[HN Gopher] Researchers Reconstruct Major Branches in the Tree o...
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       Researchers Reconstruct Major Branches in the Tree of Language
        
       Author : infodocket
       Score  : 13 points
       Date   : 2021-09-12 20:09 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.santafe.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.santafe.edu)
        
       | Jun8 wrote:
       | The Altaic "macrofamily" mentioned here is deemed controversial
       | as is the relation between Japanese and Korean. From a cursory
       | research in this topic I think that many discussions (on either
       | side of the debate) are at least partly motivated by national
       | feelings and politics and it's sometimes hard to discern where
       | this ends and real science begins.
       | 
       | There's a _large_ body of writing in this topic, one easy
       | starting point is:
       | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages. Unfortunately,
       | some in-depth research good resources I have seen accessed in
       | Turkish are not referenced here.
       | 
       | The comparison of Altaic languages with some in Europe, e.g.
       | Finnish and Hungarian was based on some similarities:
       | 1. Being agglutinative       2. Having vowel harmony        3.
       | Lack of grammatical gender       4. SOV word order
       | 
       | However, AFAIK, not much evidence could be found at the cognate
       | level.
        
       | optimalsolver wrote:
       | A really interesting BBC documentary from the 90s about
       | reconstructing early human languages:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7x7vLM_q50
        
       | devonkim wrote:
       | There's some evidence that Tamil and Korean is related based upon
       | genealogy as well which may be part of the reason for the failure
       | to account for it in particular although the article didn't make
       | it clear exactly what the criteria for the relationships are for
       | cognates in the summary. I'm not sure if scholars have delved
       | much into the relationship because the genealogical evidence was
       | only confirmed in the past so many years when it was considered a
       | folk legend for many years.
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-12 23:00 UTC)