Aquila_grande:
>As far as I know, there are no (or nearly no) basic grammatical elements
>in Japanese and Altaic that are common.
Yes, but little vocabulary is shared between English and Chinese and
in all respects, we can deduce easily that these are unrelated languages.
It's a different situation with Japanese and other Altaic languages.
A common vocabulary does exist and there are even shared grammatical
elements that cannot be attributed to Austronesian.
I recall an Old Japanese 1ps being related to Turkish /ben/. Perhaps it
was /wa/? I fail to see how it could be connected with Austronesian (eg:
Tagalog /ako/). Doesn't Japanese /de/ "at" also have Altaic parallels?
The tripartite system of demonstratives /ko-/ (proximal), /so-/ (medial)
and /a-/ (distal) is non-Austronesian. (In fact, there's an outside
connection with IE *ko, *so and *e if we can one day graduate from
the simple notion of an isolated Altaic to external relations.) How is
this demonstrative system Austronesian?
>What are the common nom, acc, gen, dat, abl, loc, instr endings?
Japanese doesn't retain the Altaic case system, that's clear. In this
respect, it can be seen to have adopted an Austronesian grammatical
pattern. However, we may also note French entirely losing Indo-European
declension yet it's not a "creole" and fully IE.
- gLeN
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