Re: Conlangs in History

On Sun, 20 Aug 2000, John Cowan wrote:

> On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> > That's pretty much  what I do with Korean.  :-/  French and German aren't
> > *that* similar, but from the perspective of Korean (isolate or grouped
> > with Japanese or Altaic, depending on whom you believe--I haven't heard
> > any definite answer on what family it belongs to!),
>
> You aren't going to, either.  Short of discovering some kind of
> monument of proto-Korean, we just aren't going to be able to nail down
> whether Japanese and Korean are part of Altaic or not.  Some people
> claim that Altaic isn't a real family either, just the result of
> a lot of borrowing by Mongolian (at the center) from Turkic and
> by Tungus from Mongolian.
Pity.  It's frustrating not knowing where they come from, just because of
personal curiosity...OTOH, there are Basque and others (is that right?).
According to World Book (well, the decade-old paper ed. we have back in
Korea) Koreans are descended from the Mongols, but I'm not sure where
that information comes from.

YHL