Re: Conlangs in History

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.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
C'est la` pourtant que se livre le sens du dire, de ce que, s'y conjuguant
le nyania qui bruit des sexes en compagnie, il supplee a ce qu'entre eux,
de rapport nyait pas.               -- Jacques Lacan, "L'Etourdit"