A Preliminary Study On The Similarities Of The Consonants In Several Kinds Of Altaic Languages

Although the several nationalities in Altaic Language System living in the northeast of China, southern Siberia, the Kazak Grassland and the Chuvashs' area respectively belong to different language families, there are a lot of similarities in their pronouncing habits. The residences of these nationalities are relatively occlusive and often in forests and mountain areas, their pronouncing habits are different from those of not only the Uigur language and common Mongolian language to the south of them, but also the languages of northern Siberia. The differences of consonants' pronunciation are mainly described as below:The weakening of consonants between vowels(in the Chuvash, Altai, Shor, Tuva, Hakas and Manchu languages).Such phenomena can also be found in the Chinese language in Beijing and northeastern China. In as early as the Jurchet documents of Jin Dynasty, we see evidence that can show something like that and maybe since then, in ancient spoken languages of this area such phenomena have been existing.The phonetic substitutions of t∫->∫-(in the Kazak, Tuva, Shor, Tofalar, Buriat, Daghur, Horqin Mongol and Manchu languages) and∫>s (in the Chuvash, Kazak, Hakas and Manchu languages).The laws are similar in Central Asia and northeastern China which are connected by the five kinds of Turkic languages in Southern Siberia, but different from those in the Mongolian Grassland and Southern Xinjiang. The phonetic substitution of s->h- and changes of consonant clumps (in the several languages the northeastern part of Eurasia Continent). Using historical linguistic knowledge, the paper amalgamated some consonants in Manchu and Daghur languages by their pronouncing positions and then worked out a new table of consonants respectively. The phenomena may be relative to the ambiguous pronouncing habits shown by the two tables.The added half vowels always appear before words beginning with higher tongue-positioned vowels in the Chuvash, Kazak, Tuva, Daghur and Manchu languages, which is a Siberian character that need to be noticed.Seen from the geographical distributions of the linguistic facts above, some Altaic-System languages in northeastern Asia and in Central Asia and Eastern Europe have some similarities in their pronouncing habits. And, the five Turkic languages in the "Forest Corridor" of southern Siberia link these similarities up. The characteristics of the paper are: (1) on-the-spot investigations to several Altaic languages only possessed of by China; (2) the maps that show the distributing rules of consonants' special pronouncing habits in some kinds of Altaic languages on the Eurasia Continent.