Introduction (to Special Issue on Tibetan Natural Language Processing)

This introduction surveys research on Tibetan NLP, both in China and in the West, as well as contextualizing the articles contained in the special issue

Morphologic, Syntactic, and Phonologic Distance Between Japanese and Altaic, Dravidian, Austronesian, and Korean Languages

The present study measures the resemblances of Japanese with Altaic languages (Turkic; Tungstic; Mongolic; Nivkh); the Dravidian language Tamil; Austronesian languages (Western Malayo-Polynesian; Malayo-Sumbawan; Central Luzon; Central Malayo-Polynesian), and Korean, in an effort to pin down the genealogy of Japanese. Morphologic, syntactic, and phonologic distance are calculated using data from corpora. The chi-square homogeneity test and Euclidean distances are used for statistical analysis. The finding brings to light, morphologically, in the light of preferences of causative/inchoative verb alternation patterning and morphemes that convey the alternation, that Japanese and Korean are close for the most part. Syntactically, Altaics and Tamil convey case via suffixes; case in Austronesian languages is marked by prefixes. Japanese and Korean share a similarity in rendering case with particles. Phonologically, the Tamil and Austronesian languages share a resemblance in the harmony of vowel height. The Korean, Altaic languages, and Austronesian languages show similarities in the harmony of vowel backness. Japanese, the Altaic languages, and the Austronesian language Madurese display vowel-consonant harmony. Pulling these strands together, a conclusion is thus drawn that Japanese is most closely related to Korean

'Mamlukisation' between social theory and social practice: an essay on reflexivity, state formation, and the late medieval sultanate of Cairo

This working paper is a reflexive essay that tries to think with and beyond one of the basic assumptions upon which the field of late medieval Syro-Egyptian ‘Mamluk’ studies is built: the idea that all late medieval Syro-Egyptian objects of study are by default first and foremost connected, circumscribed and distinguished by some agency of dominant military slavery, of Mamluk-ness. Acknowledging that there may be different ways to pursue such an epistemological exercise, this essay opts for re-imagining the historical agency of what traditionally tends to be subsumed under the phenomenon of the Mamluk state. It is argued that the notions of state in modern research and of dawla in contemporary texts remain an issue of related analytical confusion. Engaging with this confusion in the generalising fashion of a historical sociology of late medieval Syro-Egyptian political action, this essay proposes an alternative analytical model that is inspired by Michael Chamberlain’s prioritisation of social practices of household reproduction and by Timothy Mitchell’s related understanding of the state as a structural effect of practices of social differentiation. The proposed model sees sultanic political order —the state— as process, in constant flux as the structural effect and structuring embodiment of constantly changing practices of social reproduction, of elite integration and of political distinction, in contexts that range between multipolar and unipolar social organisation at and around Cairo’s court and its military elites. The essay ends with summarily suggesting from this model how the socio-culturally structured and structuring memories of dynastic political order that had remained politically dominant for most of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were all but obliterated in the fifteenth century by a new layer of particularly ‘Mamluk’ socio-political meaning

Korpus orchonských runových textů

The goal of the submitted thesis is creating an electronic corpus of Old Turkic Orkhon runiform inscriptions. Author will argue the choice of texts he made; the minimum volume of textual material will be at least 30 000 characters. Author will propose a model of data structure that will connect inscriptions with their electronic counterpart (including discussion of the following problems: encoding of runes, transliteration and transcription) and also various other levels of description. Author will propose solution for basic segmentation problems (on both sentence, word and morphosyntactic level). Pilot version of corpus will be made accessible and the whole procedure will be described in the text of the thesis.Cílem diplomové práce bude vytvořit elektronický korpus starotureckých orchonských runových textů. Diplomant(ka) provede a zdůvodní výběr textů; objem textů dosáhne nejméně 30 tis. run. Dále navrhne model datové struktury, která zahrne propojení nápisů s jejich elektronickou podobou (včetně kódování run, otázek transliterace a transkripce), a také další roviny popisu. Navrhne řešení základních problémů segmentace, a to jak na větné, tak slovní a případně i morfotaktické úrovni. Funkční prototyp korpusu vhodnou formou zpřístupní, celou proceduru popíše v textu práce.Ústav Blízkého východu a AfrikyInstitute of Near Eastern and African StudiesFilozofická fakultaFaculty of Art

Fabrication of Turkic böz ‘fabric’ in Japan and Korea

This paper represents a long-needed criticism of Miller (2005) which carried over the famous discussion of Turkic böz ‘fabric’ in the micro-‘Altaic’ context even further East to Japan and Korea. I demonstrate that Miller’s arguments fail on historical linguistics and philological grounds for all five putative ‘Altaic’ families due in large extent to the faulty nature of either his argumentation or data, or both

Ideas behind symbols – languages behind scripts

Proceedings of the 60th Meeting of the Permanent International Altaistic Conference (PIAC) August 27 – September 1, 2017 Székesfehérvár, Hungary, Vol 52 (2018), printed in 2019. ISBN: 9789633066638 (printed) ISBN: 9789633066645 (pdf

Representing language, culture and citizenship to minoritised ethnic groups: the teaching of Mandarin Chinese to Mongolian learners as a second language in China since 1912

My PhD study investigates the under-researched history of teaching Mandarin Chinese as a second language to Mongolian learners within China since 1912, and its implications for the present day. This research makes a novel contribution to understanding how a national language and national identities are promulgated to a minoritised ethnic group over time. Mandarin teaching to Mongolian learners is revealed as a site where different representations of the Chinese nation contest and negotiate with one another, shaped by the power relations between Mongolian and Han. I employ critical discourse analysis to examine a wide range of Mandarin Chinese language textbooks for Mongolian learners issued by the Republican (1912-1949) and People’s Republic of China’s governments (1949-present) to explore the changes in expectations of Chinese cultural knowledge and values to be taught, in particular in terms of Chinese history and citizenship. The findings show that the Chinese cultural knowledge and values conveyed through the textbooks is given different emphases at different times, but it frequently serves as a tool serving the interests of the governments to reproduce official understandings of Chinese national identities, with Mongolian cultural features being often neutralised and/or made subservient to Han-dominant Chinese national values. In addition, to explore how the dominance of Han culture and values in the textbooks has been embraced and/or challenged by Mongolian elites in the early twentieth century and Mongolian teachers of Mandarin Chinese in the present, two approaches are adopted. First, a historical linguistic analysis of how Mandarin Chinese pronunciation is presented to Mongolians in a dictionary compiled by a Mongolian official named Khaisan in 1917 is conducted, when the basis for a standard Chinese was still being debated. This part of the study reveals that the diverse linguistic sources that Khaisan drew on challenge the monolingual Han native speakership ideology. Second, the historical textual analysis is augmented by data from two months’ field work in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia in 2018. There, I conducted semi-structured interviews, surveys and classroom observations of the Mongolians and Han who work in the field of Mandarin teaching to Mongolian learners to explore their understandings of the Mandarin language and views on what cultural knowledge and values to teach. The data highlight how different views of Mandarin Chinese teaching, as a communicative tool, as linguistic and cultural capital, and as an identity marker, are negotiated by Mongolians today. Looking into the past and present impact of Mandarin Chinese teaching on Mongolian ethnic identity, my work is the first to combine historical textbook analysis, historical linguistics, and ethnography. It makes an important contribution to the field of the History of Language Learning and Teaching, which has thus far been heavily skewed to the history of language education in Europe. Second, it addresses a gap in bilingual education studies, where little attention has been paid to the teaching of the majority language that Mongolians in the past and at present as the actors to define the knowledge of Chinese to teach. Third, my analysis of strategies for incorporating Mongolians into China are relevant to other non-Han studies such as Tibetans and Uyghurs and ethnic minority studies in different political and educational contexts