Tungusic Linguistics
In July, 2005, I had the good fortune to carry out acoustic phonetic fieldwork in the Oroqen language, together with linguists Lindsay Whaley and Frank Li. Oroqen is an endangered Tungusic language, and will probably be extinct within the next 15 to 25 years. Tungusic languages in general are losing speakers, being replaced by Russian and Mandarin. The Manchus of the Qing Dynasty were a Tungusic people, though there are now only a handful of speakers left. According to the most current version of the Altaic Hypothesis (which is itself controversial, both in general and in its details), Tungusic forms a larger language family with Mongolic and Turkic to the west, and Korean and Japanese to the east.
In order to analyze the acoustic properties of Oroqen speech, it has been necessary to investigate the historical development of the language. Unfortunately the Tungusic languages are both the most remote and the most endangered of the Altaic family and have correspondingly been studied the least. I have been working on an etymological dictionary of the words we collected in July, drawing from published sources and attempting my own reconstructions when necessary. This is highly tentative work thus far, but it has been valuable as a tool for understanding the phonological and phonetic form of real words spoken by Oroqen people. I plan to continue this work over the long term, in an attempt to flesh out the historical development of Tungusic languages, complete with sound changes and sound correspondences with other Altaic languages. A considerable amount of such work has been carried out by others already, but there is still much room for further contributions. In particular, I am interested in exploring how far acoustic data from modern languages (such as Oroqen) can help us develop a theory of (Altaic) language change over time.
For the near-term, I am analyzing the vowels of Oroqen. I would like to expand my analysis to cover consonants and prodosy as well.
Some pictures of the trip are available here. (Note: the presentation isn't the *nicest* one you've ever seen...)
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