The Tungusic Languages

Download or read book The Tungusic Languages written by Alexander Vovin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tungusic Languages is a survey of Tungusic, a language family which is seriously endangered today, but which at the time of its maximum spread was present all over Northeast Asia. This volume offers a systematic succession of separate chapters on all the individual Tungusic languages, as well as a number of additional chapters containing contextual information on the language family as a whole, its background and current state, as well as its history of research and documentation. Manchu and its mediaeval ancestor Jurchen are important historical literary languages discussed in this volume, while the other Tungusic languages, around a dozen altogether, have always been spoken by small, local, though in some cases territorially widespread, populations engaged in traditional subsistence activities of the Eurasian taiga and steppe zones and the North Pacific coast. All contributors to this volume are well-known specialists on their specific topics, and, importantly, all the authors of the chapters dealing with modern languages have personal experience of linguistic field work among Tungusic speakers. This volume will be informative for scholars and students specialising in the languages and peoples of Northeast Asia, and will also be of interest to those engaged with linguistic typology, cultural anthropology, and ethnic history who wish to obtain information on the Tungusic languages.

Download or read book Spoken Sibe: Morphology of the Inflected Parts of Speech written by Veronika Zikmundová and published by Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At present, the Sibe language is the only oral variety of Manchu which is actually in use. With some 20,000 to 30,000 speakers it is also the most widely spoken Tungusic language. The Sibe people, who live at the North-Western border of the present-day Sinkiang Uyghur Autonomous province of China, are descendants of the garrison men of the Manchu army from 18th century. They were sent there after the area was annexed by the Manchus with the task to guard the newly established border between the Manchu Empire and Russia. Being soldiers of an alien army they remained isolated from the indigenous Turkic and Mongolian peoples, which resulted in an allmost miraculous preservation of the language. In the 1990s, when the oral varieties of Manchu in historical Manchuria became either extinct or at the verge of extinction, Sibe kept surviving as a language spoken by all generations of Sibe people in the Chapchal Sibe autonomous county, and by the middle and older generations in virtually all other Sibe settlements of Xinjiang. By now, although the percentage of Sibe-Chinese bilingualism is high, the number of speakers, including young people, is still significantly great. The present description of the grammatical functioning of the two main inflected word classes – nouns and verbs – is documented by examples and sample texts, and provided with the basic general information about the Sibe language and its speakers. The intention of this work is to offer the reader a more complex image of the Sibe language as it is used at present on its historical and cultural territory.

Download or read book Language Contact in Siberia written by Bayarma Khabtagaeva and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph dicsusses phonetic, morphological and semantic features of the ‘Altaic’ Sprachbund (i.e. Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic) elements in Yeniseian languages (Kott, Assan, Arin, Pumpokol, Yugh and Ket), a rather heterogeneous language family traditionally classified as one of the ‘Paleo-Siberian’ language groups, that are not related to each other or to any other languages on the face of the planet. The present work is based on a database of approximately 230 Turkic and 70 Tungusic loanwords. A smaller number of loanwords are of Mongolic origin, which came through either the Siberian Turkic languages or the Tungusic Ewenki languages. There are clear linguistic criteria, which help to distinguish loanwords borrowed via Turkic or Tungusic and not directly from Mongolic languages. One of the main outcomes of this research is the establishment of the Yeniseian peculiar features in the Altaic loanwords. The phonetic criteria comprise the regular disappearance of vowel harmony, syncope, amalgamation, aphaeresis and metathesis. Besides, a separate group of lexemes represents hybrid words, i.e. the lexical elements where one element is Altaic and the other one is Yeniseian. This book presents a historical-etymological survey of a part of the Yeniseian lexicon, which provides an important part of the comparative database of Proto-Yeniseian reconstructions.

Download or read book The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages written by Martine Robbeets and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 984 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages provides a comprehensive account of the Transeurasian languages, and is the first major reference work in the field since 1965. The term 'Transeurasian' refers to a large group of geographically adjacent languages that includes five uncontroversial linguistic families: Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic. The historical connection between these languages, however, constitutes one of the most debated issues in historical comparative linguistics. In the present book, a team of leading international scholars in the field take a balanced approach to this controversy, integrating different theoretical frameworks, combining both functional and formal linguistics, and showing that genealogical and areal approaches are in fact compatible with one another. The volume is divided into five parts. Part I deals with the historical sources and periodization of the Transeurasian languages and their classification and typology. In Part II, chapters provide individual structural overviews of the Transeurasian languages and the linguistic subgroups that they belong to, while Part III explores Transeurasian phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, and semantics from a comparative perspective. Part IV offers a range of areal and genealogical explanations for the correlations observed in the preceding parts. Finally, Part V combines archaeological, genetic, and anthropological perspectives on the identity of speakers of Transeurasian languages. The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages will be an indispensable resource for specialists in Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages and for anyone with an interest in Transeurasian and comparative linguistics more broadly.

Download or read book Introduction to Altaic Philology written by Igor de Rachewiltz and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-05-31 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are many excellent books dealing with Old Turkic, Preclassical and Classical Mongolian and Literary Manchu individually, but none providing in a single volume a comprehensive survey of all the three major Altaic languages. The present volume attempts to fill this gap; at the same time it reviews also the much debated Altaic Hypothesis. The book is intended for use by students at university level as well as by general readers with a basic knowledge of linguistics. The 39 language texts analysed in the volume are discussed within their historical and cultural context, thus vastly enlarging the scope of the purely linguistic investigation.

Download or read book Is Japanese Related to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic? written by Martine Irma Robbeets and published by Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. This book was released on 2005 with total page 980 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where does Japanese come from? The linguistic origin of the Japanese language is among the most disputed questions of language history. One current hypothesis is that Japanese is an Altaic language, sharing a common ancestor with Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic. But, the opinions are strongly polarized. Especially the inclusion of Japanese into this classification model is very much under debate. Given the lack of consensus in the field, this book presents a state of the art for the etymological evidence relating Japanese to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic. The different Altaic etymologies proposed in the scholarly literature are gathered in an etymological index of Japanese appended to this book. An item-by-item sifting of the evidence helps to hold down borrowings, universal similarities and coincidental look-alikes to a small percentage. When the remaining core-evidence is screened in terms of phonological regularity, the answer to the intriguing question is beginning to take shape.

Download or read book Tungusic languages: Past and present written by Andreas Hölzl and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2022-10-20 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tungusic is a small family of languages, many of which are endangered. It encompasses approximately twenty languages located in Siberia and northern China. These languages are distributed over an enormous area that ranges from the Yenisey River and Xinjiang in the west to the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin in the east. They extend as far north as the Taimyr Peninsula and, for a brief period, could even be found in parts of Central and Southern China. This book is an attempt to bring researchers from different backgrounds together to provide an open-access publication in English that is freely available to all scholars in the field. The contributions cover all branches of Tungusic and a wide range of linguistic features. Topics include synchronic descriptions, typological comparisons, dialectology, language contact, and diachronic reconstruction. Some of the contributions are based on first-hand data collected during fieldwork, in some cases from the last speakers of a given language.