A proposed language family called the Altaic languages, also known as Transeurasian, are the Mongolian, Turkish and Tungusic languages, including Japanese and Korean. Speakers of these languages ??are now scattered throughout northern Asia, extending from Turkey to Japan and some parts of Europe.
Highlights
This group is named after the Altai Mountains in Central Asia. This hypothetical language continues to be favoured by a small but stable scientific minority, but have long been rejected by most comparative linguistics. A study that combines genetic, linguistic and archaeological evidence reveals the origins of this transeurasian linguistic families, including modern Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, and Turkish, with millet farmers who used to live in north eastern China 9000 years ago. The results explain the common genetic lineage of hundreds of millions of people who speak what researchers call the transeurasian language in areas over 8,000 km.
The results show how post-Ice Age humans embraced agriculture and spread some of the world’s most important linguistic tribes. An important early crop was Millet when hunter-gatherers moved into agricultural life.
Transeuarsian languages are divided into 98 languages which includes Japanese, Korean, various Turkic languages in parts of Anatolia, Europe, Siberia and Central Asia various Tungusic and Mongolic languages in Siberia and Manchuria.
Origin of this language
The origin of this linguistic family dates back to the Neolithic millet farmers in the Liaoning Valley, which includes parts of China’s Liaoning and Jilin provinces and the Inner Mongolia region. As these farmers roamed Northeast Asia for thousands of years, the language of their descendants spread to Siberia and grasslands to the north and west, across the sea to the Japanese archipelago and to the Korean Peninsula to the east.
Research conducted
This study highlighted the complexity of the origins of modern cultures and populations. The researchers developed a dataset of lexical concepts for 98 languages followed by the identification of the core of inherited agriculture-related words, and built a linguistic pedigree.
Researchers examined data from 255 archaeological sites in Japan, China, the Far East of Russia and the Korean Peninsula and assessed the similarity of relics such as stoneware, pottery and relics of fauna and flora. They also considered data from 269 old crop relics from different locations.
The researchers concluded that farmers in north eastern China eventually added rice and wheat to millet. This agricultural package was brought to Japan from where this population spread to the Korean Peninsula. Researchers performed a genomic analysis of 23 ancient ruins, examining existing data from other people who lived in North and East Asia 9,500 years ago.
The origin of modern Chinese is similar, but with the involvement of millet, it originated independently. While transeurasian language ancestors cultivated millet in the Liao Valley, the founders of the Sino-Tibetan language family cultivated millet in the Yellow River region of China at about the same time, paving the way for the spread of the language.
