Item

Abstract

Even if the hypothesis of Transeurasian affiliation is gradually gaining acceptance, supporters do not coincide on the internal structure of the family. Over the last century, a range of different classifications has been proposed. While these proposals show some remarkable overlap, the position of the Tungusic branch in the family tree remains a recurrent issue. Here I infer the best supportable tree for the Transeurasian family, notably a binary topology with a Japano-Koreanic and an Altaic branch, in which Tungusic is the first to split off from the Altaic branch. To this end, I combine the power of classical historical-comparative linguistics with computational Bayesian phylogenetic methods. In this way, I introduce a quantitative basis to test various competing hypotheses with regard to the internal structure of the Transeurasian family and to solve uncertainties associated with the application of the classical historical-comparative method.