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Double-negative periphrastic litotes have been for nearly three centuries the usual way to express necessitive predicates in Japanese and Korean. These constructions do not, however, go back to the earliest stages of these languages and should not be invoked as evidence of a possible common origin. But Korean also has a double-affirmative periphrastic necessitive construction. Premodern Japanese has no overt counterpart to it, but it does have an auxiliary adjective that expresses necessity. I argue that this auxiliary was a grammaticalization of a periphrastic analogous in form and meaning to the Korean double-affirmative necessitive, and should be considered as evidence of a common origin. Looking at sampling of Transeurasian languages other than Korean and Japanese, it seems that double-affirmative necessitives may have been an innovation of a branch of Proto-Tungusic that later split into Proto-Korean-Japanese and the predecessor of Manchu.

This article analyses the vowel in the illative marker of monosyllabic nouns which usually copies the quality of the stem vowels. The data come from different questionnaires recorded by Soikkola Ingrian speakers in the 21 (st) century. The main point of interest is the contradiction between the fact that the vowel in the illative marker copies the stem vowel and the fact that existing descriptions often indicate raising of mid vowels in the stem but not in the illative suffix. Both auditory analysis and acoustic measurements are used to check the correspondence between the quality of the stem and suffix vowels in the illative forms of monosyllabic nouns. The research reveals that there is both interspeaker and intraspeaker variation in the quality of the vowels under discussion, and several different strategies can be used for building the illative marker. The rounded stem vowels öö and oo are opposed to the unrounded ee: if raised in the stem, the latter does not influence the quality of the suffix vowel. In most cases, the quality of the rounded stem and suffix vowels is the same, so a transcription where these vowels are denoted differently is not justified. Pronunciations where both the stem and suffix vowels are half-raised argue for an alternative variant of the Soikkola Ingrian phonological system. Keywords: Ingrian, illative, vowel quality, morphology-phonology interface, variation. Artiklis analüüsitakse ühesilbiliste nimisõnade illatiivi käändelõpus olevat vokaali, mis tavaliselt langeb kokku tüvevokaaliga. Keeleainestik pärineb erinevatest küsimustikest, mille andmed on isuri keele Soikkola murde kõnelejatelt salvestatud XXI sajandil. Peamist huvi on pakkunud vastuolu, mis seisneb selles, et illatiivi lõpus olev vokaal langeb kokku tüvevokaaliga ja et olemasolevate kirjelduste järgi keskvokaalid kõrgenevad tiives, kuid mitte käändelõpus. ?œhesilbiliste nimisõnade illatiivivormide tüve ja käändelõpu vokaalide kvaliteedi vastavuse kontrollimiseks on kasutatatud nii auditoorset analüüsi kui ka akustilisi mõõtmisi. Uuringust selgub, et vaatluse all olevate vokaalide kvaliteedis on varieerumist nii eri kõnelejate vahel kui ka ühel ja samal kõnelejal ning et illatiivi käändelõpu moodustamiseks saab kasutada mitmesuguseid strateegiaid. ?œmardatud tüvevokaalid öö ja oo vastanduvad ümardamata ee-le: tüvevokaali ee korgenemine ei mõjuta käändelõpu vokaali kvaliteeti. Enamasti on nii ümardatud t õ ve- kui ka sufiksivokaalide kvaliteet sama, mistõttu ei ole ü igustatud transkriptsioon, milles neid vokaale tähistatakse erinevalt. N äited, kus nii t õ ve- kui ka sufiksi vokaal on pooleldi kõrgenenud, viitavad Soikkola murde fonoloogilise süsteemi alternatiivsele variandile.

The origin and early dispersal of speakers of Transeurasian languages—that is, Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic—is among the most disputed issues of Eurasian population history 1 – 3 . A key problem is the relationship between linguistic dispersals, agricultural expansions and population movements 4 , 5 . Here we address this question by ‘triangulating’ genetics, archaeology and linguistics in a unified perspective. We report wide-ranging datasets from these disciplines, including a comprehensive Transeurasian agropastoral and basic vocabulary; an archaeological database of 255 Neolithic–Bronze Age sites from Northeast Asia; and a collection of ancient genomes from Korea, the Ryukyu islands and early cereal farmers in Japan, complementing previously published genomes from East Asia. Challenging the traditional ‘pastoralist hypothesis’ 6 – 8 , we show that the common ancestry and primary dispersals of Transeurasian languages can be traced back to the first farmers moving across Northeast Asia from the Early Neolithic onwards, but that this shared heritage has been masked by extensive cultural interaction since the Bronze Age. As well as marking considerable progress in the three individual disciplines, by combining their converging evidence we show that the early spread of Transeurasian speakers was driven by agriculture. A ‘triangulation’ approach combining linguistics, archaeology and genetics suggests that the origin and spread of Transeurasian family of languages can be traced back to early millet farmers in Neolithic North East Asia.

This book deals with shared verb morphology in Japanese and other languages that have been identified as Transeurasian (traditionally: \"Altaic\") in previous research. It analyzes shared etymologies and reconstructed grammaticalizations with the goal to provide evidence for the genealogical relatedness of these languages.

This paper investigates back/front vowel harmony in the Kihnu variety of Estonian. Data from the Estonian Dialect Corpus are analyzed to inform the description of harmony in this dialect, a phenomenon that has been understudied in the literature. Previously reported patterns of categorical harmony (/u/-/y/ and /[alpha]/-/ae/ pairs) and transparency (/i/) are confirmed. However, the corpus provides insufficient direct evidence to either support or refute previous descriptions of the /o/-/ø/ pair as non-participatory Subtleties of a relationship previously described as variable (/e/-/r/ pair) are explored in more depth, with /e/ proposed as a second transparent vowel. Vowel harmony is also explored in Kihnu Estonian's rich inventory of diphthongs, with intra-syllabic harmony in diphthongs shown to occur at a similar rate to that of inter-syllabic harmony between monophthongs. Keywords: Estonian dialects, Kihnu, corpus, vowel harmony. Töös kasitletakse eesti keele Kihnu murraku vokaalharmooniat eesti murdekorpuse (

In Linguistic Mysteries of Ethnonyms in Inner Asia, Penglin Wang focuses on semantics as a central theme in onomastics and strives to unravel the origin and meaning of a series of influential ethnonyms such as Xianbei, Rouran, Tabγač, Tatar, Shiwei, Mongol, Merkid, Nüzhen, Jušen, and Nikan. Since much of modern research has dealt with issues of Inner Asian ethnonyms within a regional framework, Wang’s exploration of the early Indo-European and Altaic influence on the ethnonymic designations of Mongol-Tungusic and Turkic groups opens up a new horizon for transcontinental approaches, which represent an important thrust in Inner Asian and Eurasian studies. Wang has based this comprehensive study on textual, cross-linguistic, and patterned analysis of the ethnonyms found primarily in ancient Chinese sources.

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.

The paper reviews the data concerning the nominal inflectional morphology in the chain of languages comprising Uralic, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic and Japonic, collectively termed \"Ural-Altaic\". Although nominal morphology has traditionally been quoted in support of the hypothesis concerning the genetic relationship of these languages, a more detailed survey of the data shows that the extant parallels are in various ways secondary and/or accidental. This suggests that Ural-Altaic is an areal and typological complex of languages, but not a genetic entity. On the other hand, it is also evident that much of the synchronically observed nominal morphology in the languages of this complex is relatively recent. The only examples of potentially relevant inter-family morphological parallels can be found between Mongolic and Tungusic.