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CONTENTS, INTRODUCTION |
Contents
Publisher's preface
1. Introduction
2. Overview of the phonetic proof
3. The syntactic and morpho-syntactic proof
4. Conclusions
5. Bibliography
About the author
Introduction
In linguistics, languages can be compared to one another either by genetic or by typological classifications. Genetic relationship means that all the languages compared are (supposed to be) genetically related to one another like the members of a family. An example is the Germanic language family, which contains amongst other languages German, Dutch, English, Danish, Swedish, the two Norwegians, Icelandic, Färöic etc. Typological relationship means that certain languages - that are not or not necessarily genetically related to one another - share certain (mostly syntactic) features. Examples are Biblical Latin, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese because they are all topic-prominent (Tóth 1992).
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From this brief list, we can conclude:1. All known Mesopotamian languages (excluded the later Semitic languages like Akkadian, Rhaetic, Amoritic, Ugaritic, etc.) were agglutinative.
2. The geographical distribution of the agglutinative languages is more or less identical with the languages that have been suspected in the past to be related to Hungarian and thus have been researched in my "Etymological Dictionary of Hungarian" (Tóth 2007b): Roughly speaking, they extend from the Ice Sea to the Southern Seas leaving huge "gaps" only in certain parts of India (e.g., no member of the Mon-Khmer family is according to my knowledge agglutinative).
Therefore, agglutination is not only inheritable, but agglutinative languages seem to cover a more or less coherent territory with a huge extension both in space and in time. Although not all languages are sufficiently documented, it is possible to show the genetic relationship of typologically related languages with Bouda's concept of "Brückensprachen" ("bridging languages") (cf. Bouda 1963). These are languages that connect both genetically and typologically related languages that are geographically (nowadays) distant. The concept of bridging languages is the more useful because, as already stated, languages can change their typological structure during their evolution. E.g., Old Chinese was agglutinative (as, e.g., Wu Chinese still is), while it is now isolating. The same may be true for the Mon-Khmer languages (cf. Shorto/Sidwell/Bauer 2006, p. 590ss.). The special problem with India is that many of the hundreds of languages are not even researched yet.
All the facts mentioned point strongly in favor of our suspect that all agglutinative languages are genetically related.
In order to prove this hypothesis, I will proceed in two steps. First, I have collected all serious etymological studies that concern the genetic interrelationships between the above listed languages and counted the number of established word equations. From that, there can be no doubt that the phonetic proof that all these languages are related, has already be done. Second, I will apply Fokos-Fuchs' (1962) catalogue of 25 syntactic and morpho-syntactic features that he used to prove syntactically the genetic relationship of the Uralic and Altaic languages, in order to demonstrate that Sumerian, Hungarian and the Dravidian languages share all features of Fokos-Fuchs' catalogue.
As representative of Dravidian I chose Kannada (Jensen 1969). The reason why I did not chose any other agglutinative language, is because most linguists believe since McAlpin (1981) that the Dravidian language originate in Elamite, although McAlpin brings only 81 word-equations while there are many hundreds of Sumerian-Dravidian cognates. Now, Elamite is besides Sumerian the only sufficiently documented ancient agglutinative Mesopotamian language. Thus, if we succeed in proving that the Dravidian languages are also syntactically related to Sumerian, we will be allowed to assume that all agglutinative language may be related to one another on the simple reason because they all go back to Sumerian.