Form and pattern borrowing across Siberian Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages

• Main Author: Anderson, Gregory D. S.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2020
• Subjects: Tungusic languages
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198804628.003.0041

When examining data from languages belonging to the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic families, two virtually opposite views have been expressed: One attributes some commonalities to inheritances from a protolanguage, the other asserts that all commonalities derive from lateral feature transfer between originally unrelated groups. However, some shared features from the domains of lexicon, phonology, morphology, and syntax showing a network of transfer paths—Turkic > Tungusic, Turkic > Mongolic, Mongolic > Turkic, Mongolic > Tungusic, Tungusic > Mongolic and Tungusic > Turkic—among these, three groups are clearly secondary, and reflect processes of lateral feature transfer postdating the breakup of any possible original Transeurasian protolanguage. Thus, one must periodicize different contact layers in the histories of these language groups to arrive at a nuanced point of argumentation to try to bridge the gap between the increasingly polemical positions expressed by the so-called pro- and anti-Altaicist camps.