Re: Korean (was Re: Alphabet)

--- Dirk Elzinga <Dirk_Elzinga@...> wrote:
> At 2:22 PM -0500 11/02/01, John Cowan wrote:
> >Frank George Valoczy wrote:
> >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.
Vowel harmony in the Tungusic languages also is one of
tongue root advancement/retraction, rather than
"front/back" as in the Turkic languages, and Mongolian
too, I guess. Though in the latter, it really seems to
me to be a matter of rounding/unrounding harmony for
some sets of vowels (the u & o vowel sets, I mean).

Part of the confusion has been that the traditional
Mongolian writing system was borrowed from Uighur, and
Turkic orthographic habits came with it.  Modern
scholars (19th-20th century) of Mongolian have almost
all been philologists above all else, who have
strongly resisted these newfangled ideas (that is,
post-1900) about linguistics.  What little fieldwork
that gets done has often been fit into or around the
12th-13th century imported orthography of classical
Mongolian.

A depressing field... I couldn't stomach it any more
and came back to research administration.

Anyway, like Dirk suggests (not to put words in your
mouth, Dirk!) vowel harmony is a dubious criteria for
"genetic relatedness" -- especially when there's also
no single form of harmony *within* the putative Altaic
family.

Kenji
(a dang "splitter", obviously)

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