonomize languages. It's a similar problem faced by bacteria and fungi taxonomists. These organisms are extremely prone to horizontal gene transfer (some even use functional horizontal gene transfer as an adaptation strategy to adapt to new environments). Languages can borrow a lot from each other and trying to untangle them is always gonna take a ton of guesswork. But it's also what makes the field so interesting. It forced this type of linguistic work to be very interdisciplinary

mrbukkake 5y ago
Absolutely. These debates are as old as linguistics, there was a lot of controversy in the 19th century between supporters of the tree and wave theories. It's an active area of debate now too with a lot of cross pollination between biology and linguistics. A good recent summary of the issues is Jacques and List 2019 which is available here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:25642/datastreams/CONTENT/content https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:25642/datastreams/C... The authors' application to historical linguistics of the concept of incomplete lineage sorting from population genetics I think is particularly cool
- canjobear 5y ago
  Cool paper!
- culi 5y ago
  Ah thank you for this. Trees and waves both seem like really useful metaphors to talk about this and undoubtedly a clearer analysis would utilize both forms of analysis in different situations
nanis 5y ago
> Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and Turkic languages could be from a common origin From Wikipedia: +> The original hypothesis unified only the Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic groups As a Turk who has occasionally looked at stuff and occasionally tried to learn Japanese, this limited version made more sense to me. OTOH, back in the 20th century in Turkey, we had a Japanese Economics faculty member who learned Turkish very quickly and I have a Turkish friend who teaches Japanese to Turks and they both talked up the similarities, but the common origin stuff seemed to me a little too far. Searching just now, I ran into this post[1]. Leaving aside all the arguments, I am going to note that: (A) Ben dün mektubu yazdım. (B) Ben mektubu dün yazdım. (C) Mektubu ben dün yazdım. Leaving aside the permutations of emphasis introduced by dropping "I" ("ben"), those three sentences convey different meanings in Turkish and each is appropriate depending on the intended meaning the speaker wants to convey. (A) to emphasize what one did the day before, (B) to emphasize that one wrote "the letter" the day before, and (C) to emphasize that the speaker is the person who wrote the letter and did the the day before. [1]: https://community.wanikani.com/t/similarities-between-japanese-and-turkish/39583 https://community.wanikani.com/t/similarities-between-japane...
canjobear 5y ago
I think the horizontal gene transfer analogy is spot on for what's going on in the Altaic grouping of languages. Even then, though, it's a weird kind of horizontal transfer that is not well understood. Probably the most common kind of transfer among languages is loanwords: think of the many many foreign loanwords in English for example. It's easy to see how this happens. You learn a foreign word that has some convenient meaning, there's no good equivalent in your native language, so you start using the foreign word if you think the person you're talking to will know it too. But in the Altaic languages, you see similarities in abstract structure, without much apparent sharing of words. Altaic languages have a certain strictly head-final syntactic structure, where the verb is the final element in the sentence, you have postpositions coming after nouns, lots of freedom to drop and reorder arguments of verbs, etc. They all have agglutinative morphology with case marking that creates long complex words. They all have, or show historical traces of, some kind of vowel harmony. All these abstract commonalities happen with only very little sharing of words. You can line up a Korean sentence with its Japanese translation almost morpheme-by-morpheme, and yet those morphemes are all totally unrelated to each other. It seems really odd that you could have a set of languages that share their abstract structure without sharing content. And Altaic isn't the only example of this kind of thing: you also see it in the North American native languages, which share a strongly head-initial head-marking structure, nearly the exact opposite of the Altaic languages, despite a lack of cognates among their morphemes. It's almost as if what was transferred among the languages was an aesthetic, rather than individual words. We don't really understand how this happens. My best guess is that it happens in situations of massive multilingualism, so that certain habits of articulation and sentence formation get shared across languages within the mind of a multilingual speaker. It's something I'd like to understand more.
- hcho 5y ago
  Multiple layers of creolization is the most likely explanation of common grammatic features and distinct vocabularies. There's a language called Gagauz, spoken in Moldova. It has a Turkic vocabulary and Indo-European grammar. It was, in its infancy, likely to be a Romanian substrate, Cuman superstrate creole. An Proto Altaic substrate with various superstrates must have played out quite a few times.
- 5y ago
kazinator 5y ago
> Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and Turkic languages could be from a common origin Mainly, a few Turkish weebos are infatuated with the idea, that's about it. Hey, French is a dialect of Japanese. Proof: The verb for "to have" is used for indicating that something exists somewhere in both languages. And, look at the tantalizing similarity: avoir (French) vs aru (Japanese). Oooooh! E.g. third person masculine avoir is a: FR: Il y a un maison. (There is a house over there.) JP: Soko ni wa, ie ga aru. FR: Il a beaucoup d'argent. (He has lots of money.) JP: Kare wa, o kane ga takusan aru. QED.

by culi 5y ago

mrbukkake 5y ago

Absolutely. These debates are as old as linguistics, there was a lot of controversy in the 19th century between supporters of the tree and wave theories. It's an active area of debate now too with a lot of cross pollination between biology and linguistics. A good recent summary of the issues is Jacques and List 2019 which is available here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:25642/datastreams/CONTENT/content https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:25642/datastreams/C... The authors' application to historical linguistics of the concept of incomplete lineage sorting from population genetics I think is particularly cool

canjobear 5y ago
Cool paper!
culi 5y ago
Ah thank you for this. Trees and waves both seem like really useful metaphors to talk about this and undoubtedly a clearer analysis would utilize both forms of analysis in different situations

nanis 5y ago

> Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and Turkic languages could be from a common origin From Wikipedia: +> The original hypothesis unified only the Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic groups As a Turk who has occasionally looked at stuff and occasionally tried to learn Japanese, this limited version made more sense to me. OTOH, back in the 20th century in Turkey, we had a Japanese Economics faculty member who learned Turkish very quickly and I have a Turkish friend who teaches Japanese to Turks and they both talked up the similarities, but the common origin stuff seemed to me a little too far. Searching just now, I ran into this post[1]. Leaving aside all the arguments, I am going to note that: (A) Ben dün mektubu yazdım. (B) Ben mektubu dün yazdım. (C) Mektubu ben dün yazdım. Leaving aside the permutations of emphasis introduced by dropping "I" ("ben"), those three sentences convey different meanings in Turkish and each is appropriate depending on the intended meaning the speaker wants to convey. (A) to emphasize what one did the day before, (B) to emphasize that one wrote "the letter" the day before, and (C) to emphasize that the speaker is the person who wrote the letter and did the the day before. [1]: https://community.wanikani.com/t/similarities-between-japanese-and-turkish/39583 https://community.wanikani.com/t/similarities-between-japane...

canjobear 5y ago

I think the horizontal gene transfer analogy is spot on for what's going on in the Altaic grouping of languages. Even then, though, it's a weird kind of horizontal transfer that is not well understood. Probably the most common kind of transfer among languages is loanwords: think of the many many foreign loanwords in English for example. It's easy to see how this happens. You learn a foreign word that has some convenient meaning, there's no good equivalent in your native language, so you start using the foreign word if you think the person you're talking to will know it too. But in the Altaic languages, you see similarities in abstract structure, without much apparent sharing of words. Altaic languages have a certain strictly head-final syntactic structure, where the verb is the final element in the sentence, you have postpositions coming after nouns, lots of freedom to drop and reorder arguments of verbs, etc. They all have agglutinative morphology with case marking that creates long complex words. They all have, or show historical traces of, some kind of vowel harmony. All these abstract commonalities happen with only very little sharing of words. You can line up a Korean sentence with its Japanese translation almost morpheme-by-morpheme, and yet those morphemes are all totally unrelated to each other. It seems really odd that you could have a set of languages that share their abstract structure without sharing content. And Altaic isn't the only example of this kind of thing: you also see it in the North American native languages, which share a strongly head-initial head-marking structure, nearly the exact opposite of the Altaic languages, despite a lack of cognates among their morphemes. It's almost as if what was transferred among the languages was an aesthetic, rather than individual words. We don't really understand how this happens. My best guess is that it happens in situations of massive multilingualism, so that certain habits of articulation and sentence formation get shared across languages within the mind of a multilingual speaker. It's something I'd like to understand more.

hcho 5y ago
Multiple layers of creolization is the most likely explanation of common grammatic features and distinct vocabularies. There's a language called Gagauz, spoken in Moldova. It has a Turkic vocabulary and Indo-European grammar. It was, in its infancy, likely to be a Romanian substrate, Cuman superstrate creole. An Proto Altaic substrate with various superstrates must have played out quite a few times.
5y ago

kazinator 5y ago

> Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and Turkic languages could be from a common origin Mainly, a few Turkish weebos are infatuated with the idea, that's about it. Hey, French is a dialect of Japanese. Proof: The verb for "to have" is used for indicating that something exists somewhere in both languages. And, look at the tantalizing similarity: avoir (French) vs aru (Japanese). Oooooh! E.g. third person masculine avoir is a: FR: Il y a un maison. (There is a house over there.) JP: Soko ni wa, ie ga aru. FR: Il a beaucoup d'argent. (He has lots of money.) JP: Kare wa, o kane ga takusan aru. QED.