The Ewenki Dialects of Buryatia and Their Relationship to Khamnigan Mongol
The Ewenki Dialects of Buryatia and Their Relationship to Khamnigan Mongol

Author: Bayarma Khabtagaeva

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 9783447109147

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Present research focuses on Mongolic loanwords in Ewenki dialects spoken in the territory of Buryatia. The aim of this work is to clarify the status of early Mongolic (i.e. not Buryat) and later Mongolic or Buryat layers. The introductory part of the book gives a short overview of the Ewenki dialects of Buryatia (Barguzin, Nercha, Baunt and North-Baikal), their language status, common phonetic and semantic features and differences between them. Also, a short survey is given on the Khamnigan Mongol language and its dialects, since the author considers this language the main source of Mongolic elements in Ewenki dialects. As a result, almost all phonetic characteristics in Mongolic loanwords in Ewenki dialects coincide with Khamnigan Mongol. This assumes that an 'Early' Mongolic language related to Modern Khamnigan Mongol was spoken in the Transbaikalian territory before the Buryat tribes arrived here, and this language had a considerable effect on Ewenki dialects in the earlier stages of borrowing. This research may strengthen the place of Khamnigan Mongol as an 'original' Mongolic language and not as an original Tungusic language, as some researchers claimed, which was assimilated by the Mongolian and Buryat people. It is a separate and independent language among other Mongolic languages belonging to an archaic group, and cannot be considered a Buryat dialect.

The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia
The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia

Author: Edward Vajda

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-03-04

Total Pages: 752

ISBN-13: 3110556219

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia: A Comprehensive Guide surveys the indigenous languages of Asia’s North Pacific Rim, Siberia, and adjacent portions of Inner Eurasia. It provides in-depth descriptions of every first-order family of this vast area, with special emphasis on family-internal subdivision and dialectal differentiation. Individual chapters trace the origins and expansion of the region’s widespread pastoral-based language groups as well as the microfamilies and isolates spoken by northern Asia’s surviving hunter-gatherers. Separate chapters cover sparsely recorded languages of early Inner Eurasia that defy precise classification and the various pidgins and creoles spread over the region. Other chapters investigate the typology of salient linguistic features of the area, including vowel harmony, noun inflection, verb indexing (also known as agreement), complex morphologies, and the syntax of complex predicates. Issues relating to genealogical ancestry, areal contact and language endangerment receive equal attention. With historical connections both to Eurasia’s pastoral-based empires as well as to ancient population movements into the Americas, the steppes, taiga forests, tundra and coastal fringes of northern Asia offer a complex and fascinating object of linguistic investigation.

Tungusic languages: Past and present
Tungusic languages: Past and present

Author: Andreas Hölzl

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2022-10-20

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 396110395X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Tungusic is a small family of languages, many of which are endangered. It encompasses approximately twenty languages located in Siberia and northern China. These languages are distributed over an enormous area that ranges from the Yenisey River and Xinjiang in the west to the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin in the east. They extend as far north as the Taimyr Peninsula and, for a brief period, could even be found in parts of Central and Southern China. This book is an attempt to bring researchers from different backgrounds together to provide an open-access publication in English that is freely available to all scholars in the field. The contributions cover all branches of Tungusic and a wide range of linguistic features. Topics include synchronic descriptions, typological comparisons, dialectology, language contact, and diachronic reconstruction. Some of the contributions are based on first-hand data collected during fieldwork, in some cases from the last speakers of a given language.

The Tungusic Languages
The Tungusic Languages

Author: Alexander Vovin

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-31

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 1317542797

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Tungusic Languages is a survey of Tungusic, a language family which is seriously endangered today, but which at the time of its maximum spread was present all over Northeast Asia. This volume offers a systematic succession of separate chapters on all the individual Tungusic languages, as well as a number of additional chapters containing contextual information on the language family as a whole, its background and current state, as well as its history of research and documentation. Manchu and its mediaeval ancestor Jurchen are important historical literary languages discussed in this volume, while the other Tungusic languages, around a dozen altogether, have always been spoken by small, local, though in some cases territorially widespread, populations engaged in traditional subsistence activities of the Eurasian taiga and steppe zones and the North Pacific coast. All contributors to this volume are well-known specialists on their specific topics, and, importantly, all the authors of the chapters dealing with modern languages have personal experience of linguistic field work among Tungusic speakers. This volume will be informative for scholars and students specialising in the languages and peoples of Northeast Asia, and will also be of interest to those engaged with linguistic typology, cultural anthropology, and ethnic history who wish to obtain information on the Tungusic languages.

Language Contact in Siberia
Language Contact in Siberia

Author: Bayarma Khabtagaeva

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9004390766

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This monograph dicsusses phonetic, morphological and semantic features of the ‘Altaic’ Sprachbund (i.e. Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic) elements in Yeniseian languages (Kott, Assan, Arin, Pumpokol, Yugh and Ket), a rather heterogeneous language family traditionally classified as one of the ‘Paleo-Siberian’ language groups, that are not related to each other or to any other languages on the face of the planet. The present work is based on a database of approximately 230 Turkic and 70 Tungusic loanwords. A smaller number of loanwords are of Mongolic origin, which came through either the Siberian Turkic languages or the Tungusic Ewenki languages. There are clear linguistic criteria, which help to distinguish loanwords borrowed via Turkic or Tungusic and not directly from Mongolic languages. One of the main outcomes of this research is the establishment of the Yeniseian peculiar features in the Altaic loanwords. The phonetic criteria comprise the regular disappearance of vowel harmony, syncope, amalgamation, aphaeresis and metathesis. Besides, a separate group of lexemes represents hybrid words, i.e. the lexical elements where one element is Altaic and the other one is Yeniseian. This book presents a historical-etymological survey of a part of the Yeniseian lexicon, which provides an important part of the comparative database of Proto-Yeniseian reconstructions.

A typology of questions in Northeast Asia and beyond
A typology of questions in Northeast Asia and beyond

Author: Andreas Hölzl

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2018-08-29

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 3961101027

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This study investigates the distribution of linguistic and specifically structural diversity in Northeast Asia (NEA), defined as the region north of the Yellow River and east of the Yenisei. In particular, it analyzes what is called the grammar of questions (GQ), i.e., those aspects of any given language that are specialized for asking questions or regularly combine with these. The bulk of the study is a bottom-up description and comparison of GQs in the languages of NEA. The addition of the phrase and beyond to the title of this study serves two purposes. First, languages such as Turkish and Chuvash are included, despite the fact that they are spoken outside of NEA, since they have ties to (or even originated in) the region. Second, despite its focus on one area, the typology is intended to be applicable to other languages as well. Therefore, it makes extensive use of data from languages outside of NEA. The restriction to one category is necessary for reasons of space and clarity, and the process of zooming in on one region allows a higher resolution and historical accuracy than is usually the case in linguistic typology. The discussion mentions over 450 languages and dialects from NEA and beyond and gives about 900 glossed examples. The aim is to achieve both a cross-linguistically plausible typology and a maximal resolution of the linguistic diversity of Northeast Asia.

Philology of the Grasslands
Philology of the Grasslands

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-01-16

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 9004351981

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Professor György Kara, an outstanding member of academia, celebrated his 80th birthday recently. His students and colleagues commemorate this occasion with papers on a wide range of topics in Altaic Studies, with a focus on the literacy, culture and languages of the steppe civilizations.

Atlas of the World's Languages
Atlas of the World's Languages

Author: R.E. Asher

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-19

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1317851099

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Before the first appearance of the Atlas of the World's Languages in 1993, all the world's languages had never been accurately and completely mapped. The Atlas depicts the location of every known living language, including languages on the point of extinction. This fully revised edition of the Atlas offers: up-to-date research, some from fieldwork in early 2006 a general linguistic history of each section an overview of the genetic relations of the languages in each section statistical and sociolinguistic information a large number of new or completely updated maps further reading and a bibliography for each section a cross-referenced language index of over 6,000 languages. Presenting contributions from international scholars, covering over 6,000 languages and containing over 150 full-colour maps, the Atlas of the World's Languages is the definitive reference resource for every linguistic and reference library.