Turanian is an obsolete language-family proposal subsuming most of the languages of Eurasia not included in Indo-European, Semitic and Chinese. During the 19th century, inspired by the establishment of the Indo-European family, scholars looked for similarly widespread families elsewhere.[1] Building on the work of predecessors such as Rasmus Rask and Matthias Castrén, Max Müller proposed the Turanian grouping primarily on the basis of the incidence of agglutinative morphology, naming it after Turan, an ancient Persian term for the lands of Central Asia.[2][3] The languages he included are now generally assigned to nine separate language families.
| Turanian | |
|---|---|
| (obsolete) | |
| Geographic distribution | Eurasia |
| Linguistic classification | Proposed language family |
| Subdivisions |
|
| Language codes | |
| Glottolog | None |
Classification
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In 1730, von Strahlenberg, relying on structural similarities of languages, proposed a group of "Tatar languages" spanning northern and central Eurasia and the languages of the Caucasus. In 1832, Rask added Basque and languages of Greenland and North America to von Strahlenberg's grouping, labelling the resulting group the "Scythian languages".[3][4] Rask also added the Dravidian languages to this grouping on the basis of similarities in grammatical structure, postulating that the Scythian languages had once stretched from the Arctic Ocean to the Indian Ocean before being split by the intrusion of Indo-Aryan languages.[5][6]
Müller added even more languages to this group.[3][7] He viewed the structure of the family as follows:[8][9]
- Turanian
- Northern Division (Ural-Altaic)
- Southern Division
- Taic
- Malaic (Malayo-Polynesian)
- Bhotîya (Tibeto-Burman)
- Gangetic
- Lohitic
- Munda
- Tamulic (Dravidian)
He left Japonic, Koreanic, Koryak, Itelmen and various languages of the Caucasus unclassified, but suggested that they might have a common origin with Turanian.[10] He preferred to call Turanian a "language group", feeling that that it was less tightly bound than "language families" like Indo-European and Semitic.[7]
Reception
editLinguists no longer consider typological features a sufficient criterion for the identification of language families.[11] Such features are commonly shared by unrelated languages across the world, and also spread by interaction between unrelated languages.[12]
The proposal of a relationship between Ural-Altaic and Dravidian persisted in some late 19th century scholarship, but in the absence of further development, was considered an idle hypothesis already by the early 20th.[13] The Ural-Altaic hypothesis was itself abandoned early in the 20th century.[14] The Altaic theory linking Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic is also rejected by most scholars.[15] The combination of the Samoyedic and Finnic (Finno-Ugric) classes form the modern Uralic family, which is firmly established.[16] Each of the five classes of Müller's southern division are now considered to belong to separate language families, Tai–Kadai, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic and Dravidian respectively.
The term "Turanian" remained for a time also a synonym for the Ural-Altaic hypothesis.[17][18]
References
edit- ^ Bhattacharya 1972, p. 242.
- ^ Müller (1861), pp. 288–289.
- ^ a b c Campbell & Poser (2008), p. 237.
- ^ Poppe (1965), p. 125.
- ^ Krishnamurti (2003), p. 5.
- ^ Rask (1834), p. 525.
- ^ a b Poppe (1965), p. 126.
- ^ Müller (1854), p. 220.
- ^ Müller (1861), pp. 397–398.
- ^ Müller (1861), p. 324.
- ^ Campbell & Poser (2008), p. 242.
- ^ Campbell & Poser (2008), p. 236.
- ^ Donner, Otto (1901). "Die uralaltaischen sprachen". Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen. 1: 130.
- ^ Campbell & Poser (2008), p. 241.
- ^ Campbell & Poser (2008), p. 238.
- ^ Campbell & Poser (2008), pp. 88–94.
- ^ Lucien, Adam (1870). "Linguistique touranienne. Du theme du pronom de la 1re personne". Revue de Linguistique et de Philologie comparée. 4: 29–40.
- ^ Pröhle, Wilhelm (1978). Vergleichende Syntax der ural-altäischen (turanischen) Sprachen. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Works cited
edit- Bhattacharya, Sudhibushan (1972), "Dravidian and Munda: a good field for areal and typological studies", in Agesthialingom, S.; Shanmugam, S.V. (eds.), Third Seminar on Dravidian Linguistics, Annamalainagar: Annamalai University, pp. 241–256.
- Campbell, Lyle; Poser, William J. (2008), Language Classification: History and Method, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-88005-3.
- Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2003), The Dravidian Languages, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-77111-0.
- Müller, Friedrich Max (1854), The classification of the Turanian languages.
- ——— (1861), Lectures on The Science of Language, New York, C. Scribner.
- Poppe, Nicholas (1965), Introduction to Altaic Linguistics, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
- Rask, Rasmus (1834), "Remarks on the Zend language, and the Zendavesta", Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 3 (3): 524–540, JSTOR 25581776.