Frederik Kortlandt – Leiden University – www.kortlandt.nl INDO-URALIC AND ALTAIC
Elsewhere I have argued that the Indo-European verbal system can be understood in terms of its Indo-Uralic origins because the reconstructed Indo-European end-ings can be derived from combinations of Indo-Uralic morphemes by a series of well-motivated phonetic and analogic developments (2002). Moreo...
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.561.5045 http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art216e.pdf |
| Summary: | Elsewhere I have argued that the Indo-European verbal system can be understood in terms of its Indo-Uralic origins because the reconstructed Indo-European end-ings can be derived from combinations of Indo-Uralic morphemes by a series of well-motivated phonetic and analogic developments (2002). Moreover, I have claimed (2004b) that the Proto-Uralic consonant gradation accounts for the pecu-liar correlations between Indo-European root structure and accentuation discov-ered by Lubotsky (1988). My reconstruction of the Indo-Uralic phonological sys-tem is essentially the same as Sammallahti’s for Proto-Uralic (1988), except for the fact that I reconstruct palatalized resonants *r ´ and *l ´ for his dental spirants *ð and *ð´. In particular, I think that the large number of Indo-European plosives is the result of a secondary development. Though it is quite possible that Indo-Uralic had a larger number of consonants than can be reconstructed for Proto-Uralic, I see no compelling evidence for this. The simplest assumption is that the Indo-Uralic proto-language was identical with Proto-Uralic. Indeed, it seems possible to derive Nivkh (Gilyak) from the same proto-language, as I have indicated elsewhere (2004a). As far as I can see, both Indo-Uralic and Nivkh (Gilyak) belong to the larger Uralo-Siberian language family which is now partly reconstructed by Fortescue (1998) and Seefloth (2000) on the basis of evidence from Uralo-Yukagir, Chu-kotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut. All of these languages belong to Green-berg’s Eurasiatic language family (2000), which in addition comprises Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic), Korean, Japanese and Ainu. There can nowadays be little doubt about the reality of an Altaic language family including Korean and Japanese (see especially Robbeets 2003), though the reconstruction of Proto-Altaic is extremely difficult because of its very large time depth. The position of Ainu remains unclear (at least to me). It is easy to criticize Greenberg’s methodology, but this leaves the basic ... |
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