Re: question - Turco-Japanese (a thought experiment for the group here)

As I haven't already said it, I would like to wish all Americans out
there (and any who wish it) a happy Thanksgiving day!

Note that I am responding to multiple posts herein.
------------------------------------------------------
From:    Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
> AFAIK, the fate of almost every successful Mongol invasion was--- complete
> assimilation of the conqueror to the local culture/language (Mughal India,
> China).  A few loanwords here and there, maybe, but no profound effect.
Certainly true.

> Their unsuccessful invasions of Europe and the Middle East had almost no
> lasting effect (of course they were driven back and didn't hang around for
> long). Compare also the "barbarian" Germanic invasions of the Roman Empire.
> Germanic loans in Romance langs. are a very short list; structural
> influences almost nil.
I would have to contest this.  IIRC, about 15% of the French lexicon
goes back to borrowings from early Germanic languages, and the old
French pattern of V2 inversion is usually said to go back to a borrowing
from Germanic languages. All the Romance languages have absorbed large
numbers of loans from the Germanic and other invaders (Slavs, in
particular).

> (Possible influence on social structure?? IIRC (and I
> may not) didn't feudalism arise out of Germanic institutions? Need to
> re-read my Toynbee........)
Toynbee is, almost by definition, too cursory to give you an interesting
answer to most questions.  Yes, it is the case that a number of institutions,
especially legal ones, have Germanic rather than Roman antecessors.  But
I would not say that Feudalism arose from Germanic institutions per se,
but rather were an independent development.

> For a conquering group's language/culture to be adopted by the defeated
> group, seems to require that the conqueror's qualities are perceived somehow
> as "superior" and desirable.
This is only rarely the case.  One potential case is that of the
Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, who began adopting the Spanish language
and Hispanic institutions relatively soon after the conquest.  I would
argue that this is the exception that proves the rule, however:  when
the Spanish introduced smallpox and other Old World diseases to Mexico,
within 10 years Mesoamerica's population of 26 million or so had been
reduced by around 75% to 6.5 million.  Such a demographic collapse had
an effect even greater than the Black Death in Europe, causing the
indigenous communities to lose faith in all their native institutions.

> Or else perhaps, simply overwhelming numbers--
This is much, much more frequently the case.

> as the Turks in Anatolia.
The Turks did have great numbers, but Greek didn't cease to be spoken
in Anatolia in large numbers until Ataturk expelled all the Greek
speakers in the 20th century.

> Something that has always intrigued me about Anatolia-- what happened to all
> the Greek- (and perhaps other-)speaking people who were there before the
> Turks came? Did their languages have no effect on Turkish??
At the beginning of the 20th century, Greece and Turkey both had
large numbers of Turkish/Greek minorities in their respective
countries.  Under Ataturk, they agreed on a mutual exchange of
population, which effectively eliminated Greek in Turkey and
Turkish in Greece.

> Only the Armenians seem to have survived.
Not so:  Kurdish, Laz (related to Georgian), and many others
are still around:

<http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=Turkey+%28Asia%29>

==================================================

Date:    Tue, 23 Nov 2004 19:37:57 +0100
From:    Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Subject: Re: question - Turco-Japanese  (a thought experiment for the
         group              here)

> I've always wondered about this too. Why was Anatolia turkicized when
> Iran never was. One should note, tho, that there were alot of
> graecophones in Anatolia up to that little population exchange project
> after WWI.
Well, Iran partly *was* Turkicized.  We just call that part of Persia
"Azerbaijan".  (Azeri is so close to Turkish that it is mostly mutually
intelligible.)

==================================================

Date:    Tue, 23 Nov 2004 19:04:23 -0000
From:    caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...>
Subject: Re: question - Turco-Japanese  (a thought experiment for the group
         here)

In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Roger Mills <rfmilly@M...> wrote:

> > Something that has always intrigued me about Anatolia-- what
> > happened to all the Greek- (and perhaps other-)speaking people who
> > were there before the Turks came? Did their languages have no effect
> > on Turkish?  Only the Armenians seem to have survived.
>
> What about the Georgians and the Azerbaijani?  A number of smaller
> ethnic groups have surfaced in that region since the collapse of the
> Soviet Union.
As I pointed out earlier, lots and lots of indigenous languages
survived the Ottoman empire.  The Georgians who converted to Islam
actually speak a language closely related to Mingrelian called Laz,
and mostly live just north and south of the border around Batumi.

As I also pointed out above, the Azeris are basically also Turks,
and would have probably been identified as the same group, early
on especially.  (Even today, the Turkish and Azeri governments
tend to automatically take the other's side in international affairs.)

=================================================================

Roger wrote:

> Charlie and Rodlox have pointed out the survival of Greek and other
> populations in the Ottoman period. Clearly the Georgians must have fled, and
> Armenians lost much of their territory.
Probably not.  As far as anyone knows, the Georgians have more or less
always lived where they do today.  Any Georgians who lived in the Empire
simply happened to fall on one side of the border.

> I was thinking more of the much
> earlier groups-- the Phrygians, Lydians, Lycians-- some of whom did survive
> at least into the early Christian Era, and whose languages _might_ have
> survived in enclaves for a little longer. But it's probably true that they'd
> been assimilated to Greek language by, say, 10-1100 C.E., and certainly by
> 1453.
I just asked my Hittitologist friend about these matters, and he says that
although there are some tomb inscriptions dated as late as the first
century for Pisidian (written with Greek letters), almost all of the
information is onomastic, and thus it is not clear to what extent the
natives of these regions were preserving their old name-giving traditions
and using Greek for all other linguistic domains, or whether they were
indeed preserving their indigenous language in some realms.  He guesses
(and one can do no more than that) that these languages were dead by
the second century, having been replaced by Greek.

> Looking back even further, one might ask, Whatever became of the Hittites
> (linguistically)?
According to my Hittitologist friend, Hittite in all likelihood died
sometime during the Bronze Age.  The evidence that are adduced to this
are: (1) there are no attestations of Hittite -- at all -- after the
fall of Hattusas around 1190 BC; (2) there are no attestations of Hittite,
or indeed even Luwian, in the form of mercantile records or other signs
of use in daily life, during the Empire, or before or after; (3) the Neo-
Hittite states in Syria during the early first millenium used Luwian,
not Hittite. The Hittite empire was one of the world's first truely
multinational states, dominating the Kaskans to the North, the Hurrians
to the south, and at times a number of states bordering the Aegean to the
 west.  It may be that, certainly by the end of the Bronze Age, Hittite
had succumbed to one or more of these ethnolinguistic groups and was a
purely scholarly language, like related Palaic or unrelated Hattic, while
Luwian was the actual tongue of the Royal Court, as well as the speech
of most of the Empire.  Thus, not entirely unlike Latin for the
Byzantines.

(It is an interesting fact about the Hittites that they often
preserved texts in many otherwise dead languages because they felt
it best to have as many gods on one's side as possible, and that
all gods must be spoken to in their respective language.  Thus,
we often find documents stating "The following is a prayer to
the Storm God in Palaic" or "The following is a hymn to the
Wind God in Hattic".)

> AFAIK, there's great doubt about whether Phrygian, Lydian
> et al. and/or Armenian, in any way represent descendants or relatives of
> Hittite. Was Hittite a total dead-end?
These languages were certainly not descendents of Hittite, and
in the case of Armenian, not even Anatolian. (Armenian has long
been associated with Caucasian languages, although Herodotus says
the Armenians originated in the Balkans.)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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