Article published in:
Diachronica
Vol. 36:3 (2019) ► pp. 299–336

Significance testing of the Altaic family

| University of Pennsylvania
Historical linguists have been debating for decades about whether the classical comparative method provides sufficient evidence to consider Altaic languages as part of a single genetic unity, like Indo-European and Uralic, or whether the implicit statistical robustness behind regular sound correspondences is lacking in the case of Altaic. In this paper, I run a significance test on Swadesh-lists representing Turkish, Mongolian and Manchu to see if there are regular patterns of phonetic similarities or correspondences among word-initial phonemes in the basic vocabulary that cannot be expected to have arisen by chance. The methodology draws on Oswalt (1970), Ringe (1992), Baxter & Manaster Ramer (2000) and Kessler (2001, 2007). The results only partially point towards an Altaic family: Mongolian and Manchu show significant sound correspondences, while Turkish and Mongolian show some marginally significant phonological similarity, that might however be the consequence of areal contact. Crucially, Turkish and Manchu do not test positively under any condition.
Keywords: comparative method, historical linguistics, Altaic, lexicostatistics, Swadesh lists, multilateral comparison
Published online: 17 September 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.17007.ceo
References

References

Barbançon, François, Steven N. Evans, Luay Nakhleh, Donald A. Ringe & Tandy Warnow
2013 An experimental study comparing linguistic phylogenetic reconstruction methods. Diachronica 30(2). 143–170. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Baxter, William H.
1998 Response to Oswalt and Ringe. In Joseph Salmons & Brian Joseph (eds.), Nostratic: Sifting the evidence, 217–236. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Baxter, William H. & Alexis Manaster Ramer
2000 Beyond lumping and splitting: Probabilistic issues in historical linguistics. In Colin Renfrew, April McMahon & Larry Trask (eds.), Time depth in historical linguistics 167–188. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.Google Scholar
Bomhard, Allan R.
1996 Indo-European and the Nostratic hypothesis. Charleston: Signum Desktop Publishing.Google Scholar
2008 Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: Comparative phonology, morphology and vocabulary. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
2011 The Nostratic hypothesis in 2011: Trends and issues. Washington DC: Institute for the Study of Man.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard
1981 The languages of the Soviet Union. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
1998 Regular sound correspondences and long-distance genetic comparison. In Joseph Salmons & Brian Joseph (eds.), Nostratic: Sifting the evidence, 271–276. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Doerfer, Gerhard
1973 Lautgesetz und Zufall: Betrachtungen zum Omnicomparatismus. Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft.Google Scholar
Dolgopolsky, Aaron B.
1986 A probabilistic hypothesis concerning the oldest relationships among the language families in Northern Eurasia. In Vitalij V. Shevoroshkin & Thomas L. Markey (eds.), Typology, relationship and time, 27–50. Ann Arbor: Karoma.Google Scholar
Dybo, Anna & George Starostin
2008 In defence of the comparative method, or the end of the Vovin controversy. Papers of the Institute of Oriental and Classical Studies 19.Google Scholar
Georg, Stefan
1999 Haupt und Glieder der Altaischen Hypothese: die Körperteilbezeichnungen im Türkischen, Mongolischen und Tungusischen. Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher 16. 143–182.Google Scholar
2008 Review article of Martine Robbeets, 2005, Is Japanese related to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic? Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung 32. 247–278.Google Scholar
[ p. 323 ]
Greenberg, Joseph H.
1957 Essays in linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hangin, John G., John R. Krueger & Robert G. Service
1986 A modern Mongolian-English dictionary. Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies.Google Scholar
Hock, Hans Henrich & Brian D. Joseph
1996 Language change, and language relationship. An introduction to historical and comparative linguistics. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Illič-Svityč, Vladislav Markovič
1971 Opyt sravnenija nostratičeskych jazykov. Moscow: Nauka.Google Scholar
Kassian, Alexei, Mikhail Zhivlov & George Starostin
2015 Proto-Indo-European-Uralic comparison from the probabilistic point of view. The Journal of Indo-European Studies 43(3–4). 301–347.Google Scholar
Kessler, Brett
2001 The significance of word lists. Stanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Information.Google Scholar
2007 Word similarity metrics and multilateral comparison. In Proceedings of Ninth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Morphology and Phonology, 6–14. Association for Computational Linguistics. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2015 Response to Kassian et al., 2015, Proto-Indo-European-Uralic comparison from the probabilistic point of view. Journal of Indo-European Studies 43(3–4). 357–367.Google Scholar
Kessler, Brett & Annukka Lehtonen
2006 Multilateral comparison and significance testing of the Indo-Uralic question. In Peter Forster & Colin Renfrew (eds.), Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, 33–42. Cambridge, England: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.Google Scholar
Li, Gertraude Roth
2000 Manchu: A textbook for reading documents. Manoa: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
Ligeti, Lajos
1960 Les anciens éléments mongols dans le mandchou. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 10(3). 231–248.Google Scholar
Longobardi, Giuseppe, Cristina Guardiano, Giuseppina Silvestri, Alessio Boattini & Andrea Ceolin
2013 Toward a syntactic phylogeny of modern Indo-European languages. Journal of Historical Linguistics 3(1). 122–152. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Longobardi, Giuseppe, Andrea Ceolin, Luca Bortolussi, Cristina Guardiano, Monica Alexandrina Irimia, Dimitris Michelioudakis, Nina Radkevich & Andrea Sgarro
2016 Mathematical modeling of grammatical diversity supports the historical reality of formal syntax. In Proceedings of the Leiden Workshop on Capturing Phylogenetic Algorithms for Linguistics, Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen.Google Scholar
Manaster Ramer, Alexis & Paul Sidwell
1997 The truth about Strahlenberg’s classification of the languages of Northeastern Eurasia. Journal de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 87. 139–160.Google Scholar
Menges, Karl Heinrich
1975 Altajische Studien: II. Japanisch und Altajisch, vol. 41, 3. Steiner Franz Verlag.Google Scholar
Miller, Roy Andrew
1971 Japanese and the other Altaic languages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
1996 Languages and History: Japanese, Korean, and Altaic. Bangkok: White Orchid Press.Google Scholar
Nichols, Johanna
1996 The Comparative Method as Heuristic. In Mark Durie & Malcolm Ross (eds.), The comparative method reviewed: Regularity and irregularity in language change, 39–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Norman, Jerry
1978 A concise Manchu-English lexicon. University of Washington.Google Scholar
Oswalt, Robert L.
1970 The detection of remote linguistic relationships. Computer Studies in the Humanities and Verbal Behavior 3(3). 117–129.Google Scholar
[ p. 324 ]
1998 A probabilistic evaluation of North Eurasiatic Nostratic. In Joseph Salmons & Brian Joseph (eds.), Nostratic: Sifting the evidence, 199–216. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Poppe, Nicholas
1960 Vergleichende Grammatik Der Altaischen Sprachen; Teil 1: Vergleichende Lautlehre. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
1965 Introduction to Altaic Linguistics. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Ramstedt, Gustav John
1957 Introduction to Altaic linguistics. Moscow: Publishing House of Foreign. lit.Google Scholar
Redhouse, James
1968 New Redhouse Turkish-English Dictionary. Publications Department of the American Board.Google Scholar
Ringe, Donald A.
1992 On calculating the factor of chance in language comparison. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 82(1). 1–110. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1998 Probabilistic evidence for Indo-Uralic. In Joseph Salmons & Brian Joseph (eds.), Nostratic: Sifting the evidence, 153–197. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2015 Response to Kassian et al., 2015, Proto-Indo-European-Uralic comparison from the probabilistic point of view. Journal of Indo-European Studies 43(3–4). 348–356.Google Scholar
Robbeets, Martine
2005 Is Japanese related to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic?, vol. 64. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
2015 Diachrony of verb morphology: Japanese and the Transeurasian languages, vol. 291. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ross, Alan S. C.
1950 Philological probability problems. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological) 19–59. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rozycki, William
1994 Mongol elements in Manchu, vol. 157. Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies.Google Scholar
Salmons, Joseph & Brian Joseph
1998 Nostratic: Sifting the evidence, vol. 142. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sinor, Denis
1988 The Uralic languages. Description, history and foreign influences. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Starostin, Sergei
1991 On the hypothesis of a genetic connection between the Sino-Tibetan languages and the Yeniseian and North Caucasian languages. In Vitalij V. Shevoroshkin (ed.), Dene-Sino-Caucasian languages, 12–41. Ann Arbor: Brockmeyer.Google Scholar
Starostin, Sergei, Anna Dybo, Oleg Mudrak & Ilya Gruntov
2003 Etymological dictionary of the Altaic languages. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Swadesh, Morris
1955 Towards greater accuracy in lexicostatistic dating. International Journal of American Linguistics 21(2). 121–137. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1971 The origin and diversification of language. Piscataway, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Unger, Marshall J.
1990 Summary report of the Altaic panel. Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 45. 479–482.Google Scholar
Villemin, François
1983 Un essai de détection des origines du japonais à partir de deux méthodes statistiques. In Barron Brainerd (ed). Historical linguistics, 116–135. Bochum: Brockmeyer.Google Scholar
Vovin, Alexander
2005 The end of the Altaic controversy. In memory of Gerhard Doerfer. Central Asiatic Journal 49(1). 71–132.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Ceolin, Andrea, Cristina Guardiano, Monica Alexandrina Irimia & Giuseppe Longobardi
2020. Formal Syntax and Deep History. Frontiers in Psychology 11 Crossref logo
Guardiano, Cristina, Giuseppe Longobardi, Guido Cordoni & Paola Crisma
2020.  In The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, ► pp. 145 ff. Crossref logo
Santos, Patrícia, Gloria Gonzàlez-Fortes, Emiliano Trucchi, Andrea Ceolin, Guido Cordoni, Cristina Guardiano, Giuseppe Longobardi & Guido Barbujani
2020. More Rule than Exception: Parallel Evidence of Ancient Migrations in Grammars and Genomes of Finno-Ugric Speakers. Genes 11:12 ► pp. 1491 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 08 february 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.