Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Japanese from Tungus

From:Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 26, 2005, 21:27
Hallo!

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 19:03:11 +0000,
Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

> As far as I know, that Japanese and Korean are related is not proven.
I agree to that. I am also skeptical about their inclusion into Altaic, which I think has been done mainly for typological reasons. (Greenberg does not include Japanese and Korean into Altaic, but he nevertheless includes them into his Eurasiatic macrofamily.) But as you wrote a few lines above:
> If one judges simply by similarities of structure, then a good > case can be made out for a relationship between the Celtic and semitic > languages; but few would take such a relationship seriously.
Indeed. In the case of Celtic and Semitic, we of course know that the Celtic languages are Indo-European and acquired their "Semitic" features secondarily, possibly from an unknown substratum. (And the Semitic languages are known to be Afro-Asiatic, which probably did not display all of the "typically Semitic" features, either.) Greetings, Jörg.

Reply

Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>