Is the Taxon of Altaic Languages Natural or Artificial?

• Authors: Yuri Tambovtsev
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The article considers if the taxon of Altaic languages natural enough to call it a good classification. The more compact a taxon, the more natural it is. The article deals with the peculiarities of functioning of labial consonants in the languages of the Altaic language unity and the peculiarities of functioning of labial consonants in subgroups, groups, families and other language taxa of world languages. The analysis is made with the help of such statistical methods as the coefficient of variance, the confidence interval, Chi-square and t-test. The linguistic conclusions on the similarity of functioning of labial consonants are made on the basis of the statistical criteria. It is possible to establish the typological distances between some language taxa (Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Tungus-Manchurian, Slavonic, etc.) on the values of the t-test.

Keywords

EN

Altaic; typology; taxon

• Publisher: Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk
• Journal: Lingua Posnaniensis
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 51
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 133-154

Dates

published

2009-01-01

online

2010-01-14

Contributors

author

Yuri Tambovtsev

• Department of English and Linguistics, Novosibirsk Pedagogical University, P. O. Box 104, Novosibirsk-123, 630123 Russia

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10122-009-0009-7