1036: 4P
LING 1030: The Diversity of Languages
Outline
1 Introduction
2
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Altaic languages
Introduction
Language families spoken in Asia
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Altaic languages
Altaic languages
The name comes from the Altai mountains in Siberia near the Mongolian border
Altaic languages are spoken on a vast area: from Turkey to northeastern Siberia.
(1) Language families in the Altaic area: a. Turkic b. Mongolic c. Tungusic d. Korean e. Japonic f. Ainu
It is still debated whether the families of the Altaic area are all genetically related and form a large Altaic language family.
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Altaic languages
Altaic languages
Altaic languages share a number of grammatical properties:
basic SOV word order order Verb -Auxiliary case system postpositions (rather than preposition) agglutinative morphology
vowel harmony
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Altaic languages
Altaic languages
The Altaic group
Japonic Ainu e.g. Japanese Ainu
Tungusic Korean e.g. Manchu Korean
Turkic Mongolic e.g. Turkish e.g. Mongolian
Kazakh Uzbek
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Altaic languages
Altaic languages
The Altaic group
Japonic Ainu e.g. Japanese Ainu
Tungusic Korean e.g. Manchu Korean
Turkic Mongolic e.g. Turkish e.g. Mongolian
Kazakh Uzbek
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Altaic languages
The Turkic family
40 languages spoken over a wide area from Macedonia to the Russian Far East this vast coverage is the product of early medieval Turkish expansions from east Asia. This expansion replaced Indo-European languages with Turkic languages in much of Central and Western Asia. By the late 11th century, the Turkic language Turkish began to replace Greek in Anatolia (modern Turkey).
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Altaic languages
The Turkic family
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Altaic languages
Turkic
Turkish is largest of the Turkic languages it has about three times as many speakers as any other Turkic language. Characteristic features of Turkish:
SOV agglutinative morphology (words can get pretty long) vowel harmony
Despite the vast geographic area they cover, Turkic languages are for the most part still very similar to one another There’s a high degree of mutual intelligibility among many of them
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Altaic languages
Turkish: the perfect agglutinative language
(2) How is the following feature encoded in Turkish? a. Acc case: -i b. Abl case: -dan c. Plural number: -lar d. Singular number: ∅
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Altaic languages
Longest word in Turkish
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Altaic languages
Altaic languages
The Altaic group
Japonic Ainu e.g. Japanese Ainu
Tungusic Korean e.g. Manchu Korean
Turkic Mongolic e.g. Turkish e.g. Mongolian
Kazakh Uzbek
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Altaic languages
The Mongolic family
spoken by around seven million people
Most of the Mongolic languages are spoken in Mongolia and in adjacent parts of Russia and China.
Example languages: Mongolian, Buriat, Oirat
The dominant language in the group is Mongolian
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Altaic languages
Classical Mongolian case paradigm
CASE SINGULAR PLURAL NOM bakši ‘the teacher’ bakši-nar ‘the teachers’ ACC bakši-yi ‘the teacher’ bakši-nar-i ‘the teachers’ DAT bakši-dur ‘to the teacher’ bakši-nar-tur ‘to the teachers’
Like Turkish, Classical Mongolian is agglutinating But it’s not as regular as the Turkish paradigm above
⇒ There are two phonological alternations: -yi/-i and -dur/-tur
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CASE SINGULAR PLURAL ABL bakši-aca ‘from the teacher’ bakši-nar-aca ‘from the teachers’ INSTR bakši-bar ‘by the teacher’ bakši-nar-bar ‘by the teachers’ COM bakši-luga ‘with the teacher’ bakši-nar-luga ‘with the teachers’
Altaic languages
Modern Mongolian syntax
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SOV word order, postpositions
(3) sine barilga bari-ba new building build-PAST ‘He built a new building’
(4) manae xüü surguuli-da orno our son school-into enter ‘Our son will enter school’
Altaic languages
Modern Mongolian syntax
Relative clauses before the head noun
Relative clause – a sentence that modifies a noun (like adjectives)
head noun the boy the book
relative clause (RC) who I like that he read
In English, relative clauses follow the noun they modify In Mongolian, the precede it:
(5) minii atsar-san nom 1sg bring-PAST book ‘a book that I brought’
(6) ger-te oro-son xun yurt-into enter-PAST person ‘a book who entered the yurt’
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Altaic languages
Overtone singing
The Altaic area is known for its traditional singing technic call overtone singing. Mongolia is considered the home of this tradition Mongolian overtone singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ3BX2tMj1Y
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Altaic languages
Altaic languages
The Altaic group
Japonic Ainu e.g. Japanese Ainu
Tungusic Korean e.g. Manchu Korean
Turkic Mongolic e.g. Turkish e.g. Mongolian
Kazakh Uzbek
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Altaic languages
The Tungusic family
Most of the Tungusic languages are spoken in eastern Siberia and northeastern China The most famous representative of this family is Manchu, the language of the people who founded the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until 1912. In the 18th century, Manchu started giving way to Chinese. Today: only a dozen people still speak Manchu natively. Some features of the Manchu grammar:
agglutinative morphology SOV word order vowel harmony 6 cases
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Altaic languages
Manchu: Yin and Yang words correlating with vowel harmony
gender vowel
Yin words female front Yang words male back
Yin hehe ‘woman’
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Yang haha ‘man’ nakcu ‘uncle’ ama ‘father’
nekcu ‘aunt’ eme ‘mother’ erselen ‘lioness’ emile ‘hen’
arsalan ‘lion’ amila ‘rooster’
Altaic languages
Verb final order
In SVO languages, auxiliaries preceded the main verb. As in English:
(7) a. John eats pizza. (S V O) b. John must eat pizza. (S Aux V O)
In verb-final languages (SOV), auxiliaries often follow the main verb. Manchu is an example of that.
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(8) Te uthai yabuci acambi. now at-once act must ‘Now, I must act at once’
Altaic languages
Altaic languages
The Altaic group
Japonic Ainu e.g. Japanese Ainu
Tungusic Korean e.g. Manchu Korean
Turkic Mongolic e.g. Turkish e.g. Mongolian
Kazakh Uzbek
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Altaic languages
Korean
Korean is the only language in its family It is the national language of both North and South Korea. Korean is agglutinative and SOV. Today it has only traces of vowel harmony, but in the Middle Korean period there was a strong vowel harmony system. Korean grammar includes a complex set of honorific forms, which reflect the status of a speaker in relation to the person spoken to or about.
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Altaic languages
Sentence particles in Korean
Like other Altaic languages, Korean is verb final But the very last morpheme in the sentence is always the so called sentenceparticle:
(9) John-i ape.nim-i silh-ta John-NOM father.HON-NOM hate-DECL ‘John hates his father.’
(10) Ken-i ape.nim-i muess-ha-si-ni? Ken-NOM father.HON-NOM what-do-HON-Q? ‘What does Ken’s father do?’
What kind of meaning do sentence particles encode?
⇒ type of sentence: e.g. declarative (a statement) or interrogative (a question).
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Altaic languages
Honorifics and honorific agreement in Korean
Honorifics are morphemes that express social attitudes e.g. the honorific suffix -nim is used for anyone of a higher station than the speaker, or those whom the speaker holds in high regard:
(11) John-i ape.nim-i silh-ta John-NOM father.HON-NOM hate-DECL ‘John hates his father.’
Sometimes, we find honorific markers on verbs, as well:
(12) Ken-i ape.nim-i muess-ha-si-ni? Ken-NOM father.HON-NOM what-do-HON-Q? ‘What does Ken’s father do?’
We call this honorific agreement: the verb has to "agree" with the subject for the honorific feature.
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Altaic languages
Altaic languages
The Altaic group
Japonic Ainu e.g. Japanese Ainu
Tungusic Korean e.g. Manchu Korean
Turkic Mongolic e.g. Turkish e.g. Mongolian
Kazakh Uzbek
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Altaic languages
Japonic
The family’s dominant member is Japanese Japanese used to be considered a language isolate This is because Ryukyuan languages such as Okinawan used to be treated as dialects of Japanese. In fact, the Ryukyuan languages have been diverging from Japanese, and from each other, for more than 1,000 years They are not mutually intelligible. Now that people have agreed that they should be considered separate languages, Japanese is no longer considered an isolate but a member of a family with perhaps a dozen members.
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Altaic languages
Japanese
Some properties of Japanese grammar: agglutinating morphology no vowel harmony (but Old Japanese did have it) SOV word order Honorifics Sentence particles
�Austronesian� traits: CV syllable structure (sa-yo-na-ra); specialized vocabulary: sawa �ricefield�, turuki �sword�
Mixed language hypothesis: Altaic language with an Austronesian substratum
Archaeological evidence: Austronesian cultures in southern islands of Japan
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Altaic languages
Altaic languages
The Altaic group
Japonic Ainu e.g. Japanese Ainu
Tungusic Korean e.g. Manchu Korean
Turkic Mongolic e.g. Turkish e.g. Mongolian
Kazakh Uzbek
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Altaic languages
Ainu
A language isolate around 15,000 people identify themselves as ethnically Ainu but only a handful of them are native speakers of the language Grammatical properties of Ainu:
basic word order is SOV the phoneme inventory is similar to that of Japanese. Unlike typical languages in the Altaic area, Ainu has prefixes and noun incorporation.
(13) Ainu ‘I make an inau.’ a. inau a-ke
inau 1sg.TR-make b. inau-ke-an
inau-make-1sg.INTR
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⇒ a polysynthetic feature
Altaic languages
Genetic relatedness of the Altaic languages
The Altaic group
Ainu Ainu
Japonic e.g. Japanese
Turkic Mongolic Tungusic Korean e.g. Turkish e.g. Mongolian e.g. Manchu Korean
Kazakh Uzbek
Is the Altaic language group a language family? That is, are all the Altaic language families above genetically related?
It’s unclear. There is some evidence for genetic relationships between some of them, but not for all.
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Altaic languages
Some evidence for genetic relatedness between Altaic languages
Pronouns Early Turkic bän
Written Mongolian bi
Tungusic (Evenki, Manchu) bi1sg ‘I’ (Nom)
1sg ‘me’ (Oblique) 2sg ‘you’ (Nom) 2sg ‘you’ (Oblique)
män min sän chi sän chin
min si sin
Case suffixes Turkish and Mongolian: Accusative -i, Genitive -in. Plural is Turkish: -lar, in Mongolian: nar.
Colour terms:
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black blue grey Turkish Mongolian
kara xar
gök xöx
boz bor
Altaic languages
Grammatical similarities
Altaic languages share many grammatical features
They are agglutinative
Many have vowel harmony They don’t have a grammatical gender system (masc, fem, neut) SOV order Auxiliaries follow the main verb Postpositions, instead of prepositions
But grammatical similarities such as these are not enough to prove a genetic relationship.
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Altaic languages
The indeterminacy of certain grammatical similarities
They are agglutinative → many languages are (e.g. Uralic, African) Many have vowel harmony → and so do Uralic languages but there is no genetic relationship (though linguistics used to this there was one: the now rejected Ural-Altaic hypothesis)
They don’t have a grammatical gender system (masc, fem, neut) → most languages don’t have the Indo-European style gender system SOV order → the most common word order Auxiliaries follow the main verb → correlated with SOV word order
Postpositions, instead of prepositions → correlated with SOV word
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order
Altaic languages
Typological tendencies
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i. Prepositions ii. Auxiliary–V order
(14) John must eat pizza.
(15) He walked into the forest.
We observe typological tendencies across languages:
SVO languages SOV languages
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i. Postpositions ii. V–Auxiliary order
Te uthai yabuci acambi. now at-once act must
(17)
‘Now, I must act at once’ manae xüü surguuli-da orno
our son school-into enter ‘Our son will enter school’ (Mongolian)
Altaic languages
Why do certain grammatical properties correlate with others?
Languages with SOV order are likely to have postpositions and auxiliaries following the main verb
⇒T h e last three properties (SOV, postpositions and V–Aux order) should not be taken as independent pieces of evidence for relatedness.
Why do we find these correlations?
Since they are found across languages and language families, they cannot be accidental. Rather, they follow from a fundamental property of the structure of natural language
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Altaic languages
Back to syntax: How do we get SVO order?
(18) John talked about Bill.
S
VP
PP
P NP about
N Bill
NP
N V John talked
NP, VP, PP etc. are phrases N, V, P are heads Every phrase has a head!!! The phrase is of the same category as its head, e.g. the head of NP must be a N, the head of VP must be a V, etc.
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Altaic languages
Back to syntax: How do we get SVO order?
(19) John saw Bill.
S
VP
N Bill
V NP talked
NP
N John
Some phrases contain just the head (e.g. the NPs here) Others consist of a head and something else: Here, the VP has two daughters: its head (V) and object NP The head is on the left in English
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Altaic languages
The Head Parameter: left or right
S
NP
N V NP John saw
N Bill
What if we swap the order of V and the object NP?
S
NP V saw
N Bill
VP NP VP
N John
⇒ SVO order ⇒ SOV order
(20) The Head Parameter: a. Phrases are left-headed (English, Spanish, Russian etc) b. Phrases are right-headed (Japanese, Turkish, Georgian etc)
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Altaic languages
Deriving the typological tendencies
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We observe typological tendencies across languages:
SVO languages i. Prepositions ii. Auxiliary–V order
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(22)
John must eat pizza.
He walked into the forest.
SOV languages i. Postpositions ii. V–Auxiliary order
(23) Te uthai yabuci now at-once act acambi.
(24)
must.1sg ‘Now, I must act at once’ manae xüü surguuli-da orno our son school-into enter ‘Our son will enter school’ (Mongolian)
Altaic languages
Position of auxiliaries
Why do auxiliaries precede main verbs in English?
(25) John must see Bill.
S
AuxP
Aux VP must
V NP see
NP
N John
N Bill
⇒ S Aux V O order
An auxiliary is the head of AuxP.
AuxP consists of its head (Aux) and the VP
The reason why auxiliaries precede verbs in English is because English is a left headed language
A single syntactic property (left-headedness) derives both the SVO order, and the Aux-V order! → correlation derived
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Altaic languages
Position of auxiliaries in right- and left-headed languages
S
AuxP
V NP see
N Bill
Aux VP must
NP
N John
(26) John must see Bill.
S
AuxP
VP Aux must
NP V see
N Bill
NP
N John
(27)
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Te uthai yabuci acambi. now at-once act must.1sg ‘Now, I must act at once’
Altaic languages
Another correlation of SVO/SOV: prepositions vs postposition
N school
P NP to
V PP went
N John
(28) John went to school.
V went
N school
S S
NP VP NP VP
N PP John
NP P to
(29)
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manae xüü surguuli-da orno our son school-into enter ‘Our son will enter school’
Altaic languages
Putting it together
The correlations are explained by the Head Parameter
In a left-headed language, the head precedes its sister, and therefore: the verb precedes the object (SVO) auxiliary precedes the verb pre-positions (they precede the noun)
In a right-headed language, the head follows its sister, and therefore: the verb follows the object (SOV) auxiliary follows the verb post-positions (they follow the noun)
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