Re: Japanese from Tungus
| From: | Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, January 26, 2005, 21:27 |
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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.
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