The Golden Summary of Cinggis Qayan
The Golden Summary of Cinggis Qayan

Author: Leland Liu Rogers

Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9783447060745

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The Golden Summary of Cinggis Qayan is the earliest post-Mongol Empire period compilation of legends of the Chinggis Khaan mythos known to date. These stories are the original legends from which many later Chinggis Khaan Chronicles were based and were central to the mythos of the Cult of Chinggis Khaan. The stories within legitimize the rules of Chinggis Khaan and his descendants through divine acts, but also clearly show the human side of Chinggis Khaan, of how he erred from lust and anger, and of his willingness to correct his mistakes, to listen to reason, thus making him the great just and righteous emperor. This book contains together with extensive commentary the first full Latin transcription, English translation and word index of the pages unearthed in Inner Mongolia in the Mid-20th Century.

Languages and Prehistory of Central Siberia
Languages and Prehistory of Central Siberia

Author: Edward J. Vajda

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9027247765

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The twelve articles in this volume describe Yeniseic, Samoyedic and Siberian Turkic languages as a linguistic complex of great interest to typologists, grammarians, diachronic and synchronic linguists, as well as cultural anthropologists. The articles demonstrate how interdependent the disparate languages spoken in this area actually are. Individual articles discuss borrowing and language replacement, as well as compare the development of language subsystems, such as numeral words in Ket and Selkup. Three of the articles also discuss the historical and anthropological origins of the tribes of this area. The book deals with linguistics from the vantage of both historical anthropology as well as diachronic and synchronic linguistic structure. The editor's introduction offers a concise summary of the diverse languages of this area, with attention to both their differences and similarities. A major feature uniting them is their mutual interaction with the unique Yeniseic language family – the only group in North Asia outside the Pacific Rim that does not belong to Uralic or Altaic. Except for the papers by Anderson and Harrison, all of the articles were originally written in Russian and they are made available in English here for the first time.

Language Contact in Siberia
Language Contact in Siberia

Author: Bayarma Khabtagaeva

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9004390766

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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 Descriptive Grammar of Ket (Yenisei-Ostyak)
A Descriptive Grammar of Ket (Yenisei-Ostyak)

Author: Stefan Georg

Publisher: Global Oriental

Published: 2007-03-22

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9004213503

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Linguists and specialists on Siberia are generally familiar with the name Ket, which designates a small ethnic group on the Yenisei and their language, widely regarded as a linguistic enigma in many respects. Ket is a severely endangered language with today less than 500 native speakers. Together with Yugh, Kott, Arin, Assan and Pumpokol, all of which are completely extinct, it forms the Yeniseic family of languages, which has no known linguistic relatives. This Grammar of Ket constitutes the first book of its kind in English and is structured as follows: (1) Introduction; (2) The Kets and their Language; (3) Phonology; (4) Morphology; (5) References. A second volume is planned on Ket syntax, supported by a collection of original texts with translations and annotations.

The Tungusic Languages
The Tungusic Languages

Author: Alexander Vovin

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-31

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 1317542797

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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.

Mongolian
Mongolian

Author: Juha A. Janhunen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2012-11-29

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 9027273057

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Mongolian is the principal language spoken by some five million ethnic Mongols living in Outer and Inner Mongolia, as well as in adjacent parts of Russia and China. The spoken language is divided into a number of mutually intelligible dialects, while for writing two separate written languages are used: Cyrillic Khalkha in Outer Mongolia (the Republic of Mongolia) and Written Mongol in Inner Mongolia (P. R. China). In this grammatical description, the focus is on the standard varieties of the spoken language, as used in broadcasting, education, and everyday casual speech. The dialectology of the language, and its background as a member of the Mongolic language family, are also dicussed. Mongolian is an agglutinating language with a well-developed suffixal morphology. In the areal framework, the language is a typical member of the trans-Eurasian Ural-Altaic complex with features such as vowel harmony, verb-final sentence structure, and complex chains of non-finite verbal phrases.

Multiple Exponence
Multiple Exponence

Author: Alice C. Harris

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0190464356

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Multiple (or extended) exponence is the occurrence of multiple realizations of a single morphosemantic feature, bundle of features, or derivational category within a word. This book provides data and direction to the discussion of ME, which has gone in a variety of directions and suffers from lack of evidence. Alice Harris addresses the question of why ME is of interest to linguists and traces the discussion of this concept in the linguistic literature. The four most commonly encountered types of ME are characterized, with copious examples from a broad variety of languages; these types form the basis for discussion of the processing of ME, the acquisition of ME, the historical development of ME, and analysis of ME. The book addresses some of the most important questions involving ME, including why it exists at all.

Asymmetries in Vowel Harmony
Asymmetries in Vowel Harmony

Author: Harry van der Hulst

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-08-23

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 0192543067

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This book deals with the phenomenon of vowel harmony, a phonological process whereby all the vowels in a word are required to share a specific phonological property, such as front or back articulation. Vowel harmony occurs in the majority of languages of the world, though only in very few European languages, and has been a central concern in phonological theory for many years. In this volume, Harry van der Hulst puts forward a new theory of vowel harmony, which accounts for the patterns of and exceptions to this phenomenon in the widest range of languages ever considered. The book begins with an overview of the general causes of asymmetries in vowel harmony systems. The two following chapters provide a detailed account of a new theory of vowel harmony based on unary elements and licensing, which is embedded in a general dependency-based theory of phonological structure. In the remaining chapters, this theory is applied to a variety of vowel harmony phenomena from typologically diverse languages, including palatal harmony in languages such as Finnish and Hungarian, labial harmony in Turkic languages, and tongue root systems in Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Tungusic languages. The volume provides a valuable overview of the diversity of vowel harmony in the languages of the world and is essential reading for phonologists of all theoretical persuasions.

Managing Frontiers in Qing China
Managing Frontiers in Qing China

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-11-14

Total Pages: 478

ISBN-13: 9004335005

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In Managing Frontiers in Qing China, historians and anthropologists explore China's imperial expansion in Inner Asia, focusing on early Qing empire-building in Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and beyond – Central Asian perspectives and comparisons to Russia's Asian empire are included. Taking an institutional-historical and historical-anthropological approach, the essays engage with two Qing agencies well-known for their governance of non-Han groups: the Lifanyuan and Libu. This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the Lifanyuan and Libu, revising and assessing the state of affairs in the under-researched field of these two institutions. The contributors explore the imperial policies towards and the shifting classifications of minority groups in the Qing Empire, explicitly pairing and comparing the Lifanyuan and Libu as in some sense cognate agencies. This text offers insight into how China's past has continued to inform its modern policies, as well as the geopolitical make-up of East Asia and beyond. Contributors include: Uradyn E. Bulag, Chia Ning, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Nicola DiCosmo, Dorothea Heuschert-Laage, Laura Hostetler, Fabienne Jagou, Mei-hua Lan, Dittmar Schorkowitz, Song Tong, Michael Weiers,Ye Baichuan, Yuan Jian, Zhang Yongjiang.