Re: Korean (was Re: Alphabet)

At 2:22 PM -0500 11/02/01, 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.
Is Chukchi considered an Altaic language? I had understood it to be
an isolate. It also has vowel harmony, but it is tongue root harmony
and not rounding/backing harmony.

Nez Perce also has tongue root harmony which is very similar to that
of Chukchi. Many African languages have tongue root harmony. Some
argue that Javanese (and other Western Austronesian languages) have
vowel harmony as well.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                              Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead;
therefore we must learn both arts."            - Thomas Carlyle

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