The Tungusic Languages

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.

The Manchu-Tungusic languages constitute a linguistically well-defined but geographically widely-dispersed family of about a dozen separate languages distributed in Siberia, Central and East Asia. Although a considerable amount of descriptive, historical and field work has been carried out on these languages in Russia and China, little is known about them in the west, since almost all available publications are either in Russian or in Chinese. An up-to-date survey of this language family aimed at the western reader is therefore long overdue.

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.

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.

This monograph dicsusses phonetic, morphological and semantic features of Altaic elements in Yeniseian, a rather heterogeneous language family traditionally classified as one of the ‘Paleo-Siberian’ language groups, that are not related to each other.

Volume 4 includes unique records of Orok (Uilta), a Tungusic language (dictionaries, texts, grammatical comments) noted down by Pilsudski directly from native informants at the beginning of the 20th century on Sakhalin. The original source material is identified with the help of - and confronted against - all the existing contemporary dictionaries with the assistance of leading specialists in the field (the Novosibirsk Avrorin group, also called the school of Manchu-Tungusologists). Abundant comparative data are quoted. All necessary introductory information and commentaries of ethnographic, historical, and linguistic nature are provided. Archival photos taken by Pilsudski are juxtaposed with related contemporary photos especially taken for this purpose. In addition, samples of original manuscript pages are reproduced. Bibliographical data and indices are provided in conformity with the previous volumes.

The Tungusic languages are spoken across most of eastern Siberia and northern China. Because all of the Tungusic languages are endangered, the opportunity to learn more about the structures of these languages in the future will become limited. Recent Advances in Tungusic Linguistics includes invited contributions from sixteen specialists on Tungusic from all over the world. The volume presents research that is representative of the current scientific knowledge. It includes papers of a comparative orientation in the tradition of Tungusic studies, but also addresses new domains (e.g. discourse), as well as employing new methods (e.g. new possibilities of acoustic analysis in phonetic research and the use of semantic maps in morphosyntax). All essays have a typological orientation, even though they draw on the material from individual Tungusic languages. With the varied conception of this volume, the editors Lindsay J. Whaley and Andrej L. Malchukov aim at stimulating further interaction and collaboration in the domain of Tungusic studies.

The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages provides a comprehensive account of the Transeurasian languages, and is the first major reference work in the field since 1965. The term 'Transeurasian' refers to a large group of geographically adjacent languages that includes five uncontroversial linguistic families: Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic. The historical connection between these languages, however, constitutes one of the most debated issues in historical comparative linguistics. In the present book, a team of leading international scholars in the field take a balanced approach to this controversy, integrating different theoretical frameworks, combining both functional and formal linguistics, and showing that genealogical and areal approaches are in fact compatible with one another. The volume is divided into five parts. Part I deals with the historical sources and periodization of the Transeurasian languages and their classification and typology. In Part II, chapters provide individual structural overviews of the Transeurasian languages and the linguistic subgroups that they belong to, while Part III explores Transeurasian phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, and semantics from a comparative perspective. Part IV offers a range of areal and genealogical explanations for the correlations observed in the preceding parts. Finally, Part V combines archaeological, genetic, and anthropological perspectives on the identity of speakers of Transeurasian languages. The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages will be an indispensable resource for specialists in Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages and for anyone with an interest in Transeurasian and comparative linguistics more broadly.