Language dispersals and the “Secondary Peoples’ Revolution”

Population growth and demic diffusion help explain the early Neolithic expansions of agriculture and Transeurasian languages in Northeast Asia. By the Bronze Age, alluvial agrarian states had come to possess considerable political and economic dominance over their subjects in the civilizational centers of Eurasia. At the same time, however, Bronze Age economies offered new opportunities for trade and secondary expansion into areas outside state control. This chapter argues that the resulting population movements—here termed the “secondary peoples’ revolution”—were of great significance in the post-Neolithic dispersals of Transeurasian languages. Four examples are briefly discussed: steppe nomadic pastoralism, Sakha horse and cattle husbandry, northeast Asian hunter-gatherers, and agriculture associated with trade/piracy networks in the Ryukyu Islands.

Contact between genealogically related languages

Although the reconstruction of Proto-Japano-Koreanic is still a work in progress, it is already sufficiently robust to establish a genetic relationship between Korean and Japanese. Furthermore, against the background of the cognates that have been reconstructed so far, the roughly three dozen clearly identifiable borrowings from Old Korean into Old Japanese amount to only about six percent of all matches. Claims that all structural similarities between Korean and Japanese are due to ancient borrowings must therefore be rejected. To answer the question of whether Proto-Japano-Koreanic is better regarded as a first-order daughter of Transeurasian or as a branch of Macro-Tungusic, it would be better to compare reconstructed Proto-Japano-Koreanic forms “by hand” separately with forms in Proto-Tungusic, Proto-Mongolic, and Proto-Turkic than to rely on statistical analyses of so-called core vocabulary.

Numerals in the Transeurasian languages

This chapter presents all relevant forms of the cardinal numerals 1‒10, 20‒90, 100, and sometimes also teens and ordinals, in all described Transeurasian languages. Besides all modern languages, where maximum accuracy in transcription is preferred, the old literary and epigraphic languages (Orkhon Runic, Old Uyghur, Karakhanid, Old Oghuz, Chaghatai; Middle Mongol, Written Mongol; Jurchen, Manchu; Middle Korean; Old and Classic Japanese), are also analyzed, including some relic languages known only fragmentarily (Kuman, Old Bulgar; Kitan; Baekje, Silla; Koguryo). On the basis of regular phonetic correspondences the related forms are projected into the partial daughter protolanguages: Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Korean. Instead of Proto-Japonic, the Old Japanese forms serve for this purpose. Applying the comparative etymological method to the final comparison between these partial protolanguages should lead to identification of inherited cognates from borrowings in agreement with phonetic rules, semantic typology, and in the perspective of possible influences of hypothetical substrata, adstrata, and superstrata.

Uyghur and Uzbek, the Southeastern Turkic languages

This chapter provides a general overview of the two Turkic languages spoken in Central Asia, Modern Uyghur and Uzbek in the southeastern group of Turkic, paying special attention to their relation and peculiarities. The languages share particular linguistic features such as palatalization of an original intervocalic -d- to -y-, the preservation of the suffix-initial uvular consonant in -GAn, long consonants in in some numerals, and the use of verbal nouns in -(X)š. Among the differences we find Uyghur umlauting, Uzbek labialized back vowel å, the Uzbek derivative suffix -li, the Uzbek use of auxiliary verbs to code actionality, etc. This chapter also briefly addresses the writing systems of the two languages, and contact with neighboring languages as well as their regional varieties.

Turkish and the Southwestern Turkic (Oghuz) languages

The Southwestern (Oghuz) branch of Turkic consists of languages that are largely mutually intelligible, and are similar with respect to their structural properties. Because Turkish is the most prominent member of this branch with respect to number of speakers, and because it is the best-studied language in this group, this chapter describes modern standard Turkish as the representative of that branch and limits itself to describing Turkish. The morphology of Oghuz languages is agglutinative and suffixing; their phonology has vowel harmony for the features of backness and rounding; their basic word order is SOV, but most are quite free in their word order and are wh-in-situ languages; their relative clauses exhibit gaps corresponding to the clause-external head, and most embedded clauses are nominalized. Fully verbal embedded clauses are found, too. The lexicon, while largely Turkic, also has borrowings from Arabic, Persian, French, English, and Modern Greek and Italian.

Khalkha Mongolian

This chapter gives an introduction to the basic structures of Khalkha Mongolian, most of which are similar to those of Mongolian proper in general. Segmental phonology (vowels and consonants) and word structure are analyzed. Major changes from earlier stages of the language are described briefly, as is the writing system, based on the Cyrillic alphabet. Vowel harmony, based on pharyngeality (ATR) and rounding, has several interesting properties, including the opacity of high rounded vowels to rounding harmony. There is a rich derivational and inflectional morphology based on suffixes. Basic syntactic structures, including word order and case marking of arguments in simple and complex clauses, are described, as are the functions of different verb forms (finite verbs, converbs, and participles). The description emphasizes the central place of Mongolian proper in the typology of the Transeurasian languages.

Japanese and the mainland dialects

After a brief discussion on the relationships between modern mainland dialects with the two varieties of Old Japanese, Central Old Japanese and Eastern Old Japanese, the salient features of Standard Japanese are described from the new perspective of grammatical nominalizations. Then cross-dialectal studies are presented on selected topics, centering on case particles and the conclusive/adnominal verbal patterns. Also presented for the first time in English is a reasonably detailed description of the isolated dialect of Hachijō Island, which, like Ryūkyūan, retains many archaic features of Old Japanese.

A Bayesian approach to the classification of the Turkic languages

Despite more than 150 years of research, the internal structure of the Turkic language family remains a controversial issue. In this study, the Bayesian phylogenetic approach is employed in order to provide an independent verification of the contemporary views on Turkic linguistic history. The data underlying the study are Turkic basic vocabularies, which are resistant to replacement and likely to reflect the genealogical relationships among the Turkic languages. The method tested in the chapter is based on the strict clock model of evolution, which assumes that relevant changes occur at the same rate at every branch of the family. This study supports the widespread view that the binary split between Bulgharic and Common Turkic was the earliest split in the Turkic family. The model further replicates most of the conventional subgroups within the Common Turkic branch. Based on a Bayesian analysis, the time depth of Proto-Turkic is estimated to be around 2,119 years BP, which is in accordance with the traditional estimates of 2,000–2,500 years BP.

The classification of the Mongolic languages

The Mongolic languages constitute a compact language family with limited written history. Given the paucity of decisive shared features such as sound laws, it has been relatively hard to set up a Mongolic family tree. Owing to the steady increase in the number of sufficiently studied Mongolic languages and dialects in the past 60 years, Mongolists have reached a rough consensus. This chapter will provide a brief overview of published opinions and a survey of phonological, morphological, and lexical arguments traditionally used in classification. In addition, it will attempt to make use of irregular, not easily repeated, developments as an alternative avenue to fine-tune the classification.

The classification of the Japonic languages

The chapter starts with an overview of the history of dialect classification in Japan. A puzzling aspect of the distribution pattern of the Japanese dialects is the fact that many features, which cannot all be explained as retentions or simplifications, recur in geographically distant areas. These similarities have been commonly but unsatisfyingly regarded as the result of parallel independent developments. Phonological (including tonal), morphological, and lexical features are selected to illustrate the splits that result in the different branches of Japonic. Based on shared innovations, the new classification at the end of the chapter proposes a Izumo-Tōhoku branch, as well as a Kyūshū-Ryūkyū branch.