Nouns are optionally marked for number, e.g., in Turkish. Some, but not all, scholars of those languages argue for their While the minorities of the Sino-Tibetan language family are thus concentrated in the south and southwest, the second major group of languages—the, Turkic speakers dominate the Altaic group. Altaic languages have also borrowed from each other, e.g., Manchu from Mongolian. Linguistics | Grammar | Verbs | Families. The sound systems of the Altaic languages are relatively simple. For instance, the earliest Mongolian written records date back to the 13th century AD, while those for Manchu go back only as far as the 17th century AD. The number of cases varies from language to language. Blog. Video conference trends for 2021; March 12, 2021. In general, the core vocabulary of Altaic languages tends to be more similar across languages that belong to one branch, than across the entire Altaic family, as you can see from the names of the numerals 1-10. At the present, approximately 40 Altaic languages are spoken by about 100 million people. The morphology of the verb is especially complex, though few of the languages have personal endings marking agreement in person and number with the subject of the verb, and there is no grammatical category of mood. The Altaic language family derives its name from the Altai Mountain region where it is believed that these languages may have originated. A Note on Language Families Well, I’ve spoken about them briefly before in the Languages of Russia video, and in short, the Altaic Languages are a proposed language family. It supposedly had 66 languages that are now spoken by about 348 million people, mostly in and around Central Asia and northeast Asia.. en-1. Create. The Altaic languages exhibit two kinds of sound harmony affecting the vowels and velar stops. Afro-Asiatic Language Family 1.World’s 4th largest language family including: a.Arabic b.Hebrew c.Languages spoken in Northern Africa, and Southwest Asia 2.Arabic is the major Afro-Asiatic language a. For instance, Turkish allows a few consonant clusters in word-final position but no clusters are allowed in initial position. There are comparatively few cognate words found in all three branches of Altaic languages. The Turkic languages, with the exception of Sakha (in Siberia), are spoken in a nearly continuous band. The Mongolic language region also extends into south-central Siberia, focused on the Russian Republic of Buryatia. An agglutinative language is one in which each affix typically represents one grammatical function, e.g.,’past tense,’ ‘plural,’ or ‘masculine.’ These affixes do not become fused with each other and do not change their form, like they do in European languages (e.g., in English, for example, –s in sings represents 2nd person + singular). Syllables in Altaic languages usually consist of Consonant + Vowel. From the earliest times, those languages in contact with Chinese took from it, either directly or indirectly (both as loanwords and as calques, or loan translations), a great number of administrative, political, cultural, and scientific terms. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Grammatical agreement is rare: quantifying words do not agree with the noun (‘two man’), and there is no agreement of the adjective with the noun in gender, case, or number. The designation Manchu-Tungus or Manchu-Tungusic for the group of languages that many scholars simply refer to as Tungusic emphasizes the historically most important member of the group, and the only language (except for the extinct Juchen [Jurchen]) that historically took written form. World Capitals Quiz. A small number of scholars reject the hypothesis, attributing similarities rather to borrowings and areal convergence. FinnoUgric languages. The nomadic culture of many Turkic peoples and the relative absence of geographic barriers to communication has resulted in a high degree of similarity and hence mutual intelligibility among most of the languages; Kyrgyz, Karakalpak, and Kazakh in particular are linguistically much alike. Speakers of Altaic languages live over a vast territory that stretches from northeastern Siberia to the Persian Gulf, and from the Baltic Sea to China, with most of them clustering around Central Asia. Languages of the three branches occur in close proximity throughout the eastern part of the Altaic-speaking world and, facilitated by similarities of structure, have borrowed freely from each other in all periods; for example, Ancient Mongolian took numerous agricultural terms from Turkic, while Sakha contains both Mongolian and Manchu-Tungus borrowings. The group contains more than 50 languages, spoken by more than 135 million people spread across virtually the entire breadth of Asia and from the Arctic Ocean to the latitude of Beijing. In Turkic, verbal nouns that act solely as derived nouns occur alongside the participles. Armenian (Hayeren) is an independent, one-language subgroup within the Indo-European language family. The concept of a Ural-Altaic ethnic and language family goes back to the linguistic theories of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; in his opinion there was no better method for specifying the relationship and origin of the various peoples of the Earth, than the comparison of their languages. See the map below to picture where each language family is found – countries are colored if they are the primary country 1 for at least one language in the family. The Altaic Family is named after the Alti Mountains, in Central Asia. For instance, Turkish has six cases. These people were nomadic horsemen living in the plains. According to the most well-known classification, Altaic has the Turkic languages, Mongolic, and the Tungusic languages. The Manchu verb may incorporate one or more auxiliary verbs, as in afa-m-bi-he-bi ‘had been attacking,’ which is analyzed as ‘to attack-[imperfect converb]-to be-[perfect participle]-to be.’. That characteristic reveals that (1) words are formed by adding affixes, specifically suffixes, to the root; (2) a relatively great number of such affixes may be added, resulting in extreme cases in polysyllabic and polymorphemic words of considerable length (although three to four morphemes per word is the usual limit); (3) each morpheme in a word has one distinct meaning or grammatical function; and (4) typically the phonological identity of each morpheme is preserved, with little or no modification of one word element by another. The term Turkish properly refers to the language spoken in Turkey and to the literary, written forms of that language. One group migrated towards Europe, the other group migrated towards the Korean Peninsula and the islands of Japan. ), the total amount of published literature in the field is enormous. Name the languages of the Altaic family. Now, the existence of the Uralic Family is less controversial than that of the Altaic Family. The second, Sino-Tibetan, includes the Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages. They typically lack honorific language, and there is no significant difference between the speech of men and women. Adjectives are not inflected and do not agree with the nouns they modify. This influence was greatest in the Southern groups mainly due to their location. In Turkey, I was taught Ural-Altaic family in both primary and high school but then in university, they said even the Altaic family is not considered as a language family anymore. Countries by First Two Letters in 90 Seconds. Numerals and other quantifying words are used with singular nouns. This language family is traditionally divided into three main subgroups: Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic (Crystal, 309). Nine Altaic languages, including Korean and Japanese, have official status in their respective countries. Quizzes . All languages in the Tungusic group and some languages in the Mongolian and Turkic groups are endangered or facing extinction. Although not definitively pr… Over time, this ancestor language split in… Altaic languages are written in a variety of scripts, some of them in more than one. In palatal vowel harmony, all the vowels of a given word are back or they are all front; further, front velar consonants /k g/ occur only with front vowels and back (deep) velars /q g/ only with back vowels. For pragmatic purposes, constituents of a sentence that carry old information precede constituents with new information. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license. An example of that characteristic can be seen in the words for numerals in the three families (e.g., ‘two’ is qoyar in Classical Mongolian, iki in Turkish, and juwe in Manchu). The most prominent of these link Korean to the Altaic languages of central Asia, a family that includes Turkish, Mongolian, and the Tungusic (for example, Manchu) languages of Siberia. Questions are formed by using a question particle or a question word without modifying word order. ăltā´ĭk [key], subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and Altaic languages). Corrections? Demonstratives are used in place of third person pronouns, i.e., ‘these’ or ‘those’ instead of ‘they.’. LANGUAGE FAMILIES. Spoken languages as the speech norms of communities of speakers must be distinguished from written languages, which are artificial and may not correspond to any spoken form. For the third person, Altaic languages use demonstrative pronouns; ‘they’ is literally ‘these’ or ‘those.’ The possessive forms of pronouns are widely used in lieu of definite articles. The use of the plural second-person pronoun (‘you’) as a polite singular is general in Altaic. Some Altaic languages in addition distinguish long and short vowel phonemes. The Altaic language contact came to the Samoyed from the Turkish people. Those migrations were partly a consequence of the economics of nomadic culture and partly due to the peculiar military and political structure of the Altaic peoples. The Uralic and Altaic language families were once believed to form a superfamily, but reliable sound correspondences have not been demonstrated, and the numerous similarities between the two are now attributed to areal influences. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. There are many auxiliary verbs which can be added to each other in a string. The Turkish word in-dir-il-emi-y-ebil-ecek-ler ‘it may be that they will not be able to be brought down’ is analyzable as root word–causative–passive–impotential–potential–future–third person plural, Mongolian eke-yin-iyen ‘of one’s own mother’ as root word–genitive case–reflexive-possessive. Note that the dialects listed below may be further subdivided into smaller regional varieties within one country. In the modern era a large number of international scientific, political, and cultural terms of English, French, German, and Classical origin have filtered into the Altaic languages of Central Asia through Russian. Nouns are marked for case. Quick Reference. All rights reserved. The Cyrillic script language used in Mongolia is sometimes called Modern Mongolian and sometimes Khalkha, after the spoken dialect on which it is based. Palatal vowel harmony has been lost or weakened in many languages of all three branches. The phonological (sound) systems of the Altaic languages tend to be simple. MustGo.com. The languages in this family, particularly those spoken in more than one country, have a number of dialects, some of them not mutually comprehensible. This hypothetical language group, called Ural-Altaic , is not considered by most scholars to be soundly based. The nominative case of ‘I’ shows a special stem in Mongolian and Manchu-Tungus (compare Classical Mongolian bi ‘I,’ genitive minu ‘my’). The ancient and medieval states they founded, however, tended to be impermanent, and conquest of neighbouring sedentary populations of higher material culture often resulted in their eventual expulsion (a fate the Mongols experienced after most of their conquests) or in cultural and linguistic assimilation (as befell the Manchu in China). Quantifying words do not agree with nouns in number, and adjectives do not agree with nouns in gender, case, or number. As in morphology, syntactic structure is consequently characteristically left-branching. Some variance is allowed in word order for purposes of emphasis or of flow of information in the discourse. Languages in contact with Chinese, such as Manchu, adopted many Chinese administrative, political, cultural, and scientific terms. The vowel system reconstructed for Proto-Altaic bears some similarity to the “cubic” vowel system of Turkish, which is a symmetrical system of eight vowel phonemes defined by three phonological oppositions: back/nonback, high/nonhigh, and round (labial)/nonround (nonlabial), as shown in the table. Labial (rounding) vowel harmony is a later development and differs in Turkic and Mongolian. With the exception of such outlying languages as Moghol, Daur, and Monguor (Tu), the Mongolian languages as a whole are quite similar to one another and enjoy a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility. Manchu-Tungus languages have as many as 14 (as in Evenk). Etymologically, almost all verbal forms have a nominal origin. Many remain largely unwritten to this day. Name the languages of the Altaic family. All languages in the Tungusic group and some languages in the Mongolian and Turkic groups are endangered or facing extinction. Some, but not all, scholars of those languages argue for their genetic relationship based on putative systematic sound correspondences, while the consensus among general linguists is that this hypothesis is at best speculative and by no means proven. Now, the FinnoUgric languages turn out to be in a larger family and share a common prehistoric ancestor language with the Samoyedic Languages and possibly Yukaghiric. Altaic languages, group of languages consisting of three language families—Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus—that show noteworthy similarities in vocabulary, morphological and syntactic structure, and certain phonological features. Altaic languages are also rich in cases, Manchu having five, Turkish six, and Classical Mongolian seven. The morphology of the Altaic languages is simple, exhibiting little if any irregularity (e.g., Turkish has only one irregular verb, ‘to be’) or suppletion (as in English went as the past form of go) and no distinct classes of noun or verb stems (“declensions” and “conjugations”) that require special sets of endings. The Altaic Family of languages includes the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages and is often expanded to include the Koreanic and Japonic languages Of the 142 different language families, these six stand out as the major language families of the world. It should be noted that often what is considered to be a language is more a matter of politics and geography than one of linguistic science. Although classified as a language isolate, many theories have been proposed to explain the origin of Korean. More . It consists of 1,524 daughter languages and has around 437 million speakers throughout Africa. The noun has a plural affix, but numerals are used with the singular (e.g., ‘two man’), and the plural is unused where a general sense is intended: ‘read books’ may be rendered ‘read book.’. Linguistic characteristics of the Altaic group, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Altaic-languages, Academia - Altaic languages and historical contact. Furthermore, it is assumed that the Turks have always inhabited the western, the Mongols the central, and the Manchu-Tungus peoples the eastern portions of the Altaic region. Those languages likewise make a distinction between exclusive ‘we’ (not including the addressee) and inclusive ‘we’ (including the addressee). Lastly, there are the Tungusic languages, which are spoken in Manchuria and Siberia. The Samoyed people had language contact from the Altaic language family. Nor are there distinct words for “he” and “she.”. A number of calques have also entered the Altaic languages from Russian and Chinese alike, while Russian has had some minor influence on syntactic structure. About ... Countries by First Two Letters in 90 Seconds. The Altaic languages are agglutinative in word structure. Altaic languages have no relative clauses as such, participial constructions being used instead—e.g., Turkish yemeğe gelen adam ‘the man (who is) coming to dinner’ (literally ‘dinner-to coming man’). In Mongolian languages reflexive-possessive affixes and enclitic possessive markers may be adjoined to the case endings, as in Khalkha mori-d-oos-min’ ‘from my horses’ (‘horse-[plural]-[ablative]-my’), Classical Mongolian baγsi-tai-ban ‘with his own teacher’ (‘teacher-[comitative]-[reflexive-possessive]’). Altai, Northern (A language of Russian Federation) Altai, Southern (A language of Russian Federation) Dolgan (A language of Russian Federation) Karagas (A language of Russian Federation) Khakas (A language of Russian Federation) Shor (A language of Russian Federation) Tuvan (A language of Russian Federation) For instance, Central Asian and Siberian languages spoken on territories formerly dominated by Imperial Russia and later by the USSR, such as Yakut and Even, have many borrowings from Russian, while Turkic languages spoken on the territory of the former Ottoman Empire, such as Kazakh, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz, have a large number of Arabic and Persian loanwords. On the basis of proposed sound correspondences, the hypothesis of a genetic relationship between Altaic and Korean is regarded by some scholars as proved, but, while most scholars view the relationship as worthy of further investigation, it has not as yet won universal acceptance. There is little written data on the historical development of Altaic languages. Word order in Altaic languages is typically Subject-Object-Verb. Exceptions occur in words borrowed from other languages. The primary language of this group is Mongolian, and there are 13 in total: Daur, Bonan, Dongxiang, Kangjia, Tu, East Yugur, China Buriat, Russia Buriat, Mongolia Buriat, Halh Mongolian, Peripheral Mongolian, Kalmyk-Oirat and Mogholi. Hypotactic (subordinate) constructions such as subordinate clauses are much preferred to paratactic (coordinate) ones such as independent clauses: the construction ‘having gotten up, she left’ is much more common than ‘she got up and left.’. Auxiliary verbs typically follow the main verb. Oct 20, 2020 - encyclopedia article about Altaic languages. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). / en-1. They are simply added to each other in a string. Turkic distinguishes an evidential past tense—used when the speaker has witnessed the events or the events are common knowledge—from an inferential past—where the events have been reported to, or inferred by, the speaker. The Manchu-Tungus languages are spoken by widely dispersed populations farther to the north and east—that is, across Siberia in Russia and in the Northeast in China. Create. A second cluster, in the North…, The first, Altaic, consists of the Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus (Tungusic) subfamilies. Branches of Altaic. ‘Who is Fatma?’ (literally ‘Fatma who-is?’). The lexical categories of Altaic languages are less distinct than in other families. Exceptions are allowed in certain compounds and borrowings. © 2014 - 2021. 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