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Altaic is a proposed language family of central Eurasia, now widely seen as discredited.〔"While 'Altaic' is repeated in encyclopedias and handbooks most specialists in these languages no longer believe that the three traditional supposed Altaic groups, Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic, are related." Lyle Campbell & Mauricio J. Mixco, A Glossary of Historical Linguistics (2007, University of Utah Press), pg. 7.〕〔"When cognates proved not to be valid, Altaic was abandoned, and the received view now is that Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic are unrelated." Johanna Nichols, Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (1992, Chicago), pg. 4.〕〔"Careful examination indicates that the established families, Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic, form a linguistic area (called Altaic)...Sufficient criteria have not been given that would justify talking of a genetic relationship here." R.M.W. Dixon, The Rise and Fall of Languages (1997, Cambridge), pg. 32.〕〔"...()his selection of features does not provide good evidence for common descent" and "we can observe convergence rather than divergence between Turkic and Mongolic languages--a pattern than is easily explainable by borrowing and diffusion rather than common descent", Asya Pereltsvaig, Languages of the World, An Introduction (2012, Cambridge) has a good discussion of the Altaic hypothesis (pp. 211-216).〕 Various versions included the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic languages.〔(Georg ''et al.'' 1999: ) 73–74〕 These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe. The group is named after the Altai Mountains, a mountain range in Central Asia. The language families included in the proposal share numerous characteristics. Supporters of Altaic, sometimes called "Altaicists", view the similarities as arising from common descent from a proto-Altaic language spoken several thousand years ago. Opponents maintain that the similarities are due to areal interaction between the language groups concerned. Some linguists think that the cases for either interpretation are equally strong; they have been called the "skeptics".〔Georg et al. 1999: 81〕 Another view accepts Altaic as a valid family but includes in it only Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. This view was widespread prior to the 1960s but has almost no supporters among specialists today.〔Georg et al. 1999: 73-74〕 The expanded grouping, including Korean and Japanese, came to be known as "Macro-Altaic", leading to the designation of the smaller grouping as "Micro-Altaic" by retronymy. Most proponents of Altaic continue to support the inclusion of Korean and Japanese.〔Stratification in the peopling of China: how far does the linguistic evidence match genetics and archaeology? In; Sanchez-Mazas, Blench, Ross, Lin & Pejros eds. ''Human migrations in continental East Asia and Taiwan: genetic, linguistic and archaeological evidence.'' 2008. Taylor & Francis.〕 Micro-Altaic includes about 66 living languages, to which Macro-Altaic would add Korean, Japanese, and the Ryukyuan languages for a total of about 74. (These are estimates, depending on what is considered a language and what is considered a dialect. They do not include earlier states of languages, such as Middle Mongol or Old Japanese.) Despite not being widely accepted as a greater language family, the term "Altaic" in its broader sense is often used to group, in informative charts such as linguistic graphics and maps, all of the families that it comprises. ==History of the Altaic idea== The idea that the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages are closely related was allegedly first published in 1730 by Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, a Swedish officer who traveled in the eastern Russian Empire while a prisoner of war after the Great Northern War. However, as has been pointed out by Alexis Manaster Ramer and Paul Sidwell (1997), von Strahlenberg actually opposed the idea of a closer relationship among the languages that later became known as "Altaic". Von Strahlenberg's classification was the first attempt to classify a large number of languages, some of which are Altaic.〔Poppe 1965: 125〕 The term "Altaic", as applied to a language family, was introduced in 1844 by Matthias Castrén, a pioneering Finnish philologist who made major contributions to the study of the Uralic languages. As originally formulated by Castrén, Altaic included not only Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus (=Tungusic) but also Finno-Ugric and Samoyed.〔Poppe 1965: 126〕 Finno-Ugric and Samoyed were eventually grouped in a separate family, known as ''Uralic'' (though doubts long persisted about its validity). The original Altaic family thus came to be known as the Ural–Altaic.〔Poppe 1965: 127〕 In the "Ural–Altaic" nomenclature, Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic are regarded as "Uralic", whereas Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic are regarded as "Altaic" - while Korean is sometimes considered Altaic, as is, less often, Japanese. For much of the 19th and the early 20th centuries, the theory of a common Ural–Altaic family was widespread, based on such shared features as vowel harmony and agglutination. However, while the Ural–Altaic hypothesis can still be found in encyclopedias, atlases, and similar general references, it has generally been abandoned by linguists. For instance it was characterized by Sergei Starostin as "an idea now completely discarded".〔Starostin et al. 2003: 8〕 In 1857, the Austrian scholar Anton Boller suggested adding Japanese to the Ural–Altaic family.〔Miller 1986: 34〕 In the 1920s, G.J. Ramstedt and E.D. Polivanov advocated the inclusion of Korean. However, Ramstedt's three-volume, ''Einführung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft'' ('Introduction to Altaic Linguistics'), published in 1952–1966, rejected the Ural–Altaic hypothesis and again included Korean in Altaic, an inclusion followed by most leading Altaicists to date. The first volume of his work, ''Lautlehre'' ('Phonology'), contained the first comprehensive attempt to identify regular correspondences among the sound systems within the Altaic language families. In 1960, Nicholas Poppe published what was in effect a heavily revised version of Ramstedt’s volume on phonology〔Miller 1991: 298〕 that has since set the standard in Altaic studies. Poppe considered the issue of the relationship of Korean to Turkic-Mongolic-Tungusic not settled.〔Poppe 1965: 148〕 In his view, there were three possibilities: (1) Korean did not belong with the other three genealogically, but had been influenced by an Altaic substratum; (2) Korean was related to the other three at the same level they were related to each other; (3) Korean had split off from the other three before they underwent a series of characteristic changes. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Altaic languages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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