# Potential link between Japanese and Turkish?



## COF

In the past I've heard of theory that suggests that Japanese and Turkish, along with Korean and possibly a couple of other languages belong to the same group. I believe the group was named Altaic. Do you think there's anything in this or do you feel this is just some nutty hypothesis with nothing really to support it other than a handful of words with the same meaning that broadly resemble each other? 

I'm no language expert, but when I've seen Romanized Japanese sentences, and Turkish sentences I can't help but think there is a bit of a similarity, both seem to have very distant similarities. Both are agglutinative languages (although many languages are, that's not really saying much), and there are quite a few words which look similar and have the same, or similar meanings in both languages. 

However, the sheer geographic distance between the 2 regions makes me wonder if it's even possible. 

Thanks for any insight into this topic.


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## Frank06

Hi,


COF said:


> In the past I've heard of theory that suggests that Japanese and Turkish, along with Korean and possibly a couple of other languages


The so-called Altaic language family counts 66 languages, spoken by almost 350 million people. That's not my understanding of 'a couple of other languages' ;-).
Anyway, we already have a thread about Altaic languages and the English Wikipedia article is a fairly good introduction.



> I'm no language expert, but when I've seen Romanized Japanese sentences, and Turkish sentences I can't help but think there is a bit of a similarity,


Could you please give a few examples?



> the sheer geographic distance between the 2 regions makes me wonder if it's even possible


I don't think distance is an issue here.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## OBrasilo

To me, there seems to be a clear link between Turkic, and Japonic. There seems to be a correspondence between Turkic initial _d-_, and Japonic initial _y-_, such as in Turkish _dört_ vs. Japanese _yo(n)_, both meaning _four_, and in Turkish _dağ_ vs. Japanese _yama_, both meaning _mountain_. In my humble opinion, the proto-sound could have been _ɟ_, which then later evolved into _d_ in Turkic, and into _y_ (phnetically j) in Japonic.


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## Hulalessar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_the_Japanese_language#Altaic_hypothesis


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## sokol

By accident - when researching a completely different matter - I've come across two older articles in *Ural-Altaic Yearbook = UAY* for short reference (and please note: this yearbook is one for which linking Uralic, Altaic and other languages is something of a 'task': quite some of the scientists writing there _want _to see connections; nevertheless you only get to write for this journal if you _are _a scientist):

*Murayama, Schichiro: Ist Japanisch eine Mischsprache? [Is Japanese a mixed language?] UAY vol. 50/1978 p. 111-115:
*This is the *"Austronesian theory"* of Japanese being probably an Austronesian language which had been thoroughly changed due to the influence of an Altaic language (and other influences).
He _has _arguments to follow, some of them sound quite good to me while others do not (one of the latter being the name of "mother" in Japanese, Altaic and Austronesian which isn't an argument really, we've already had some discussions about this, e. g. that one here).
The article is very short and I am in no position to evaluate the examples he has given therefore I leave them out.
(And I couldn't post them here anyway, this would exceed the 4-lines-copyright-rule quite considerably.  And anyway it would be best, for those proficient enough to evaluate, to read the original article.)

The conclusion at which he arrives is as follows (all these are *quotes from p. 115, *translations are mine; for copyright reasons I have to be short):


> One should take into account (...) that Austronesian elements outnumber Altaic ones in basic vocabulary of Old Japanese (...)





> (...) one can conclude that the genesis of Proto-Japanese might be explained as based on an Austronesian language which became reformated*) due to the influence of an Altaic language, probably one closely related to Proto-Tungusic.


*) I object against his choice of word _"reformiert_ - reformated" because in science we shouldn't call one thing good or bad - and this verb here is not neutral. But translation should be true to the original. And the German sentence is so complicated (with several Matryoshkas if you know what I mean, sentence-embedded-in-a-sentence-embedded-...) that translation has to be somewhat free concerning syntax.
Further he states that syntax of Japanese were more Altaic than Austronesian.
He also mentioned some other authors doing research: he begins with Bedler (1857), later came Polianov (~1900), then Miller (1971) and Menges (1975). Polianov already argued very much in favour of Japanese being a mixed language.
Whoever is interested in this should read this article, and the next one:

*Kazár, Lajos: Uralic-Japanese Language Comparison;  UAY vol. 48/1976 p. 127-150:*
This gives extensive word-lists and discussion; what I said about the first article is even more true about this one: I can't possibly evaluate if what is written there is valuable.
The same author has written more articles about related topics.

*Please *also note:
- some linguists take it for a fact that the Altaic family in the broader sense (with Korean or probably even Japanese included): this is not the case, that's still _very much_ disputed
- some linguists still are influenced by national ideologies; I won't quote an article and I won't give names (this is not about making accusations, right? ) - I only advice to be careful with all such theories (and to always be on the look-out for ideologies hidden behind so-called science); some of those hidden ideologies you also find in UAY
- those old articles sometimes, alas, are just _old; _so please don't read to much into it, newer, modern authors should be read before you come to a conclusion


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## neonrider

OBrasilo said:


> To me, there seems to be a clear link between Turkic, and Japonic. There seems to be a correspondence between Turkic initial _d-_, and Japonic initial _y-_, such as in Turkish _dört_ vs. Japanese _yo(n)_, both meaning _four_, and in Turkish _dağ_ vs. Japanese _yama_, both meaning _mountain_. In my humble opinion, the proto-sound could have been _ɟ_, which then later evolved into _d_ in Turkic, and into _y_ (phnetically j) in Japonic.



How is Turkish _dört_ similar to Japanese _yon_? I know Turkish and I know Japanese and i don;t see any similarity between the two, yet I see similarity (a very old influence) between Polynesian, Pacific languages and Japanese.


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## Rallino

neonrider said:


> How is Turkish _dört_ similar to Japanese _yon_? I know Turkish and I know Japanese and i don;t see any similarity between the two, yet I see similarity (a very old influence) between Polynesian, Pacific languages and Japanese.



Yes, it's a little weird to claim that _dört_ and _yon_ are similar...^^ Also weird to claim that _dağ_ and _yama_ are similar.  

If it is going to satisfy you, the word for _hill _is *tepe* in both Turkish and Japanese. Anyway, the similarity in vocabulary isn't a criteria to claim that a group of languages are from the same family.

I do feel like Japanese and Turkish are similar, because the logic of the syntax of both languages seem really close to each other.

Jp: Kyoto-*no*
Tr: Kyoto'*nun*
En: of Kyoto

Jp: Kuruma-*de*
Tr: Araba-*da*
En: by car

Jp: Kutu-*o*
Tr: Pabuç-*u*
En: the shoes

Jp:  Nan-*desu ka*
Tr: Ne-*dir ki*?
En: What is it?

Jp: imasu
Tr: imiş
En: there is

Jp: hanashi*mashita*
Tr: konuş*muştu*
En: he had talked

Jp: i*tta*
Tr: gi*tti*
En: he's gone

and so on and so forth. In my opinion there is a faint link somewhere in the history of these languages. But I'm not a linguist, so my opinion isn't worth much.


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## neonrider

Could be! I always thought Japanese is not like other East Asian languages and I thought it originated somewhere in Central Asia (and I know well the Chinese and Ainu parts of it), so I and you could be right. Also, the weirdest thing is that my brother when he was in Uzbekistan, he told me that local people taught him this phrase: "Oppai name" which in Japanese (20 years later I found out) means "child sucking a breast", but in Uzbekistan they use it for something else. Remember, Uzbekistan just like the entire USSR was a closed society and very few people, especially in Uzbekistan, could travel to Japan or even to Mongolia or China. Also I know that Japanese haplogroups, genetics etc. derives from both Tibet and NE China. But some, quite many, Japanese have these curvy noses unlike SE Asians or Chinese, which I thought sometimes remind me slightly of gentle form of Jews. Also in Japanese "atama" means "head" and "otosan" (oto) means "father". Further you know already. By the way, in Lithuanian "bite" is very similar to Japanese "bite" (to bite, biting, bitten, bit) = "kanda, kaasti, kandzhioja" and there are other "wild matches" or "coincidences". So please post more assumed matches, I'd like to see them since I like not to outrule "wild guesses" as they call it.


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## berndf

neonrider said:


> So please post more assumed matches


*Moderator note: but not in this forum. A reminder of the rules:*


Frank06 said:


> EHL is not a venue to launch or expand on private pet theories, pseudo-linguistic ponderings, idiosyncratic and fringe ideas. *This also includes theories based upon random lists of similarly looking words, chance coincidences*, wild speculations or associations and other pseudo-linguistic and pre-scientific methods.


*To a certain degree we tolerate posting of such list as an explorative step for formulating an initial hypothesis. But any claims resulting from such lists should subsequently be substantiated. Providing more lists does not qualify as substantiation.*


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## neonrider

I understand, yet languages evolve, so should the rules. Good luck.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Rallino said:


> Jp: Kyoto-*no*
> Tr: Kyoto'*nun*
> En: of Kyoto
> 
> Jp: Kuruma-*de*
> Tr: Araba-*da*
> En: by car



What do the suffixes no (Jp) and nun (Tr), as well as de (Jp) and da (Tr) mean?
As for all I know, the suffix "da/de" in Turkish means "in", "inside".



Rallino said:


> Jp: Kutu-*o*
> Tr: Pabuç-*u*
> En: the shoes



Once again: what does the suffix o (Jp) / u (Tr) mean?



Rallino said:


> Jp: Kutu-*o*Jp:  Nan-*desu ka*
> Tr: Ne-*dir ki*?
> En: What is it?
> 
> Jp: imasu
> Tr: imiş
> En: there is
> 
> Jp: hanashi*mashita*
> Tr: konuş*muştu*
> En: he had talked
> 
> Jp: i*tta*
> Tr: gi*tti*
> En: he's gone
> 
> and so on and so forth. In my opinion there is a faint link somewhere in the history of these languages. But I'm not a linguist, so my opinion isn't worth much.



The verbs appear to be the most interesting part of your list, especially "he had talked".
Are there any more coincidences among verb stems and in the verbal morphology of Japanese and Turkish?


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## Rallino

Angelo di fuoco said:


> What do the suffixes no (Jp) and nun (Tr), as well as de (Jp) and da (Tr) mean?
> As for all I know, the suffix "da/de" in Turkish means "in", "inside".


 
Yes, mostly, it's also possible to use it as "by car" though.



> Once again: what does the suffix o (Jp) / u (Tr) mean?


 
They are the object markers. i.e. The accusative case.



> The verbs appear to be the most interesting part of your list, especially "he had talked".
> Are there any more coincidences among verb stems and in the verbal morphology of Japanese and Turkish?


 
Are you talking about verb stems like "*yak*imasu" (to burn) in Turkish is "*yak*mak" ? I don't know about them. But the suffixes are more important to decide about a language's relation with another language, don't you find? =) 

Nevertheless, I don't have all of them in my mind at the moment.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Rallino said:


> Are you talking about verb stems like "*yak*imasu" (to burn) in Turkish is "*yak*mak" ? I don't know about them. But the suffixes are more important to decide about a language's relation with another language, don't you find? =)
> 
> Nevertheless, I don't have all of them in my mind at the moment.



I agree that suffixes are more important than word stems, therefore I asked you not only about stems, but also about morphology.
My knowledge of both Japanese (except the meaning of some Kanji, which Japanese has in common with Chinese) and Turkish (one or two words) being virtually none, it also would be interesting for me to have a look at a Swadesh list of Turkish and Japanese and to compare the similarities and differences.


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## OBrasilo

> Yes, it's a little weird to claim that dört and yon are similar...^^ Also weird to claim that dağ and yama are similar.
> 
> If it is going to satisfy you, the word for hill is tepe in both Turkish and Japanese. Anyway, the similarity in vocabulary isn't a criteria to claim that a group of languages are from the same family.


I've NEVER talked about simple vocabulary similarity. I talked about a seemingly *regular sound correspondence* between Japanese initial y and Turkish initial d. I'm pretty aware, that convergent vocabulary is not a criterion for relationship, but vocabulary with a seemingly *regular sound correspondence* is.


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## neonrider

Rallino said:


> Are you talking about verb stems like "*yak*imasu" (to burn) in Turkish is "*yak*mak" ? I don't know about them. But the suffixes are more important to decide about a language's relation with another language, don't you find? =)



Degimas (Lith.) = burning process. Yet "yakimasu" in Japanese means "I bake" or "to bake" (Kepimas in Lith.), not "to burn".


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## clevermizo

Angelo di fuoco said:


> The verbs appear to be the most interesting part of your list, especially "he had talked".



It's not particularly interesting in the slightest. I find the similarity forced.

"He talked" is _hanashita_. _Hanashimashita_ is an _honorific_ form used in respectful/polite circumstances. _-mashita_ is not a suffix. The way to analyze _hanashimashita  _correctly is:

_hanas(h)-------- mas(h)------------ta
(talk) ----- (polite/respectful)-----(past tense)_

So the question is, can _muștu _be analyzed similarly? I believe that -_muș_ is the tense/aspect marker. -_t_ marks it as a narrative pluperfect and -_u_ is the personal pronoun inflection for "he". This is very different from the Japanese structure which is not a pluperfect nor does it mark "he" but only tense and politeness. _Hanashimashita_ can also mean "I talked". 

The surface similarity looks like pure coincidence.

The only similarity here could be a sound correspondence between _k_ and _h_: _konuș_ and _hanas(h) _but that would have to be shown to be a robust correspondence. There's no correspondence in the grammatical suffixes.


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## Angelo di fuoco

One who, like me, doesn't know anything about Japanese and Turkish, may be deceived by superficial sound correspondence, or, better, similarity (which, in this case, is extreme), so thank you very much for undeceiving me.


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## clevermizo

Angelo di fuoco said:


> One who, like me, doesn't know anything about Japanese and Turkish, may be deceived by superficial sound correspondence, or, better, similarity (which, in this case, is extreme), so thank you very much for undeceiving me.



Well although there's no similarity in the grammatical affixes, the root words are similar. /k/ and /h/ are known to be related elsewhere, consider that Latin _canis_ and English _hound_ are real cognates. Mind you, I don't really believe in a link between Turkish and Japanese, but if the relationship between /k/ in Turkish and /h/ in Japanese were robust, then it would supportive of that hypothesis.


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## Abu Rashid

COF said:
			
		

> However, the sheer geographic distance between the 2 regions makes me wonder if it's even possible.



The Turkic languages probably originated in, and are still spoken in, Western China. So the geographic distance is not quite as sheer as you seem to think.


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## Rallino

clevermizo said:


> It's not particularly interesting in the slightest. I find the similarity forced.
> 
> "He talked" is _hanashita_. _Hanashimashita_ is an _honorific_ form used in respectful/polite circumstances. _-mashita_ is not a suffix. The way to analyze _hanashimashita  _correctly is:
> 
> _hanas(h)-------- mas(h)------------ta
> (talk) ----- (polite/respectful)-----(past tense)_
> 
> So the question is, can _muștu _be analyzed similarly? I believe that -_muș_ is the tense/aspect marker. -_t_ marks it as a narrative pluperfect and -_u_ is the personal pronoun inflection for "he". This is very different from the Japanese structure which is not a pluperfect nor does it mark "he" but only tense and politeness. _Hanashimashita_ can also mean "I talked".



You're right, we can't analyze the Turkish equivalent as such. I had no idea that "mash" were honorific. Turkish doesn't have a honorofic speech though. Anyway, thanks for clearing that up; and I hope you guys will excuse me for having citated that example...


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## OBrasilo

clevermizo said:
			
		

> Well although there's no similarity in the grammatical affixes, the root words are similar. /k/ and /h/ are known to be related elsewhere, consider that Latin canis and English hound are real cognates. Mind you, I don't really believe in a link between Turkish and Japanese, but if the relationship between /k/ in Turkish and /h/ in Japanese were robust, then it would supportive of that hypothesis.


Well, modern Japanese /h/ ultimately comes from old Japanese /p/. So any relationship to /k/ is out of the question here, sorry.


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## clevermizo

OBrasilo said:


> Well, modern Japanese /h/ ultimately comes from old Japanese /p/. So any relationship to /k/ is out of the question here, sorry.



Hah, well then! Confirmed my suspicion.


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## seyif

Rallino said:


> Yes, it's a little weird to claim that _dört_ and _yon_ are similar...^^ Also weird to claim that _dağ_ and _yama_ are similar.
> 
> If it is going to satisfy you, the word for _hill _is *tepe* in both Turkish and Japanese. Anyway, the similarity in vocabulary isn't a criteria to claim that a group of languages are from the same family.
> 
> I do feel like Japanese and Turkish are similar, because the logic of the syntax of both languages seem really close to each other.
> 
> Jp: Kyoto-*no*
> Tr: Kyoto'*nun*
> En: of Kyoto
> 
> Jp: Kuruma-*de*
> Tr: Araba-*da*
> En: by car
> 
> Jp: Kutu-*o*
> Tr: Pabuç-*u*
> En: the shoes
> 
> Jp:  Nan-*desu ka*
> Tr: Ne-*dir ki*?
> En: What is it?
> 
> Jp: imasu
> Tr: imiş
> En: there is
> 
> Jp: hanashi*mashita*
> Tr: konuş*muştu*
> En: he had talked
> 
> Jp: i*tta*
> Tr: gi*tti*
> En: he's gone
> 
> and so on and so forth. In my opinion there is a faint link somewhere in the history of these languages. But I'm not a linguist, so my opinion isn't worth much.




If it is tried to compare Turkish and Japanese, one should be careful about changes in Turkish. If there were some interactions between them, it must be before 7th century. Since that time Turkish has changed in many ways. If we use modern Turkey Turkish for this comparison that can mislead us. Most affixes in your examples started to be used in West Turkish and it seems it is hard to find interactions between Oghuz and Japanese in most case.


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## muhahaa

COF said:


> Both are agglutinative languages (although many languages are, that's not really saying much)



We'll have to remember that morphological typology is a cyclical thing. Isolating -> agglutinative -> fusional -> isolating....

An isolating language will eventually become agglutinative as the separate particles lose stress and become suffixes or prefixes. An agglutinative language will eventually become fusional through sound changes. A fusional language will eventually become isolating as the root changes get replaced by separate particles and also through sound changes.


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## sokol

Moderator note:

Links to temporary download sites are not awfully useful: as soon as the download link expires downloads aren't available anymore, which would render the discussion about the document linked to completely useless.

The link has been deleted for this reason.

Thank you for your understanding.
Cheers
sokol
Moderator


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## er targyn

http://www.altaica.ru/Engl.htm - A good site on topic.


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## artion

Hi everybody. This is my first post.
Turkish language is originating from central Asia, not Turkey. Of course is relevant to Chinese and Japanese. The word "yon" that someone mentioned, is not Japanese but Chinese (although I don't recognize any similarity to turkish). The native Japanese for "four" is "yottsu" (still not close to turkish). Some words are similar. e.g. Turk. "kara" (black), jap. Kuro. Turk "ii" (good), jap. "ii". But the two languages separated long time ago and similarities are few and not recognized by the non-expert.


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## jmx

artion said:


> The word "yon" that someone mentioned, is not Japanese but Chinese ... The native Japanese for "four" is "yottsu" ...


I thought that "shi" is the Chinese loanword for 'four', and that "yottsu" is nothing but "yon" + suffix "tsu", in the same way as "hitotsu" is "hito" + "tsu".


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## er targyn

> Turkish ... Of course is relevant to Chinese and Japanese.


Not to Chinese. Japanese jo- < *dә < *toj > dört, dörben, dügin


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## Edguoglitigin

As a young Turkic linguist, even though I was taught that there had been an Altaic language family, I am gradually walking away from the Altaic family idea, cause (such as Gerhard Doerfer and Gerard Clauson emphasized) those languages do not share a common vocabulary, especially in basic words. 

I think those approaches which try to get the languages close one another are emotinal rather being scientific. For example, Old Mongolian had gender in conjugation whereas Turkic has never had a gender case.

As Clauson claimed, Turkic had influenced environmental languages (Mongolian, Tungusic, Korean and maybe Japanesse) a long times ago and it provides a situation that those languages belong to a common ancestor. According to some researches, Sumerian had some (about 150) Turkic words. It points out that Pre-Turks had been in contact with too many groups in a vast geography.

My additions to some examples given above:

*Turkish "ii" (actually _iyi_) was *edgü* in Old Turkic. Therefore Turkish "iyi" cant be compared to Japanesse "ii".

* Japanesse *yama* "mountain" is not an equivalent to Turkic *tag* but in Turkish there is a word *yamaç* that means "piedmount".

* If Japanesse _*yaki*masu_ has "to bake" meaning it still preserves the comparison with Turkic _*yak*mak_.


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## er targyn

Edguoglitigin, are you 





> walking away from the Altaic family idea


? What are last 2 additions then? Btw, Turkic-Sumerian "comparison" can't be taken serious by linguists.


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## ancalimon

er targyn said:


> Edguoglitigin, are you ? What are last 2 additions then? Btw, Turkic-Sumerian "comparison" can't be taken serious by linguists.



It is linguists themselves that does these comparisons.

Here are only words which are proven to be cognates by Osman Nedim Tuna.

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cg...2070501&N=Sumerian-Tuna.pdf&T=application/pdf


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## er targyn

Have you read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language?


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## Frank06

ancalimon said:


> Here are only words which are proven to be cognates by Osman Nedim Tuna.
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cg...2070501&N=Sumerian-Tuna.pdf&T=application/pdf


The link proves that mister Tuna made such a list, not that the list with alleged cognates is correct, nor that a possible link between Sumerian and Turkish has been demonstrated.

I had a look at a few items and it strikes me that Mr Tuna only mentions the variant of the Sumerian words which come close to Turkish words, ignoring sometimes up to 8 other variants. 

In short, we need a bit more than a manipulated list and an antiquated idea which still seems to be popular among pan-Turkists. 

Frank


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## Edguoglitigin

er targyn said:


> Edguoglitigin, are you ? What are last 2 additions then? Btw, Turkic-Sumerian "comparison" can't be taken serious by linguists.



You mean if I walk away from the idea so why I gave the last two additions. I just wanted to share my opinions on those words (because I saw that comparisons are devoid of scientific respect). To find some lexical similarities is not a direct evidence that we should postulate a language family.

I spoke of Sumerian in order to show Turkic languages' vast influence area.


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## er targyn

Any mention of Sumerian in relation to Turkic is pseudo-scientific. There's no Turkic loans in Japanese. Turkic influenced to some extent only Mongolic, Hungarian, Russian, Tajik and minor languages in Russia.


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## Edguoglitigin

er targyn said:


> Any mention of Sumerian in relation to Turkic is pseudo-scientific. There's no Turkic loans in Japanese. Turkic influenced to some extent only Mongolic, Hungarian, Russian, Tajik and minor languages in Russia.



I do not insist on Turkic loanwords in Sumerian (Btw I offer you to read Marcel Erdal's opinions about grammatical similarities between Hurrians and Turkic. Hurrians were a middle-eastern people) It was only an example. Besides you can not know whether the similar words in Japanesse are not loanwords.


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## Angelo di fuoco

If you know the phonetical and morphological evolution of both Japanese and Turkish (or rather the Turkic language family) and possibly some contact languages like Chinese, you can make some conclusions about the origin of some words.


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## er targyn

I'd like to read Marcel Erdal's opinions about grammatical similarities between Hurrians and Turkic. Where?


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## Edguoglitigin

That was a symposium paper:
Marcel Erdal, *"Türkçenin Hurrice İle Paylaştığı Ayrıntılar" (Details which Turkic and Hurrian share),* V. Uluslararası Türk Dili Kurultayı, 2004, Ankara. 

I'm sorry that it is written in Turkish, but I can summarize it for you the next wednesday.


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## Frank06

I wouldn't like to count the kilometers between Japan and the Hurrian homeland.  I mean, it seems we're drifting off-topic.

On the other hand, I start to get the impression that the ideas about Turkish-Japanese and Hurrian-Turkish (or Sumerian-Turkish) are two sides of the same coin. 

The Sumerian/Hurrian-Turkish idea has to convince us that speakers of a Turkic language (and this quickly becomes Turkish, hence Turks in the writings of certain self-proclaimed linguists) were present in the region from an early date on.

The Japanese/Korean-Turkish idea has to convince us that speakers of Turkic language (and this quickly becomes Turkish, hence Turks, rather than Altaic) were incredibly widely spread.


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## er targyn

I'd like to mention that unlike to Sumerian/Hurrian stuff, a theory of Altaic language family was developed by Russian linguists and became popular around the globe. According to them Turkic homeland is located in Ordos, China, very close to other Altaic branches.


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## Edguoglitigin

*"Details Which Hurrian and Turkic share"*

Morphological features:

1- Verb or noun stems do not change in Hurrian *(H)* and Turkic Languages *(TL)*, they only take suffixes.

2- The gender which IE languages and Semitic languages have, does not exist in (H) or (TL), neither in nouns / pronouns nor conjugation.

3- Neither in (H) nor in (TL), there are no prefixes. Their morphology all depend on agglutinative structure by affixes.

4- A few affixes of (H) stand out in vowel harmony.
*tan-asht-* 'to make', *an-asht-* 'to be happy', *tekh-esht-* 'to ascend, to rise', *shurv-usht-* 'to do harm'.

5- Alike (TL), (H) had connection vowels and in some cases they used to disappear.
    e.g. Turkish, *burun* 'nose' but, burnu 'his / her nose', *ayrıntı* 'detail' (< ayır-ın-tı), *kork-* 'to fear' (< korık-).

6- (H) and (TL) only have singularity and plurality. Semitic languages, Ancient IE have had also 'dual'.

7- In (H), nouns used to accept possessive affixes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd singular person
    Turkish  1st. person singular  *-Im (-Um)* 		 ~    Hurrian *-iw *                 'my...'
    Turkish 3rd. person singular  *-I (-U) / -sI (-sU)*   	~  Hurrian * -ia*                     'his/her...'
    Turkish  1st. person plural *-ImIz (-UmUz)*		~ Hurrian  * -iwazh*		'our...'

8- (H) case suffixes (dative *-va*; directive *-ta / -da / -uda*; ablative *-tan / -dan / -udan*; comitative *-ra*) come after the possesive suffixes such as (TL) do. In Uralic Languages 

and Arabic, possesive suffixes come after case suffixes.

9- Negation In (H) were made by a suffixe. They were *-u- / -wa-* (for transitive verbs in first and second person), -ma- (for transitive verbs in third person) *-kki-, -kka-, -kko-* (intransitive verbs by sound harmony). Correspondingly, in Urartian *-we- / -me-* suffixes used to agglutinate to verbs for negation.

10- In (H) tense and personal agent suffixes used to take part in the last section of conjugation such as (TL) still do. In Eurasiatic languages, only Armenian has a negation 

suffixe for verbal sentence that it must have borrowed from Urartian.

11- Similar to (TL), in (H) secondary / relative sentences used to be formed by participes.

12- Imperative forms in (H), like (TL), there did exist for not only second person but also first and third person as well.

Phonological features:

1- On the contrary to Eastern Caucasian languages, /r/, /l/ consonants were not able to be initial phonemes. If loandwords have these consonants, there appear an /i/ front of 

them that (TL) has undergone this situation before modern written languages:
    In Anatolian Turkish, *ramazan* (/ramadan) 'personal name' is used as *ıramazan*; *recep* 'personal name'   is used *irecep* *limon* 'lemon' is used *ilimon*; *leğen* 'bowl' is used as 
*ileğen*. And in some Kipchak languages, *rus* 'russian' has become *orus*.

2- Eastern Caucasian Languages *(ECL)* have so many initial double consonants, whereas (H) and (TL) have never had them.

Syntactical features:

1- (H) and (TL) share in a common about morphosyntax that in both language type order of morphemes are the same: *iç-i-n-de* (*iç* 'in / inside' + possesive suffixe + pronominal + locative case suffixe)

2- In word phrases, adjective and noun (with genitive suffixe) are always before the noun. (like Ali-nin kitabı ~ Ali's book)


Note! Erdal, in some comparisons, speaks of Eastern Caucausian languages (ECL) because I. M. Diakonoff and S. A. Starostin claimed that some (ECL) (Nahy and Lazgy) have a kinship with Hurrian.


*Note!* I have made some additions (examples), which does not exist in the paper, to illuminate Erdal's opinions.

This symposium paper's exact name: Türkçe'nin Hurrice'yle Paylaştığı Ayrıntılar, V. Uluslararası Türk Dil Kurultayı 20-26 Eylül 2004 (5th International Turkish Language 

Symposium, 20th-26th September 2004). Published version: Türkçe'nin Hurrice'yle Paylaştığı Ayrıntılar, V. Uluslararası Türk Dil Kurultayı Bildirileri, TDK Yay., Ankara, 2004, 929-937.


----------



## er targyn

Good overview, but this only means some typologycal similarity, nothing more.


----------



## Edguoglitigin

er targyn said:


> Good overview, but this only means some typologycal similarity, nothing more.



But these typological features are not ordinary and should not be underestimated.

I have not translated the paper thoroughly, therefore this quotation may not make you convinced enough. 

By the way, Erdal concludes at the end of paper that Hurrians might be the ancestors of Oghuz Turks. It means that Hurrian (~ Ghurrian ~ Ghuz / Oghur ~ Oghuz) were a group which had been turkified among Turks such as Kyrghyzs had been.


----------



## er targyn

I noticed an opinion that ogur might be an Ugric word.


----------



## ancalimon

Frank06 said:


> The link proves that mister Tuna made such a list, not that the list with alleged cognates is correct, nor that a possible link between Sumerian and Turkish has been demonstrated.
> 
> I had a look at a few items and it strikes me that Mr Tuna only mentions the variant of the Sumerian words which come close to Turkish words, ignoring sometimes up to 8 other variants.
> 
> In short, we need a bit more than a manipulated list and an antiquated idea which still seems to be popular among pan-Turkists.
> 
> Frank



A late reply to something which I got more knowledge about today.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/64297815/Osman-Nedim-Tuna-Sumer-ve-Turk-Dillerinin-Tarihi-İlgisi

Starting from chapter 3, he explains the scientific way about how he found out that these were Turkic words inside Sumerian.


What Osman Nedim Tuna did was to compare only those words that are thought to to be foreign borrowings inside Sumerian~ Kenger language. There are supposedly two languages there.  Proto-Tigris  and Proto-Euphrates.

He says that he does not know whether Sumerian as a language is related with Turkic language or not and he also says that his work does not cover this. The only thing his work proves is that Sumerian borrowed some words from some people who were using these Turkic words. (Unlike what he wrote in the conclusion part, I don't think this proves that Turks were living in Eastern Anatolia during 3500BC (he wrote that he was going to write about this in his next work which never came to life as far as I know since he died). They might as well borrowed these words from some other people who might or might not have been Turks.  Of course what I know about the subject is only a fraction of what he knows..)

In his book, he talks about the method he used to test whether the Turkic words appearing in Sumerian is a coincidence or not. The words he listed as being Turkic in origin turns out to be Turkic words borrowed into Sumerian language.
He names this method as "*regular sound correspondences*". 
According to what I read, this method is accepted as the only reliable way for Historical Comparative Linguistic. And pairings upto 3, 4 or 5 are needed to prove that it's not a coincidence.


He writes about the the process, how they debated with 22 people, talked about more than 200 comparison and the committee found his work "impeccable" in 9 April 1974 (University Of Pennysylvania). The linguists Cardona and Faught accepted the case as proven while Hoenigswald accepted the case as proven with a little reservation because of the problem of time depth. He writes that he later found what the problem was in 1978.

He also explains  a couple of things in order to not be accused of Ethnocentrism.

In the Conclusion Part he writes:

4) Among the world languages that are still alive, Turk language has the oldest written words. These are the borrowed Turkic words on the cuneiform Sumerian tablets.


I guess we would need to contact University of Pennysylvania for more information about this.

(PS: I'm replying to Frank06. If you think this is off topic, please move it to a new topic)


----------



## karaakrep

clevermizo said:


> It's not particularly interesting in the slightest. I find the similarity forced.
> 
> "He talked" is _hanashita_. _Hanashimashita_ is an _honorific_ form used in respectful/polite circumstances. _-mashita_ is not a suffix. The way to analyze _hanashimashita _correctly is:
> 
> _hanas(h)-------- mas(h)------------ta
> (talk) ----- (polite/respectful)-----(past tense)_
> 
> So the question is, can _muștu _be analyzed similarly? I believe that -_muș_ is the tense/aspect marker. -_t_ marks it as a narrative pluperfect and -_u_ is the personal pronoun inflection for "he". This is very different from the Japanese structure which is not a pluperfect nor does it mark "he" but only tense and politeness. _Hanashimashita_ can also mean "I talked".
> 
> The surface similarity looks like pure coincidence.
> 
> The only similarity here could be a sound correspondence between _k_ and _h_: _konuș_ and _hanas(h) _but that would have to be shown to be a robust correspondence. There's no correspondence in the grammatical suffixes.




Hey there.

I'm not sure if _Hanashimashita _is correct Romaji spelling ( I don't know any Japanese so I can't tell ). If it is romanized with closest English pronunciation, then we should run the similar process with the turkish word konuş*muştu. *Because the Turkish character "_ș_", although a modified Latin character, should be represented with the proper sound. "_ș" _in Turkish is not an "s" with an accent ( cedilla ) and has nothing to do with "s". It is a character itself and like any other character in Turkish alphabet, represents a sound. The closest sound in English is "sh". (Like *sh*e). Also "u" in Turkish is always pronounced like a short "oo" as in "C*oo*k". the character "o" is always pronounced like "O" in "*O*rganization". The other characters, "n, k, t" have pretty much the same sounds as in English.

This being said, to represent the sounds correctly using English variant of the Latin characters, the Turkish word would look somewhat like this: 
konooshmooshtoo.

Analysis: 

konuş (konoosh)----------------- muş (moosh)------------------ tu (too)
verb (talk)-------------------- indefinite past tense-------- definite past tense.

Indefinite + definite past tense is used to construct a compound tense.. Equivalent of English past perfect tense.

Your analysis of muştu is almost completely wrong.

muş : indefinite past tense ( variants : muş, müş, mış, miş )
tu : defınıte past tense ( variants: du, dü, dı, di -or- tu, tü, tı, ti )

there is no personal pronoun as a suffix in Turkish for the 3rd person singular of any verb. 

Cheers


----------



## Gregory1992

I think they may be related. Early turkic rulers were known as khagan. That was their title like in Europe, the title was/is king for instance. From what I've heard khagan was spelt like it was written _shagan_ or _chagan _in English. On the japanese side we have _shogun_. Although the shoguns were not sovereigns, but rather the nobility, it's not wrong to assume that khagan or shagan is in a way or another related to shogun. Of course, now we cannot judge by only one word, but it could prove to be a link.


----------



## francisgranada

Edguoglitigin said:


> ...8- (H) case suffixes (dative *-va*; directive *-ta / -da / -uda*; ablative *-tan / -dan / -udan*; comitative *-ra*) come after the possesive suffixes such as (TL) do. In Uralic Languages and Arabic, possesive suffixes come after case suffixes...



Can you give som examples from some Uralic language? 

In Hungarian, the case suffixes come _after _the possessive, e.g.:

house - ház
*in* house - ház*ban*
*from *house - ház*ból
*etc ....

my house - házam
*in* my house - házam*ban*
*from *my house - házam*ból
*etc ....


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## Edguoglitigin

francisgranada said:


> Can you give som examples from some Uralic language?
> 
> In Hungarian, the case suffixes come _after _the possessive, e.g.:
> 
> house - ház
> *in* house - ház*ban*
> *from *house - ház*ból
> *etc ....
> 
> my house - házam
> *in* my house - házam*ban*
> *from *my house - házam*ból
> *etc ....



Actually this was only a quotation from Marcel Erdal, and I had no idea about morphosyntax of Hungarian. If I have made a mistake about translation (from Turkish into English), I'll ask you for excusing me  . So Hungarian shares in a common with Turkish on morphosyntax


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## ancalimon

The latest findings show that Turkish people from Thrace and Aegean part of Turkey and Japanese people are relatives.

http://www.turks.us/article.php?story=20031009084039299


----------



## killerbee256

ancalimon said:


> The latest findings show that Turkish people from Thrace and Aegean part of Turkey and Japanese people are relatives.
> 
> http://www.turks.us/article.php?story=20031009084039299


I would be careful about equating DNA and language. The silk road facilitated gene flow through out Euroaisa and the Romans conducted sea trade as far always as India. Also as I'm sure you know Islam was spread as far south east Asia by sea. That said the Japanese could very well be distantly related to the Turkic people, Turkic is closely related to Mongolian and according to some old Japanese folk lore the Japanese were from an coastal area in China, I can't remember the name of the region. Geographically far eastern Turkic languages and Mongolian aren't that far away from Japan.


----------



## OBrasilo

karaakrep said:
			
		

> Analysis:
> 
> konuş (konoosh)----------------- muş (moosh)------------------ tu (too)
> verb (talk)-------------------- indefinite past tense-------- definite past tense.
> 
> Indefinite + definite past tense is used to construct a compound tense.. Equivalent of English past perfect tense.


And this is some of the definite evidence that Turkish konuş*muştu* is NOT related to Japanese hanashimashita.

Hanashimashita in Japanese is indeed past tense (the final -ta is past tense), but:
1. The -ta past tense in Japanese is relatively new, older forms of Japanese formed the past tense with -ki or -keri, so we end up with _hanashimashiki_ (might be -ku instead, not sure, but definitely has a -k- in it);
2. This long form is a compound of _hanashi-_ (which was actually pronounced _hanasi-_ long ago), which is the continuative form of _hanasu_ (to speak), and the verb _masu_, for which let me quote from the (free) dictionary I use (edict):
_ます        (aux-v) (1) (pol) used to indicate respect for the listener (or reader), (2) (arch) (hum) used to indicate respect for those affected by the action_.
So _masu_ was (and in archaic usage still is) a verb indicating respect. In fact, _hanashimasu_ is the polite form of _hanasu_. The casual past tense is therefore _hanashita_, earlier _hanashiki_ and even earlier _hanasiki_;
3. The transcriptions of Japanese from the 16th or so century by Portuguese missionaries, as well as certain modern Japonic languages of the Ryukyuan branch, have _f_ where modern Japanese has _h_. In addition, even Modern Standard Japanese has _f_ before _u_. This means we go back to _fanasiki_ (doesn't look like the Japanese _h_ was ever a _k_);
4. The sound changes observed in the Chinese loanwords in Japanese shed further light on the sound shifts the language experienced, and one in particular is relevant for us here: that the _h_, earlier _f_, was originally _p_. This means the original form was _panasiki_ for the past and _panasu_ for the present. I certainly don't think it is in any way possible for _panasu_ to be related to _konuş_.
Therefore I think we can conclusively state that the two words are completely unrelated. Now of course, there is one thing I haven't done and that is, researching on when _hanasu_ or its predecessors were first attested in Japanese. But even if the word was first attested late, it would still be at best a loanword (and even then it's quite a stretch that Japanese could have loaned such a word from a Turkic language at a late stage when any Japanese speakers al lived quite far from any Turkic speakers), so there's still no evidence that the Japanese and Turkish words have anything to do with each other beyond a superficial similarity.

Now, there *is* the Altaic theory, and I have read some literature about it recently, and I can say, some cases for the regular sound correspondence posited in there are quite convincing, though I don't agree with many of them (I seem to notice a regular correspondence between Japonic _y-_ (IPA _j-_) and Turkic _d-_ which that literature seems to ignore (but my own research has been very superficial so I could quite well be wrong), plus they seem to do a massive roundabout when it comes to Japonic _mizu_ (originally _midu_) and Koreanic _mul_ (originally _mut_) for _water_ - we have an indicator of at least a very early direct borrowing here if not a cognate, but for some reason, the Altaicists seem to be derive the two rods from _different_ roots, no idea exactly why). I also think the whole Altaicist approach is wrong.
I personally think people should first seek for possible relations between the Japonic languages and the Koreanic languages. We have the Goguryeo language which seems to be an intermediate between the two group, so that's where the investigation should start (plus, we know that the Japanese language originated in the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula, while on the Japanese islands, the languages spoken before then were the completely unrelated Ainu languages to the north and Austronesian languages to the south). I think once we get a clear enough picture of the Japonic and Koreanic languages, and some clear Proto-Languages for those groups, only then should be start looking for correpsondences between that Proto-Language or Proto-Languages, and those of the other language families claimed to be branches of Altaic.
But in my opinion, while there's some vague and circumstantial evidence that points at maybe a very distant relation of Japonic to Turkic (but then again, it could simply be loanwords from some Turkic or related language family to Proto-Japonic as was spoken on the Korean peninsula, that happend thousands of years ago), but nothing is certain... well, except for the fact that _hanasu_ is not one of the words that show a relation.



			
				Gregory1992 said:
			
		

> I think they may be related. Early turkic rulers were known as khagan.  That was their title like in Europe, the title was/is king for instance.  From what I've heard khagan was spelt like it was written _shagan_ or _chagan _in English. On the japanese side we have _shogun_.  Although the shoguns were not sovereigns, but rather the nobility, it's  not wrong to assume that khagan or shagan is in a way or another  related to shogun. Of course, now we cannot judge by only one word, but  it could prove to be a link.


Japan does appear to have a cognate to _khagan_ but it's not _shogun_. _Shogun_, actually _shougun_, is a Chinese loanword, it would be pronounced _jiang-jun_ in Modern Standard Mandarin (but I'm not sure if the word is even used), and of course _shiang-kun_ in older varities of Chinese. From there we get _siyau-gun_ in older Japanese (it didn't have _ng_ so final _ng_ in loanwords became final _u_ instead), then we know _au_ became _ou_, and _siy_ became _sh_, so we regularly end in _shougun_. The Japanese word related to _khagan_ is actually _ki1mi1_ (written with the 君 character in Old Japanese texts), which is still used to refer to the Emperor of Japan, eg. in the National Anthem _Kimi ga yo_. The word has a related word in Goguryeo, _k∧i_ or _kai_, written with the 皆 character in the attested Goguryeo words. The word also has related words in the other two Koreanic languages, Baekje where it is either _kan_ (干) or _han_ (翰), and in Silla, where it is _kan_ (干). The word _khagan_ itself is of Mongolic origins (and not Turkic or Uralic), and is in fact _kaγan_. I think it is most likely that the word was simply independently borrowed into the various languages spoken at the time on the Korean peninsula, and then transported to the Japan islands by those who migrated.

Edit: I was actually wrong. The Classical Japanese past tense was actually _-tari_ for the class of verb _fanasu_ belongs too. So the past tense was _fanasitari_, or in Old Japanese, most probably _panasitari_. For the polite forum, we can presume Old Japanese _panasi masitari_.

Edit #2: After some more read, the _masu_ probably originated in the Choushuu dialect at the end of the Edo period, and it spread to the rest of Japan due to the Choushuu army's importance in the Imperial army. The orgiinal form of _masu_ was actually _mairasu_, earlier _mawirasu_. Now we can trace _hanashimashita_ to _panasi mawirasitari_, or later, _fanasi mairasitari_, a Choushuu dialectal polite form of the verb _fanasu_, earlier _panasu_ which at its earliest had the castual past tense _panasitari_. And I think we can all see that _panasi mawirasitari_ is very different from _konu__şmu__ştu_, and therefore the two can in no way be related.


----------



## OBrasilo

Rallino said:
			
		

> Jp: Kyoto-*no*
> In Old Japanese, there was the particle *-nu* which evolved into *-no*. But the most common genitive particle in Old Japanese was actually *-ga*. The *-nu* seems to have appeared later.
> Tr: Kyoto'*nun*
> En: of Kyoto
> 
> Jp: Kuruma-*de*
> The particle *-de* is a contraction of the original particle *-nite*. Nothing to do with Turkic *-da*.
> Tr: Araba-*da*
> En: by car
> 
> Jp: Kutu-*o*
> The Japanese particle was originally *-wo* and it is still written with that hiragana syllable, albeit now pronounced *-o*.
> Tr: Pabuç-*u*
> En: the shoes
> 
> Jp:  Nan-*desu ka*
> The copula *desu* is a relatively recent evolution and is a contraction of *de arimasu*, and originally *nite arimasu*, which we can trace back to **nite ari mawirasu*, which however was in Old Japanese not a copula. The copula in Old Japanese were *nari* and *tari*, with *nari* being the most common. The interrogative particle also was not standardized at *ka* in earlier Japanese, but both *ka* as well as *ya* (preserved in some Japanese dialects as *yo*) were used. In Classical Japanese (and Old Japanese too), your question would have therefore been _Nani-*nari ka*_ or _Nani-*nari ya*_. As you can see, not that similar to the Turkic sentence. Correction: until the Kamakura period, the _ya_ particle _preceded_ question words rather than follow them (and _ya_ was the pure interrogative particle at the time, while _ka_ was more a doubt particle), so the question here would have been most probably phrased _*Ya* nani-*nari*_.
> Tr: Ne-*dir ki*?
> En: What is it?
> 
> Jp: imasu
> Earlier _wimasu_ and originally _wi mawirasu_. Quite different from _imiş_.
> Tr: imiş
> En: there is
> 
> Jp: hanashi*mashita*
> My post above this one elucidates further on this one, but let me just mention again that it goes back to _panasi mawirasitari_ which was however only used in the Choushuu dialect.
> Tr: konuş*muştu*
> En: he had talked
> 
> Jp: i*tta*
> Before the consonant assimilation, the form was _ikita_, and comes from earlier _ikitari_ which was however the conclusive past tense. The past participle, which you would have used in this case, was _ikishi_.
> Tr: gi*tti*
> En: he's gone



I have put my notes in the quote, and marked them in red.


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## phobbs1

It should be noted that links between languages should not be assumed based on similar lexical items. Just because a language shares words with one language does not mean that the languages themselves are related. Take for example the word "çanta" in Turkish. This word originally did not exist in the language but was borrowed from Arabic (شنطة Pronounced more like 'shyanta') due to proximity with the language. Now, with that being said, Turkish is not an Afro-Asiatic language but a Turkic language more so related to Uzbek, which is speculated to part of the greater language family, Altaic. As a linguist, I believe that there is some validity to this theory given that the Mongols traveled extensively throughout the region, although they did not appear to travel as far east as Japan or Korea for that matter. Regardless, even though that specific group of individuals did not travel that far east, their languages could have. Indo-European languages are seen spoken as native languages from Portugal to India. Again, going back to lexical similarities, English and Farsi are indeed related even though English has a SVO word order and Farsi has a SOV word order. One has to look further than mere lexical similarities between languages in order to determine greater relations between them. I believe that given the numerous similarities between Turkish, Japanese, and Korean in their grammatical structures and ways of describing their environments to be too great to be overlooked or dismissed as a mere coincidence. Their differences could be explained by isolation and distance in addition to the times at which they split from a common ancestor. I am by no means saying that this is undoubtedly true but merely stating that the Altaic theory should not be disregarded by those who think that since they do not share a large vocabulary that they couldn't possibly be related.

Happy pondering!


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## kartacali

Hello,

The dispute about Japanese being an Altaic language is not an empty claim. You can check the wikipedia page to see that it's actually the commonly accepted fact, even though disputed.
ht tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language#Altaic_hypothesis

My Turkish professor teaches us in the class that Japanese belongs to the Altaic language family, even though that it's accepted only recently. My claim has no other source than this, though a professor in the best university in Istanbul should suffice as a citation in my opinion. 

As an art student I can say that Turkish and Japanese culture have more than lingual matters in common. The style in the miniature art is completely similar with Japanese and Turkish. Miniature art is very widely practiced across Asia but all cultures have different details and techniques. However Turkish and Japanese miniature have exactly same techniques, as if the artists that practiced them in the first place were the same. 

Also other forms of art also look alike. Certain "animal form" patterns and the plant patterns are exactly the same. It's very easy to find Turkish patterns which we only discover in 12th century Seljuk art on the clothing pattern of a samurai miniature in Japan. 

Dragons, clouds, animals are very similar in Chinese, Japanese and Turkish art, and one can find all o these plus Indian and Persian shapes in the pre-15th century Turkish art as well. But every shape has to follow a certain pattern and ruleset in order to be placed on the "plate" and this patterns and ruleset synchronize with only the Japanese patterns. Not Indian, not Persian, not Chinese but Japanese. Although the Japanese version is a little bit more crude and haven't been chased to it's final limit, the baseline is same.

I'm not "racist" or political, but I also refuse to deliberately reject certain scientific facts and discoveries or skip them in order to look cute to the western ideologies. All of the world culture looks to the west now, accepting their ideology as the best and most accepted, since it "worked", western powers won the most recent wars and came out as the most rich. "If that works it must be right" people think. When google is cencored to protect the western interests, we think it's fair. When a western country invades or applies sanctions against a weak country to protect its interests, we think it's fair. When western scholars delbierately continue to reject certain notions and key points in history in order to protect their interests, we don't accuse them of racism. We think as if west is all invulnurable to the insult "racist" but when we point out a fact that Turkish grammar is very similar to American native languages or Japanese, we get called racist and politically sided. That's because Turkey as a country is seen vulnurable, and USA, EU etc look invincible, so the certain human nature accepts them as final point in every argument. This is not how it should be. History finds out the wrong or right in due time. How Europe or Latin countries are now, that's how the concept of "Turk" was in the old times. A group of people who shared a common culture and heritage but were too crowded to be called one ethnicity. It's very normal for the concepts of Turks being everywhere, having signs in every culture. Just like how the Spanish and French languages are very common and their cultures are extremely look-alike to an outsider (to an Asian for example) that's how Turkish countries are and how the Altaic language family is.

Long post but thank you for reading anyway.


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## unutuma

To add,

"şaşı" (Turkish) and "shashi" (Japanese) are same. "chassis" (English)
"ş" is pronounced as "sh" in Turkish


----------



## Angelo di fuoco

You forgot the ultimate source language for both Turkish and English (whence it came into Japanese), i. e. French.


----------



## Karton Realista

Polish nie and Japanese iie mean both no...
Therefore Japanese is a Slavic language! 
I feel like everything said in this thread is pretty


----------



## unutuma

Karton Realista said:


> Polish nie and Japanese iie mean both no...
> Therefore Japanese is a Slavic language!
> I feel like everything said in this thread is pretty




Turks came from the lands todays Mongolia and China. They were very close to Mongolians and Japanese.


----------



## Karton Realista

unutuma said:


> Turks came from the lands todays Mongolia and China. They were very close to Mongolians and Japanese.


So what? What we were given here are wordlists and dubious studies that are not even on the topic, with the side of personal opinion of some Turkish scholar. 
Distance isn't really relevant when you have languages like Basque and Spanish right next to each other. I would also mention Asian languages, but they are being discussed right now.


----------



## unutuma

Karton Realista said:


> So what? What we were given here are wordlists and dubious studies that are not even on the topic, with the side of personal opinion of some Turkish scholar.
> Distance isn't really relevant when you have languages like Basque and Spanish right next to each other. I would also mention Asian languages, but they are being discussed right now.



Altaic languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The similarities can be mentioned and discussed.


----------



## Karton Realista

unutuma said:


> Altaic languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> 
> The similarities can be mentioned and discussed.


I love how the first sentence in the article you send me discards your case:


> *Altaic/ælˈteɪᵻk/ is a proposed language family of central Eurasia, now widely seen as discredited.[1][2][3][4]*


----------



## unutuma

Karton Realista said:


> I love how the first sentence in the article you send me discards your case:





I know, but the similarities still can be mentioned and discussed. There are many supporting researchs too. Thank you for reading at least the first sentence by the way.




*Altaicists*
  Pentti Aalto (1955). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic–Korean.
  Anna V. Dybo (S. Starostin et al. 2003, A. Dybo and G. Starostin 2008).
  Ki-Moon Lee (K.-M. Lee and S.R. Ramsey 2011). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic–Korean and perhaps Japanese.
  Karl H. Menges (1975). Common ancestor of Korean, Japanese and traditional Altaic dated back to the 7th or 8th millennium BC (1975: 125).
  Roy Andrew Miller (1971, 1980, 1986, 1996). Supported the inclusion of Korean and Japanese.
  Oleg A. Mudrak (S. Starostin et al. 2003).
  Nicholas Poppe (1965). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic and perhaps Korean.
  Alexis Manaster Ramer.
  Martine Robbeets (2004, 2005, 2007, 2008).
  G.J. Ramstedt (1952–1957). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic–Korean.
  George Starostin (A. Dybo and G. Starostin 2008).
  Sergei Starostin (1991, S. Starostin et al. 2003).
  John C. Street (1962). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic and Korean–Japanese–Ainu, grouped as "North Asiatic".
  Talat Tekin (1994). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic–Korean.

*Major critics of Altaic*
  Gerard Clauson (1956, 1959, 1962).
  Gerhard Doerfer (1963, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1981, 1985, 1988, 1993).
  Juha Janhunen (1992).
  Claus Schönig (2003).
  Stefan Georg (2004, 2005).
  Alexander Vovin (2005, 2010). Formerly an advocate of Altaic (1994, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001), now a critic of it.
  Alexander Shcherbak.
  Alexander B. M. Stiven (2008, 2010).

*Advocates of alternative hypotheses*
  James Patrie (1982). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic and Korean–Japanese–Ainu, grouped in a common taxon (cf. John C. Street 1962).
  J. Marshall Unger (1990). Tungusic–Korean–Japanese ("Macro-Tungusic"), with Turkic and Mongolic as separate language families.
  Joseph Greenberg (2000–2002). Turkic–Mongolic–Tungusic and Korean–Japanese–Ainu, grouped in Eurasiatic.
  Lars Johanson (2010). Agnostic, proponent of a "Transeurasian" verbal morphology not necessarily genealogically linked.


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## Languagelearner123456

What about (O) Cha and Cay For tea


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## Karton Realista

Languagelearner123456 said:


> What about (O) Cha and Cay For tea


It's a loan. It exist even in languages like Russian (чай).
Wikitionary says: 


> *Этимология*
> От кит. 茶 «чай»; сев.-кит. вариант čhā
> From Chinese 茶  «tea»; western-chinese variant čhā


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## Lugubert

Karton Realista said:


> It's a loan. It exist even in languages like Russian (чай).
> Wikitionary says:


Quite so. Wikipedia says, on the etymology of tea,


> Nearly all the words for tea worldwide, fall into three broad groups: _te_, _cha_ and _chai_, which reflected the history of transmission of tea drinking culture and trade from China to countries around the world.


Tea that travelled overland brought with it the western pronunciation cha like in your quote. Tea arriving by sea, like to England (tea), Germany (The), Scandinavia (te) from Cantonese ports carried the Amoy te.


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## Muttaki

Rallino said:


> Jp:  Nan-*desu ka*
> Tr: Ne-*dir ki*?
> En: What is it?


I thought "ki" is from Persian. As you might also know it is originally written as كه like Persian.


Rallino said:


> Angelo di fuoco said:
> 
> 
> 
> As for all I know, the suffix "da/de" in Turkish means "in", "inside".
> 
> 
> 
> Yes, mostly, it's also possible to use it as "by car" though.
Click to expand...

How so?


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## OBrasilo

Not to even mention that "ki" in Turkish probably means "it". In Japanese, "ka" is the question particle that goes after a verb to make it a question. This seems to be an areal East Asian feature, also appearing in South Korean -ikka (which may or may not be a cognate to Japanese "ka"), and in Mandarin Chinese where "ma" is used to turn statements into questions. Maybe the feature originated in Chinese, and Korean and Japanese took it but substituted their own particles for the Chinese one.

Also, in Japanese, "de" means "by" but also has also lots of other usages and meaning. Also its older form is "nite" which looks much less like the proposed Turkish cognate.


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## Muttaki

OBrasilo said:


> Not to even mention that "ki" in Turkish probably means "it".


What do you mean it probably means "it" in Turkish?

It doesn't. It means something like "which" or "who". So for example _Dostlar ki bir kerre bile selamlaşmadık_ means _The friends whom we haven't even greeted each other.
_
As far as I know "ki" or "كه" means "which" or "who" in Persian too.


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## Nino83

Muttaki said:


> As far as I know "ki" or "كه" means "which" or "who" in Persian too.


Yes. The Turkish "ki" clause was borrowed from Persian. 

Turkish "ki" from Persian "ke" *که* from Proto-Indo-European "kʷis". 
ki - Wiktionary 
که - Wiktionary 
Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/kʷis - Wiktionary


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## francisgranada

Nino83 said:


> Yes. The Turkish "ki" clause was borrowed from Persian.


In Hungarian _*ki* _means also _who _(not _which_). 

According to Hung. etymological dictionaries, _ki_ is (at least) of Finno-Ugric, but  most probably, of common Uralic origin. As the words like _ki _form part of the basic vocabulary of both the Turkish and Hungarian (and other Uralic languages), the borrowing seems to me  rather improbable  ...


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## Muttaki

francisgranada said:


> In Hungarian _*ki* _means also _who _(not _which_).
> 
> According to Hung. etymological dictionaries, _ki_ is (at least) of Finno-Ugric, but  most probably, of common Uralic origin. As the words like _ki _form part of the basic vocabulary of both the Turkish and Hungarian (and other Uralic languages), the borrowing seems to me  rather improbable  ...


Is it possible that Persian كه is borrowed from the Uralic languages then?


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## Muttaki

But wait there is kim/كیم in Turkish which means who. It is probable that Hungarian "ki" has to do with this and maybe it is not about the "ki" that we were talking of.


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## OBrasilo

Thanks for the correction. However, my point still stands - the Turkish "ki" is a pronoun (though an interrogative pronoun), but the Japanee "ka"  is a question particle. The interrogative pronoun in the Japanese is "nan_" _which means "what". The sentence "Nan desu-ka?" is a contraction of something like "Kore wa, nani desu ka?" which literally means "What is this?" ("This" being "kore"). So someone was even comparing a contracted Japanese sentence with a full Turkish sentence.


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## M Mira

To establish a link between Turkish and Japanese, one should compare their oldest attested forms, i.e. Old Turkic and Old Japanese. Any similarities that developed later can not be attributed to common origin.


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## Hulalessar

M Mira said:


> To establish a link between Turkish and Japanese, one should compare their oldest attested forms, i.e. Old Turkic and Old Japanese. Any similarities that developed later can not be attributed to common origin.



Indeed. We know, for example, that Welsh and Bengali are related, but anyone comparing the two would I think have to look at them a long time before the relationship became apparent, if it ever did. Indo-European, along with Afro-Asiatic, is unusual in that it has a long recorded history. Compared to Indo-European, the earliest attested examples of Turkic and Japonic do not go back that far. If you construct Proto-Turkic and Proto-Japonic and then compare them you start to get on shaky ground. The certainty available in the case of Indo-European is unattainable and that is why linguists cannot agree or remain agnostic with regard to any supposed relationship. The position is complicated because unrelated languages may be subject to convergent development or involve areal features and borrowings. If linguists are unable to agree about precisely how Baltic and Slavic or Italic and Celtic are related, or whether there is a Celtic substrate to English, they are not going to agree about how Turkic and Japonic are related.

The danger for an enthusiast unfamiliar with the comparative method is that humans are programmed to see patterns. They often see them where they do not exist, particularly if the imagined pattern confirms a preconceived notion. A salutary exercise if trying to show that A and B are related is to see how each compares with C, a language not considered related to either. If you find that A and C and/or B and C have as many features in common as A and B then (apart from the possibility that A and/or B and C may be related after all) it casts doubt on whether A and B are related. Linguists are not in any event necessarily looking for similarities which leap out at them, but rather for correspondences of the type /k/ = /h/ as in Latin _canis _and _centum _compared with English _hound _and _hundred.
_
If it is considered how much a language may change over a thousand years how much more can it change over five, ten or twenty times that long? You get to the point where you have Welsh and Bengali. It not impossible that Turkic and Japonic, however different they may look today, have a common ancestor. Archaeology and anthropology may throw some light on prehistory, but ultimately you have to look at the languages and the other disciplines can do no more than tend to confirm what you find. As the author of one book put it, the only thing we can be certain about the Indo-Europeans is that they spoke Indo-European.

Turkic and Japonic are not going to turn out to be related because a Turkish nationalist wants them to be, nor are they going to turn out to be unrelated because a Japanese nationalist does not want them to be - or vice versa.


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## Nino83

Hulalessar said:


> Indo-European, along with Afro-Asiatic, is unusual in that it has a long recorded history. Compared to Indo-European, the earliest attested examples of Turkic and Japonic do not go back that far.



For example, it is said that *even if* Japanese and Korean were related, they split more than 4000 years ago, more or less (see Shibatani)
It's easier to see the similarity between the Bantu languages (whose expansion happened, probably, from 1000 BCE to 500 AD), the Austronesian languages (expecially the Polynesian ones, whose expansion is dated 1300 AD) or that between Greek and Latin (whose written works are available since the 4th century BCE).


Hulalessar said:


> Archaeology and anthropology may throw some light on prehistory, but ultimately you have to look at the languages and the other disciplines can do no more than tend to confirm what you find.


Agree.
For example the work of Cavalli-Sforza is a good example. There is a strict correlation between genes, peoples and languages. Genes can tell us when people (and languages) split (see migrations).
But without linguistic evidence coming from written works, you can only speculate that people that are genetically closer are linguistically closer too. Anyway languages change faster than genes, so it could be possible that two people whose languages are more conservative are linguistically closer than two people that split later but whose languages changed rapidly.
There are also contact and areal features that can spread from a language to another unrelated language.
There are borrowings (Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese borrowed a lot of words from Old and Middle Chinese, for example).

Without written works, it is very difficult to find similarities between languages (there is no literature written in Old Japanese and Old Turkish, the older ones are dated 8th century AD) unless (like in the case of Bantu and Austronesian languages) the split is relatively recent.


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## danielstan

Just a note:
- to build linguistic studies on archaeology is a dangerous game
Usually a prehistoric material culture spread over ethnic boundaries.
As today we are wearing blue jeans in most countries, the same happened with a successful piece of pottery in the prehistoric time:
different ethnic groups (I don't dare to speak of "nations" for that time) have reproduced it on larger areas.


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## Awwal12

Nino83 said:


> There is a strict correlation between genes, peoples and languages.


It is better to say that there is a correlation between genes, languages and cultures. Speaking about ancient populations, we rarely deal with "peoples" directly; for that, they should be more or less unambiguously described in some written source, and the deeper we go into the centuries, the more scarce are such written sources. Neither languages, nor genes, not even pottery have ethnic consciousness.
And although such correlation does exist, we know many enough examples to say that this correlation isn't very strong. Sure when we have two large and independent folks, we will likely see the growing cultural, genetic and linguistic divergence between them (and the growing uniformity inside each of them). The only problem is that peoples don't exist eternally, they are born and they die, and they tend to be born from several sources; not all of them are large enough, even if a small folk may get larger and vice versa; plus, of course, people conquer each other and interact in a lot of other possible manners.
In Dagestan, for instance, we see a bunch of really close traditional cultures (maybe excluding Nogai, although they too were strongly influenced by their surrounding), the local folks are difficult to tell apart by their appearance and genes, yet they speak a large bunch of mutually unintelligible languages which belong to 3 language families; a mountain refugium as it is, with a rather recent colonization of the adjacent steppes. Scots do form a single nation, but that nation used to speak two mutually unintelligable languages belonging to different groups (and now the both are oasted by more or less standard English); the future archaeologists hardly would be able to find any difference not even between them, but even between all them and English, etc.


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## Nino83

Awwal12 said:


> Speaking about ancient populations


I simply pasted the title of that work. We can call them populations, they are synonyms. .


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## OBrasilo

Well, my point was, people were comparing a contracted Japanese sentence that so happened to sound like a Turkish sentence with actually a completely different grammatical structure, and somehow concluding from it that the two sentences have common origins, which is demonstrably false.
Though I still firmly believe Macro-Altaic is on the right track, I belive that Japono-Koreanic is its own branch of it, and the relationship between Korean and Japanese has to be resolved first, and a reconstruction of the resulting proto-language published, before further hypothesizing. It doesn't help that the Japonic languages have been IMHO heavily affected by Austronesian language - Ryukyuan probably by Taiwanese aboriginal language and Japanese by a language akin to Hawaiiwan and Māori (if you look at the phonology of all three languages, you can see some very similar developments, including all syllables fitting into a CV structure), though Japanese also has features that no other language in the area has - the syllabic N (that seems to be a late development and not have existed in the oldest stage of the language) and voiced cosonants (the only nearby languages that have those are Tungusic, Mongolian, Malaysian/Indonesian, and the Austronesian languages of the Philippines; Polynesian languages only seem to have voiceless consonant, while Korean and Chinese have a voiceless vs. voiceless aspirate distinction, with Korean also adding tense consonants).


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## M Mira

OBrasilo said:


> voiced cosonants (the only nearby languages that have those are Tungusic, Mongolian, Malaysian/Indonesian, and the Austronesian languages of the Philippines; Polynesian languages only seem to have voiceless consonant, while Korean and Chinese have a voiceless vs. voiceless aspirate distinction, with Korean also adding tense consonants).


Middle Korean and Middle Chinese both had voiced consonants, devoicing was a continental development that didn't affect Japanese.


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