THE PHONO-TYPOLOGICAL DISTANCES BETWEEN AINU AND THE OTHER WORLD LANGUAGES AS A CLUE FOR CLOSENESS OF LANGUAGES

• Authors: Tambovtsev Yuri
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The article deals with one of the genetically isolated languages - Ainu. It is usually a common practice in linguistics to provide a genetic identification of a language. The generic identity of a language is the language family to which it belongs. Therefore, is advisable to find a family for every isolated language. The new method of phonostatistics proposed here allows a linguist to find the typological distances between Ainu and the other languages of different genetic language families. The minimum distances may be a good clue for placing Ainu in this or that language family. The result of the investigation shows the minimum typological distance between Ainu and the Quechuan family (American Indian languages).

Keywords

EN

AINU; ISOLATED LANGUAGES; PHONOSTATISTICS; SPEECH SOUND CHAIN; TYPOLOGICAL DISTANCE

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Institute of Oriental Studies, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Asian and African Studies
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 40-62
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Tambovtsev Yuri

• Department of English, Linguistics and Foreign Languages of KF, Novosibirsk Pedagogical University,28, Vilyuiskaya Str., Novosibirsk, 630126, Russia

• Yu. Tambovtsev, Department of English, Linguistics and Foreign Languages of KF, Novosibirsk Pedagogical University, 28, Vilyuiskaya Str., Novosibirsk, 630126, Russian Federation

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

08SKAAAA05009517