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43-613: Tengiz , Teniz (Kazakh: Теңіз ; Russian: Тениз ), or Tengis is a Turco-Mongol word meaning sea . It may refer to: Altaic languages The Altaic ( / æ l ˈ t eɪ . ɪ k / ) languages consist of the Turkic , Mongolic and Tungusic language families , with some linguists including the Koreanic and Japonic families. These languages share agglutinative morphology, head-final word order and some vocabulary. The once-popular theory attributing these similarities to

86-622: A Turkic language are the Orkhon inscriptions , 720–735 AD. They were deciphered in 1893 by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in a scholarly race with his rival, the German–Russian linguist Wilhelm Radloff . However, Radloff was the first to publish the inscriptions. The first Tungusic language to be attested is Jurchen , the language of the ancestors of the Manchus . A writing system for it

129-713: A basis for a multiethnic nationalist movement. The earliest attested expressions in Proto-Turkic are recorded in various Chinese sources. Anna Dybo identifies in Shizi (330 BCE) and the Book of Han (111 CE) several dozen Proto-Turkic exotisms in Chinese Han transcriptions. Lanhai Wei and Hui Li reconstruct the name of the Xiōngnú ruling house as PT * Alayundluğ /alajuntˈluγ/ 'piebald horse clan.' The earliest known texts in

172-543: A closer relationship among those languages. Later proposals to include the Korean and Japanese languages into a "Macro-Altaic" family have always been controversial. The original proposal was sometimes called "Micro-Altaic" by retronymy . Most proponents of Altaic continue to support the inclusion of Korean, but fewer do for Japanese. Some proposals also included Ainuic but this is not widely accepted even among Altaicists themselves. A common ancestral Proto-Altaic language for

215-466: A collection of 25 poems, of which some go back to the Three Kingdoms period (57 BC–668 AD), but are preserved in an orthography that only goes back to the 9th century AD. Korean is copiously attested from the mid-15th century on in the phonetically precise Hangul system of writing. The earliest known reference to a unified language group of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages is from

258-597: A common ancestry has long been rejected by most comparative linguists in favor of language contact , although it continues to be supported by a small but stable scholarly minority. Like the Uralic language family, which is named after the Ural Mountains, the group is named after the Altai mountain range in the center of Asia. The core grouping of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic is sometimes called "Micro-Altaic", with

301-469: A family consisting of Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic languages, but not Turkic or Mongolic. However, many linguists dispute the alleged affinities of Korean and Japanese to the other three groups. Some authors instead tried to connect Japanese to the Austronesian languages . In 2017, Martine Robbeets proposed that Japanese (and possibly Korean) originated as a hybrid language . She proposed that

344-586: A limited degree of scholarly support, in contrast to some other early macrofamily proposals. Continued research on Altaic is still being undertaken by a core group of academic linguists, but their research has not found wider support. In particular it has support from the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and remains influential as a substratum of Turanism , where a hypothetical common linguistic ancestor has been used in part as

387-733: A list of 2,800 proposed cognate sets, as well as a few important changes to the reconstruction of Proto-Altaic. The authors tried hard to distinguish loans between Turkic and Mongolic and between Mongolic and Tungusic from cognates; and suggest words that occur in Turkic and Tungusic but not in Mongolic. All other combinations between the five branches also occur in the book. It lists 144 items of shared basic vocabulary, including words for such items as 'eye', 'ear', 'neck', 'bone', 'blood', 'water', 'stone', 'sun', and 'two'. Robbeets and Bouckaert (2018) use Bayesian phylolinguistic methods to argue for

430-618: A typological study that does not directly evaluate the validity of the Altaic hypothesis, Yurayong and Szeto (2020) discuss for Koreanic and Japonic the stages of convergence to the Altaic typological model and subsequent divergence from that model, which resulted in the present typological similarity between Koreanic and Japonic. They state that both are "still so different from the Core Altaic languages that we can even speak of an independent Japanese-Korean type of grammar. Given also that there

473-399: Is generally regarded as a language isolate . Starting in the late 1950s, some linguists became increasingly critical of even the minimal Altaic family hypothesis, disputing the alleged evidence of genetic connection between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages. Among the earlier critics were Gerard Clauson (1956), Gerhard Doerfer (1963), and Alexander Shcherbak. They claimed that

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516-542: Is neither a strong proof of common Proto-Altaic lexical items nor solid regular sound correspondences but, rather, only lexical and structural borrowings between languages of the Altaic typology, our results indirectly speak in favour of a “Paleo-Asiatic” origin of the Japonic and Koreanic languages." In 1962, John C. Street proposed an alternative classification, with Turkic-Mongolic-Tungusic in one grouping and Korean-Japanese- Ainu in another, joined in what he designated as

559-632: Is the Memorial for Yelü Yanning , written in the Khitan large script and dated to 986 AD. However, the Inscription of Hüis Tolgoi , discovered in 1975 and analysed as being in an early form of Mongolic, has been dated to 604–620 AD. The Bugut inscription dates back to 584 AD. Japanese is first attested in the form of names contained in a few short inscriptions in Classical Chinese from

602-616: The Liao dynasty . Yelü Yanning's family belonged to the imperial household and had a place in the horizontal gers of the Khitan Khan. His great-grandfather Gaoligu, grandfather Zhiwubu and his father Sage were all widely known as brave and expert warriors who repeatedly accomplished meritorious deeds. His father Sage was given the title "Imperial Tutor Honorable Duke". When the Jingzong Emperor Yelü Xian succeeded to

645-439: The ancestral home of the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages was somewhere in northwestern Manchuria . A group of those proto-Altaic ("Transeurasian") speakers would have migrated south into the modern Liaoning province, where they would have been mostly assimilated by an agricultural community with an Austronesian -like language. The fusion of the two languages would have resulted in proto-Japanese and proto-Korean. In

688-515: The "Macro" family has been tentatively reconstructed by Sergei Starostin and others. Micro-Altaic includes about 66 living languages, to which Macro-Altaic would add Korean, Jeju , Japanese, and the Ryukyuan languages , for a total of about 74 (depending on what is considered a language and what is considered a dialect ). These numbers do not include earlier states of languages, such as Middle Mongol , Old Korean , or Old Japanese . In 1844,

731-498: The "North Asiatic" family. The inclusion of Ainu was adopted also by James Patrie in 1982. The Turkic-Mongolic-Tungusic and Korean-Japanese-Ainu groupings were also posited in 2000–2002 by Joseph Greenberg . However, he treated them as independent members of a larger family, which he termed Eurasiatic . The inclusion of Ainu is not widely accepted by Altaicists. In fact, no convincing genealogical relationship between Ainu and any other language family has been demonstrated, and it

774-416: The "Uralic" branch. The term continues to be used for the central Eurasian typological, grammatical and lexical convergence zone. Indeed, "Ural-Altaic" may be preferable to "Altaic" in this sense. For example, Juha Janhunen states that "speaking of 'Altaic' instead of 'Ural-Altaic' is a misconception, for there are no areal or typological features that are specific to 'Altaic' without Uralic." In 1857,

817-543: The 1692 work of Nicolaes Witsen which may be based on a 1661 work of Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur , Genealogy of the Turkmens . A proposed grouping of the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages was published in 1730 by Philip Johan von Strahlenberg , a Swedish officer who traveled in the eastern Russian Empire while a prisoner of war after the Great Northern War . However, he may not have intended to imply

860-434: The 1991 lexical lists and added other phonological and grammatical arguments. Starostin's book was criticized by Stefan Georg in 2004 and 2005, and by Alexander Vovin in 2005. Other defenses of the theory, in response to the criticisms of Georg and Vovin, were published by Starostin in 2005, Blažek in 2006, Robbeets in 2007, and Dybo and G. Starostin in 2008. In 2010, Lars Johanson echoed Miller's 1996 rebuttal to

903-729: The 5th century AD, such as found on the Inariyama Sword . The first substantial text in Japanese, however, is the Kojiki , which dates from 712 AD. It is followed by the Nihon shoki , completed in 720, and then by the Man'yōshū , which dates from c. 771–785, but includes material that is from about 400 years earlier. The most important text for the study of early Korean is the Hyangga ,

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946-582: The Austrian scholar Anton Boller suggested adding Japanese to the Ural–Altaic family. In the 1920s, G.J. Ramstedt and E.D. Polivanov advocated the inclusion of Korean. Decades later, in his 1952 book, Ramstedt rejected the Ural–Altaic hypothesis but again included Korean in Altaic, an inclusion followed by most leading Altaicists (supporters of the theory) to date. His book contained the first comprehensive attempt to identify regular correspondences among

989-754: The Finnish philologist Matthias Castrén proposed a broader grouping which later came to be called the Ural–Altaic family , which included Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus (=Tungusic) as an "Altaic" branch, and also the Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic languages as the "Uralic" branch (though Castrén himself used the terms "Tataric" and "Chudic"). The name "Altaic" referred to the Altai Mountains in East-Central Asia, which are approximately

1032-476: The analysis supported the Altaic grouping, although it was "older than most other language families in Eurasia, such as Indo-European or Finno-Ugric, and this is the reason why the modern Altaic languages preserve few common elements". In 1991 and again in 1996, Roy Miller defended the Altaic hypothesis and claimed that the criticisms of Clauson and Doerfer apply exclusively to the lexical correspondences, whereas

1075-525: The center of the geographic range of the three main families. The name "Uralic" referred to the Ural Mountains . While the Ural-Altaic family hypothesis can still be found in some encyclopedias, atlases, and similar general references, since the 1960s it has been heavily criticized. Even linguists who accept the basic Altaic family, such as Sergei Starostin , completely discard the inclusion of

1118-507: The coherence of the "narrow" Altaic languages (Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic) together with Japonic and Koreanic, which they refer to as the Transeurasian languages. Their results include the following phylogenetic tree: Japonic Koreanic Tungusic Mongolic Turkic Memorial for Yel%C3%BC Yanning The Memorial for Yelü Yanning (耶律延寧) is the oldest known Khitan inscription of significant length and for now

1161-489: The critics, and called for a muting of the polemic. The list below comprises linguists who have worked specifically on the Altaic problem since the publication of the first volume of Ramstedt's Einführung in 1952. The dates given are those of works concerning Altaic. For supporters of the theory, the version of Altaic they favor is given at the end of the entry, if other than the prevailing one of Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic–Korean–Japanese. In Robbeets and Johanson (2010), there

1204-629: The deep trust of the Jingzong Emperor and Empress Xiaochuo. After the Jingzong Emperor died in 982, Empress Xiao was regent. During this time the Zubu confederacy ( Keraites ) in central Mongolia raised armies against the Liao dynasty and pushed eastwards, profoundly affecting the Niaogu, Dilie, Shiwei ( Mongols ) and others. Emperor Shengzong Yelü Longxu and Empress Xiao sent Yelü Yanning to pacify

1247-479: The different uses of Altaic as to which group of languages is included, 2) to reduce the counterproductive polarization between "Pro-Altaists" and "Anti-Altaists"; 3) to broaden the applicability of the term because the suffix -ic implies affinity while -an leaves room for an areal hypothesis; and 4) to eliminate the reference to the Altai mountains as a potential homeland. In Robbeets and Savelyev, ed. (2020) there

1290-427: The expanded group including Koreanic and Japonic labelled as "Macro-Altaic" or "Transeurasian". The Altaic family was first proposed in the 18th century. It was widely accepted until the 1960s and is still listed in many encyclopedias and handbooks, and references to Altaic as a language family continue to percolate to modern sources through these older sources. Since the 1950s, most comparative linguists have rejected

1333-532: The first and second syllables of words occurred in Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic. They also included a number of grammatical correspondences between the languages. Starostin claimed in 1991 that the members of the proposed Altaic group shared about 15–20% of apparent cognates within a 110-word Swadesh-Yakhontov list ; in particular, Turkic–Mongolic 20%, Turkic–Tungusic 18%, Turkic–Korean 17%, Mongolic–Tungusic 22%, Mongolic–Korean 16%, and Tungusic–Korean 21%. The 2003 Etymological Dictionary includes

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1376-436: The most pressing evidence for the theory is the similarities in verbal morphology . The Etymological Dictionary by Starostin and others (2003) proposes a set of sound change laws that would explain the evolution from Proto-Altaic to the descendant languages. For example, although most of today's Altaic languages have vowel harmony, Proto-Altaic as reconstructed by them lacked it; instead, various vowel assimilations between

1419-544: The most pressing evidence for the theory is the similarities in verbal morphology. In 2003, Claus Schönig published a critical overview of the history of the Altaic hypothesis up to that time, siding with the earlier criticisms of Clauson, Doerfer, and Shcherbak. In 2003, Starostin, Anna Dybo and Oleg Mudrak published the Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages , which expanded

1462-544: The oldest major written attestation of a Mongolic (or Para-Mongolic) language. Dated 986, it is written in the Mongolic Khitan language using the Khitan large script . With 19 lines and 271 characters it was found in 1964 at Baimu Mountain, Chaoyang County, Liaoning, China. and is now kept in the Liaoning Province Museum , China . The Khitan word 'jau' (hundred) which occurs in line 13 of

1505-450: The proposal, after supposed cognates were found not to be valid, hypothesized sound shifts were not found, and Turkic and Mongolic languages were found to have been converging rather than diverging over the centuries. The relationship between the Altaic languages is now generally accepted to be the result of a sprachbund rather than common ancestry, with the languages showing influence from prolonged contact . Altaic has maintained

1548-490: The sound systems within the Altaic language families. In 1960, Nicholas Poppe published what was in effect a heavily revised version of Ramstedt's volume on phonology that has since set the standard in Altaic studies. Poppe considered the issue of the relationship of Korean to Turkic-Mongolic-Tungusic not settled. In his view, there were three possibilities: (1) Korean did not belong with the other three genealogically, but had been influenced by an Altaic substratum; (2) Korean

1591-535: The throne Yelü Yanning was recruited as a jinshi (close supporter). Yelü Yanning was gradually given various titles such as "State-defending Righteous Outstanding Minister", "Sublime Fortunate Minister", "High Inspector", "Imperial Censor", "State High Support" and "Great General". He was given 500 families in Qishui county. Yanning scrupulously performed his guard duties, always ensuring the Emperor's safety and earning

1634-496: The upper-right Khitan section of the inscription and which is written with the large script character 百 is one of the earliest fully deciphered Mongolic words preserved in a Mongolic inscription. Yelü Yanning is not mentioned in the Liaoshi or other Khitan historical documents. The discovery of his memorial inscription in 1964 gave the first information about him. Yelü Yanning (946-985) was a high ranking Khitan military officer of

1677-436: The words and features shared by Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages were for the most part borrowings and that the rest could be attributed to chance resemblances. In 1988, Doerfer again rejected all the genetic claims over these major groups. A major continuing supporter of the Altaic hypothesis has been Sergei Starostin , who published a comparative lexical analysis of the Altaic languages in 1991. He concluded that

1720-399: Was a concerted effort to distinguish "Altaic" as a subgroup of "Transeurasian" consisting only of Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic, while retaining "Transeurasian" as "Altaic" plus Japonic and Koreanic. The original arguments for grouping the "micro-Altaic" languages within a Uralo-Altaic family were based on such shared features as vowel harmony and agglutination . According to Roy Miller,

1763-422: Was a proposal to replace the name "Altaic" with the name "Transeurasian". While "Altaic" has sometimes included Japonic, Koreanic, and other languages or families, but only on the consideration of particular authors, "Transeurasian" was specifically intended to always include Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Japonic, and Koreanic. Robbeets and Johanson gave as their reasoning for the new term: 1) to avoid confusion between

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1806-594: Was devised in 1119 AD and an inscription using this system is known from 1185 (see List of Jurchen inscriptions ). The earliest Mongolic language of which we have written evidence is known as Middle Mongol . It is first attested by an inscription dated to 1224 or 1225 AD, the Stele of Yisüngge , and by the Secret History of the Mongols , written in 1228 (see Mongolic languages ). The earliest Para-Mongolic text

1849-549: Was related to the other three at the same level they were related to each other; (3) Korean had split off from the other three before they underwent a series of characteristic changes. Roy Andrew Miller 's 1971 book Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages convinced most Altaicists that Japanese also belonged to Altaic. Since then, the "Macro-Altaic" has been generally assumed to include Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese. In 1990, Unger advocated

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