Language Roots and Families

The Altaic Language Family

Before coming to Japan, I don’t think I really understood that despite the fact that Chinese characters are used to write Japanese words—and more that about half of Japanese vocabulary has roots in Chinese character-words— the two languages are completely unrelated.

It was something I never thought about. Though, in my years studying French, it was often pointed out that English and French –as well as all the Romance languages—were cousins. And that English was a sibling to German in the great Indo-European language.

So to what family did Japanese belong? As it turns out, this has long been a controversial topic!

In the early 1990s when I arrived in Tokyo, the major theory making the rounds was that Japanese was an Altaic language, with roots in the grasslands of Central Asia. This theory, made famous by the American scholar Roy Andrew Miller, connects Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese.

It is wonderful imagining the great northern sweep of the Steppes connecting languages as far-flung as Hungary in the west through Ukraine and Central Asia to Manchuria and Japan in the east. The northern steppe once served as an ancient superhighway connecting peoples, cultures, and goods. It is the reason people in places as far west as Turkey speak a Turkic language, after all.

It also would explain why Korean and Japanese have so many superficial similarities. From a distance, I often think Koreans are speaking Japanese. It takes a few moments for me to realize I can’t understand what they are saying. But the sound quality is similar. Both languages have complicated honorific and humble verb forms and related vocabulary; and both are agglutinative languages—as is Turkish.

After Miller’s theory was unveiled, many Japanese linguists rose up to tear it down. Their attempts to formulate other possible sources for the origins of Japanese were sometimes jokingly referred to as “anything but Korean,” since nationalistic people do not want to see their culture as being somehow indebted to Korea. The borrowings from China being beyond any possible deniability, given that fundamental aspects of Japanese culture from Chinese characters to city planning had its roots in China.

One of those other non-Altaic theories saw Japanese linked to the Polynesian languages.

In later years, I worked on a translation of a Japanese novel set in the days of King Kamehameha in Hawaii. The author was an authority on Hawaiian history and had written many essays comparing Japanese and Hawaiian languages. For him, the most significant point of comparison was the phonology, or language speech sounds.

The very first advice I ever received for pronouncing Japanese words was from Matsuura-sensei, who told me to speak Japanese words “like in Italian.” Every vowel, even the ending vowels need to be articulated: Sake like Grazie…Among European languages, Italian is well-known as an open-syllable language, but sometimes a syllable may end in a consonant. Japanese surpasses Italian and competes in this respect with the Polynesian languages. The author saw many places of overlap from tradition Hawaiian architecture to the spirit of aloha and ohana. Given Japan’s proximity to Taiwan, some of whose aboriginal peoples spoke an Austronesian language, his idea was not as far-fetched as I first thought.

In November 2021, Reuters reported that a new study had come out in Nature that combined linguistic, genetic, and archaeological evidence that traced the origin of the family of languages that includes modern Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Mongolian to an ancient group of people who inhabited an area northeaster China 9,000 years ago.

Someone in my translators’ groups said: “Roy Andrew Miller is no doubt laughing in his grave.” This was upsetting to realize that Miller had died. But there does now seem to be solid evidence, both genetic and linguistic that posits a common ancestor –an ur language?—in a population in China and that this culture spread both east to Japan and west Turkey, along the steppes.

The language family is being called Transeurasian —but it is basically what Miller referred to as Altaic— and contains languages spoken by hundreds of millions of people. Because the common ancestor was a population of millet farmers, the linguistic evidence is based on common words related to agriculture. These ancient farmers apparently supplemented their millet crops with rice and wheat and the vocabulary relating to this advanced technology spread to surrounding regions.

The Chinese language developed independently at roughly the same time in China's Yellow River region. Yes, linguistics can be fascinating!