Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/9



RAL-ALTAIC LANGUAGES. The Ural-Altaic, Finno-Tatar, or "Turanian" languages constitute one of the primary linguistic families (see, vol. xviii. p. 779) of the eastern hemisphere, occupying a vast domain, which extends with few interruptions from the Balkan Peninsula, Hungary, and Lapland eastwards to the Pacific Ocean, and from the Arctic Ocean southwards to China proper, Tibet, and the Mediterranean. It thus compromises nearly the whole of Asiatic and a considerable section of European Russia, the northern half of the Chinese empire, a large part of north Persia, by far the greater part of Asia Minor, and extensive tracts in European Turkey, Austria, Scandinavia, with an area of not less than 10,000,000 square miles and a total population of over 40,000,000. Philologists recognize six well-marked branches, which, with their main subdivisions and four outlying doubtful or extinct members of the family, may be tabulated as under:—

In its morphology Ural-Altaic belongs to the agglutinating order of speech, differing from other languages of this order chiefly in the exclusive use of suffixes attached to the unmodified root, and partly blended with it by the principle of progressive vowel harmony, in virtue of which the vowels of all of the suffixes are assimilated to that of the root. Thus the typical formula is R + +  +, &c., where R is the root, always placed first, and , , … the successive postfixed relational elements, whose vowels conform by certain subtle laws of euphony to that of the root, which never changes. These suffixes differ also from the case and verbal endings of true inflecting languages (Aryan, Semitic) in their slighter fusion with the root, with which they are rather mechanically united (agglutinated) than chemically fused into a term in which root and relational element are no longer separable. Hence it is that the roots, which in Aryan are generally obscured, blurred, often even changed past the possibility of identification, in Ural-Altaic are always in evidence, unaffected by the addition of any number of formative particles, and controlling the whole formation of the word. For instance, the infinitive element mak of the Osmanli yaz-mak = to write becomes mek in sev-mek = to love (vowel harmony), and shifts its place in sev-il-mek = to be loved (imperfect fusion with the root), while the root itself remains unchanged as to form and position in sev-ish-il-mek = to be impelled to love, or in any other possible combination with suffixed elements. The facility with which particles are in this way tacked on produces an exuberance, especially of verbal forms, which in Osmanli, Finnish, Magyar, Tungus, and Mordvinian may be said to run riot. This Rh