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Yukaghir (spoken in eastern Siberia) uses a pre-literate form of pictograms similar to those of some Native Americans.
The Uralic Languages have many suffixes. Finnish, for example, behaves as if it had 15 noun cases, Hungarian has 17. Country names in Finnish are difficult to recognize. Finland, for example, is Suomi. Mordvin has complex verbs varying for subject and object over four tenses and 7 moods.
The Altaic Family of Languages
The Altaic Family is named after the Altai Mountains, in Central Asia. These people were nomadic horsemen living in the plains. One group migrated towards Europe; the other group migrated towards the Korean Peninsula and the islands of Japan.
Turkish is the most westerly member of this family as well as the most spoken. Many of the others are spoken in former USSR republics Azeri (in Azerbaijan), Turkmen (in Turkmenia), Kazakh (in Kazakhstan), Kirghiz (in Kyrgyzstan), Uzbek (in Uzbekistan), Uigur (in Western China east of the Pamir
Mountains).
Mongolian is found in Mongolia (where it is written in the Cyrillic script) and Northern China (with a script that goes down rather than horizontal). Korean and Japanese are the most easterly Altaic languages.
The scripts used by these languages depend on historical or political factors. Turkish uses a Latin-based script, the ex-Soviet languages and Mongolian ones use the Cyrillic alphabet. Korean has its own distinctive script. Korean writing evolved separately from all the other scripts in the world, having been invented six hundred years ago. The language used to be written in Chinese characters.
Japanese is still written with Chinese characters (called Kanji) but there are two other alphabetic scripts. Hiragana is used to indicate prefixes and suffixes while Katakana is used for foreign words.
The Altaic languages have lots of suffixes and a property called vowel harmony. This means that the vowels are divided into two groups. Words will either
have one type of vowel or the other. All the suffixes have two forms one for each type of vowel. In Turkish, the plural is formed by the addition of LER or LAR. The suffixes themselves can be glued on one after the other. For example, EV is house, EV-LER is houses, EVLER-IMIZ is our houses, EVLERIMIZ -E is to our houses, etc. Languages that behave in this manner are called agglutinating. Turkish is one of the most regular languages in the world. It has one irregular noun (water) and one irregular verb (to be).
Japanese and Korean have highly complex honorific forms for verbs depending on the social Level of the speaker and the one spoken to. Japanese also has some differences in vocabulary depending on whether the speaker is male or female. For example, stomach is HARA if spoken by a male, and ONAKA if spoken by a female.
All languages are influenced by languages they are in contact with. At the two extremes of the Altaic family, Turkish has many Arabic words while Korean and Japanese have many from Chinese.
Some linguists do not include Korean and Japanese in this family. Others link the Uralic and Altaic families together.
The Sino-Tibetan Family of Languages
The Sino-Tibetan Family is an important Asian family language, Mandarin, the official language of China.
The languages in this family are monosyllabic tonal languages. Words are made up of single syllables: Mandarin has over 1600. GUO - country, MEN -gate, WO - I, REN - person, AN - peace. The syllables themselves have tones. This means that the voice can be high, low, rising, falling, etc, just like singing. It is like the way many people raise the voice at the end of a question. As an example the syllable, MEN can mean gate or we depending on tone. Mandarin has four tones, Thai has five (MAI can mean not, burn, wood or no depending on tone), Cantonese has nine and Kam-Sui has 15.
The languages in the Sinitic Branch are the various languages of China (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Gan, Min, Hakka, Xiang, Vue). They are all written in Chinese characters. Each syllable has a different character so that the writing is not alphabetic. There are over 50,000 characters, 6000 of which are needed to read a newspaper. Even though the different languages have different pronunciations, the meanings of characters are the same.
The languages in the Tibeto-Burman Branch are spoken in Burma (Burmese, Karen) Thailand and Laos (Lisu, Lahu), Southern China (Chin, Vi), Tibet
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