The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages provides a comprehensive account of the Transeurasian languages, and is the first major reference work in the field since 1965. The term 'Transeurasian' refers to a large group of geographically adjacent languages that includes five uncontroversial linguistic families: Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic. The historical connection between these languages, however, constitutes one of the most debated issues in historical comparative linguistics. In the present book, a team of leading international scholars in the field take a balanced approach to this controversy, integrating different theoretical frameworks, combining both functional and formal linguistics, and showing that genealogical and areal approaches are in fact compatible with one another.
The volume is divided into five parts. Part I deals with the historical sources and periodization of the Transeurasian languages and their classification and typology. In Part II, chapters provide individual structural overviews of the Transeurasian languages and the linguistic subgroups that they belong to, while Part III explores Transeurasian phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, and semantics from a comparative perspective. Part IV offers a range of areal and genealogical explanations for the correlations observed in the preceding parts. Finally, Part V combines archaeological, genetic, and anthropological perspectives on the identity of speakers of Transeurasian languages.
The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages will be an indispensable resource for specialists in Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages and for anyone with an interest in Transeurasian and comparative linguistics more broadly.
Martine Robbeets, Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Alexander Savelyev, Postdoctoral Researcher, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena
Martine Robbeets is Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena and Honorary Professor in Transeurasian Linguistics at the University of Mainz. She currently leads the eurasia3angle research project, which explores the dispersal of the Transeurasian languages and is funded by the European Research Council. Her publications include
Is Japanese related to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic? (Harrassowitz, 2005),
Diachrony of Verb Morphology: Japanese and the Transeurasian Languages (De Gruyter, 2015), and several edited volumes.
Alexander Savelyev is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. He obtained his PhD from the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2015 and joined the eurasia3angle research project in 2016. He currently works on cultural reconstruction of the Proto-Turkic language and its Transeurasian connections, and on verifying the internal structure of the Turkic language family. His other research interests include historical grammar and dialectology of Chuvash, language contact in the Volga-Kama Basin, and documentation of Siberian Turkic languages.
