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Contact or cognate: using onomasiological reconstruction to shed light on the ‘Altaic’ question
In this paper, I re-examine the controversial issue of lexical similarities between the three major linguistic families that constitute the bulk of the so-called Altaic linguistic area or macrofamily. Applying a simple automated analysis procedure to a newly compiled 400-item wordlist for Proto-Turkic, Proto-Mongolic, and Proto-Tungusic allows to draw the following conclusions: (a) lexical similarities are always higher in geographically contiguous areas, agreeing with the idea of strong Turkic-Mongolic and Mongolic-Tungusic linguistic contacts; (b) additionally, the quantity and nature of Turkic-Mongolic and Mongolic-Tungusic matches are strikingly different from each other, with the latter better interpretable as evidence for common ancestry; (c) some of the matches, particularly those spread across all three families, still provide incentive for further testing of the Altaic kinship hypothesis. It is also argued that the best way to investigate such long-range comparisonsisthrough “onomasiological” reconstruction, paying equal attention to the phonetic properties, semantic aspects, and topological distribution of any potential cognates.
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