Re: Korean (was Re: Alphabet)

On Fri, 2 Nov 2001, John Cowan wrote:

> Frank George Valoczy wrote:
>
>
> > Aha! Yet more proof for my "theory" that Korean is a Uralic language
> > ;-) (or more accurately, one of my radical and outrageous claims that I
> > expect to have shot down).
>
> Altaic languages are big on vowel harmony too, and nobody can quite
> agree whether Altaic is just {Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic} or includes
> Korean and Japanese too.  Some people think it's not even a family
> but a Sprachbund: the connections between Turkic and Mongolian on
> the one hand, and between Mongolian and Tungusic on the other, being
> a lot more compelling than any direct Turkic-Tungusic link.
>
> And some still think Uralic and Altaic are linked, too.
I'm one of them, off and on. Sometimes I find something that screams to
me, "Ural-Altaic" and then sometimes I find something that says,
"naah". At the moment I'm of the former opinion, with Eskimo-Aleut and
Yukagir in the mix too.

---frank