Transeurasian

Abstract

This chapter discusses the basic verbs and verbal property words that have a match in, at least, Turkic and Japonic, the families at the peripheries of Transeurasian. The most pertinent issues standing in the way of establishing Transeurasian as a language family have been identified as the lack of basic vocabulary, sound correspondences, and common morphology. The bulk of comparative research between the Turkic and the other Transeurasian languages has a lexical orientation: it is concerned with word comparisons. Crosslinguistically, most sets of copied verbs or copied suffixes have a binary setting in common: the copying typically goes from a model language, say West Old Turkic, into a recipient language, say Hungarian. Examples of the same verb or suffix being copied into a third or fourth language are rare. Derivational categories such as nominalizers, actionality, voice, and valency are therefore genealogically more stable than inflectional markers when reconstructing morphology at profound time depths.