mac@uvacs.UUCP (09/20/83)
Any of this information may be outdated. The suggestion (sdcrdcf.525) that all Oriental languages are tonal is indeed incorrect (ihuxr.650). Sinitic (Chinese and related) are. I don't know whether Thai falls into this category. Another major class of Oriental and central Asian languages is Altaic. Korean and Mongolian are Altaic languages. Another branch is Manchu (now disappearing) and Tungus (in Siberia). Japanese appears related, though this was not universally accepted. One theory had it that Japanese was a fusion of a South Pacific language with an Altaic. The simple phonemes and many words seem South Pacific, but the grammer appears Altaic. This was explained in terms of an invasion of a South Pacific island by Altaic speakers. Turkish and the various Turkic languages of central Asia are also Altaic. This may have been the relation to Afghanistan mentioned in (ihuxr.650). As far as I know (not far) the principal language in Afghanistan is Farsi, a descendant of Persian, an old Indo-European language. One of the features of Altaic languages is vowel harmony. Vowels may be either masculine, feminine, or neuter. (terms used by European grammarians). The presence of a feminine vowel at the beginning modifies all subsequent masculine vowels. And vice versa. Neuter vowels harmonize with anything. The grammers are agglutinative -- endings are added for case, number, etc. without modifying each other or the stem. I don't believe there is such a thing as noun gender. -- A. Colvin (speaker to humans?)