Anna Dybo

• Russian Academy of Sciences

This article provides an attempt to revise the phylogenetic structure of the Turkic family using a computational lexicostatistical approach. The methodological framework of the present research is characterized by the following features: (1) wordlists with strictly controlled semantics; (2) step-by-step reconstruction using Swadesh wordlists for pr...

Tungus-Manchu and Samoyed peoples inhabit adjacent territories and live in a similar environment since antiquity. Both of these language families also underwent divergence at roughly the same time. It is interesting to see which dwelling names can be reconstructed for the different proto-language states of these families, and with which ethnographi...

The main aim of this article is to demonstrate some new results obtained when working on the Dialectological Atlas of the Turkic languages of Russia and the Electronic Corpus of Khakas. Material and methods. While preparing the Atlas, in addition to the already available published and archival sources, the team of authors is collecting field materi...

Introduction. The article continues the discussion of isogloss types and their relevance for the Proto-Turkic reconstruction and reconstruction of the intermediate nodes of the Turkic family tree. Goals. The paper makes another attempt to reconstruct the morphophonological appearance of some affixes for intermediate languages-ancestors of the stand...

Introduction. As is well known, the three Turkic dialectal continua — Tatar-Bashkir, Shor-Khakass-Chulym, and Karachay-Balkar ones — have developed quite distinctive reflexes of proto-Turkic palatal *j- and *č-, *-č(-). While compiling the Dialectological Atlas of Russia’s Turkic Languages, the authors were able to compose exact isoglosses of *j- a...

This article considers a brief dialectological questionnaire produced for a pilot study of the areal and genetic characteristics of speech varieties belonging to one of the South Siberian groups of the Turkic languages. The paper elucidates the principles for producing the questionnaire, as well as general approaches to compiling a dialectological...

The problem of the speech norm and deviations from it in various forms of communication will never lose its relevance. Firstly, linguistic rationing is included in the sphere of state regulation aimed at stabilizing it, and, secondly, variation in the norm is an inevitable consequence of the impact of a dynamically developing speech pattern. The ar...

This article attempts to outline the current impact that genetics is having on the fields of archaeology and historical linguistics across the Eurasian continent. It positions the relationship between all three disciplines by reviewing the earlier history of their interactions. In the area of archaeology, there has been a long history of research i...

The authors aim at presenting the results of their analysis of deviations from the speech norm (DSN) at the phonetic, morphological-syntactic and lexical levels in the speech of bilinguals in one special case of ethno-linguistic contacting, i.e. Shor-Russian bilingualism. The conclusions are based on the data of field recordings of bilingual speech...

The article makes an effort to trace the paradigmatic unification processes in the development history of the system of personal flections of primary predication in Turkic languages and dialects. This method allows to verify the Proto-Turkic reconstruction and reconstruct a number of intermediate states for this morphological subsystem. At the same...

Through the analysis of the use of vowels and consonants in five Cyrillic books which were published within the framework of the Kyrgyz mission at the end of 19th and beginning of the 20th century, one can suggest that they were written using at least four different spelling systems: Type I is represented by books [School of Piety 1892, Primer for...

The Slavic branch of the Balto-Slavic sub-family of Indo-European languages underwent rapid divergence as a result of the spatial expansion of its speakers from Central-East Europe, in early medieval times. This expansion-mainly to East Europe and the northern Balkans-resulted in the incorporation of genetic components from numerous autochthonous p...

Y-chromosomal haplogroup G1 is a minor component of the overall gene pool of SouthWest and Central Asia but reaches up to 80% frequency in some populations scattered within this area. We have genotyped the G1-defining marker M285 in 27 Eurasian populations (n= 5,346), analyzed 367 M285-positive samples using 17 Y-STRs, and sequenced ~11 Mb of the Y...

The origin of native Americans is one of the most intriguing issues in world history. This article presents a synthesis of environmental, geological, archaeological, biological, linguistic, and folkloric evidence relevant to this issue as well as facts concerning prehistoric art. The totality of data indicates an Asian homeland situated anywhere fr...

We analyzed 40 single nucleotide polymorphism and 19 short tandem repeat Y-chromosomal markers in a large sample of 1,525 indigenous individuals from 14 populations in the Caucasus and 254 additional individuals representing potential source populations. We also employed a lexicostatistical approach to reconstruct the history of the languages of th...