本論文では,「言語構造の世界地図」(The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), Haspelmath, et al. (Eds.), 2005)を利用して,ユーラシア地域の様々な言語における,格の数や語順等の文法的特徴について概観した.加えて,WALSを使用した文法情報の収集と言語類型論の手法を利用することで,ユーラシア言語の多様性を視覚的に観察する一研究を紹介した.ユーラシア地域の言語は基本的に格を多く持つ傾向があり,それらの格の多様性として,対格言語と能格言語の相違は存在するが,大まかに地域内で共通の特徴がある.また,ユーラシアの言語はSOV語順及び指示詞の2種類使い分け(「この」と「あの」)の傾向を持つ.WALSに含まれるいくつかの文法情報を整理し,その結果を視覚化することで,典型的なユーラシア言語とはどのようなものであるかを考察した.その結果,言語の特徴がユーラシア地域と欧州地域で明確に分かれることが判明し,その境界上にフィン=ウゴル語が存在する.

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In spoken Manchu, i. e. the Sibo dialect in the Ili valley, west of Dzungaria, the consonant s is always palatalized as [š] before the highvowel i, wherever it may occur. Also, the consonant that was transcribedby the Manchu letter normally representing s was Romanized by some Western scholars in the XVIIth through XIXth centuries as š, s, sh, etc., which presumably indicated [š], when followed immediately by i. Althoughsome other scholars in that period used the Latin alphabet s (or Cyrillic alphabet c) for the same consonant in the same environment, their Romanization was surely not a phonetic transcription but rather atransliteration of the Manchu script into the Latin (or Cyrillic) alphabet.
Since the transcription of phonemes of a language in its native scriptusually reflects the speakers' concept of the phonemic level, and not ofthe phonetic level, the syllable transcribed with the Manchu letters sand i denotes /si/. Thus, it is certain that /s/ in /si/ in literary Manchurepresented [š], both initially and intervocalically as an environmentalvariant of /s/. In fact, judging from an investigation of the Chinesetranscription of Jurchen words appearing in the Sino-Jurchen glossaryproduced in the XVth century, the syllable /si/ in Manchu words correspondsto *ši in any position in the cognate words in Jurchen, a pre-Manchulanguage. The Jurchen syllable *si is found only in Chinese loansderived from Chinese si.
On the other hand, Manchu had a consonant that was transcribed bythe Manchu letter normally representing š. This consonant, i.e./š/, however, always preceded the vowels other than i since [ši] was regarded as/si/ then, as a result of a sound change, *ši>si, which had taken placebefore the appearance of the Jurchen language. The syllable /ši/, so transcribedin Manchu script, appears only in Chinese loans of which theoriginal sound was si with a retroflex in its syllable initial.
To sum up, in literary Manchu the sound value of /s/ preceding vowelsother than i was [š], but when preceding i it was [š]. On the otherhand, the sound value of /š/ was [š] before vowels other than i, but [š], a loan pronunciation, when preceding i.
Thus, it can be said that conclusions on Altaic or Tunguz comparativelinguistics such as in Nikolaus Poppe's and Johannes Benzing's, which were reached by regarding the Manchu /si/ as [si], and not as [ši], have to be revised.

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Possessive, nominative, objective, and nominative-objective personal affixes (mostly prefixes) of Ainu (the Raichishka dialect) and their sememes aredescribed.
With regard to the syntactical distribution of the possessive personal prefixes, it is pointed out, among other things, that kurasno poro'esetaha «black large your dog»(seta «dog») is the best expression, while ‘ekurasno poro setaha «your black large dog» is also possible, but ×’ekurasno ‘eporo’ esetaha is impossible. The author analyzesthe second expression into two immediate constituents:'e setaha and kurasno poro. The form setaha in the former has no prefix because it is a fraction of the (broken) form setaha «your dog», whereas setaha «his (her, their) dog» in kurasno poro setaha has a zero prefix which means «the third personer's».
According to the author, 'ekurasno poro setaha is better described as consisting of four words ('e-being viewed as a proclitic) rather than as a compound, because each of its three parts, written separately above, has its own prosodeme, and other free forms of the same class can freely replace kurasno, poro, and seta.

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Monguor and Dagur are known as the languages which stand in isolated positions from the other Mongol languages and dialects. I have been planning for a long time to compare the Mongol languages from the glottochronological view-point. Recently I have tried the comparison in terms of Swadesh's 200-item list (See the Journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan, Nos. 26/27, p.72f.), and obtained the following figures (the percentages of the residual cognates). The figures clearly show that Dagur, Monguor, and the group of the other dialects are considerably remote from each other. Although we are not yet in the situation to compute the exact time-depth, I think it is probable that Monguor was separated from the other dialects before the 13th century.

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Jurchen is the language of the Jurchen tribes, which founded the Chin dynasty in the early twelfth century, and is the oldest of the Tunguz languages for which there are extant materials in the native script.
It is, however, almost impossible to reconstruct Jurchen phonology and establish the phonological system in that period due to the scarcity of linguistic materials. Although Chin-kuo yü-chieh金国語解has survived, the dictionary produced by the Jurchen themselves, the Nü-chen-tzu tzu-mu女真字字母, is not extant.
Nevertheless, inasmuch as the Jurchen section of the Hua-i i-yü華夷訳語 (Chinese-Barbarian Glossaries) produced by the Ming Translators Bureau, namely Nü-chen-kuan i-yü女真館訳語, exists, one may reconstruct the Jurchen phonemes in the Ming period by means of the Chinese characters in the text used for the transcription of Jurchen. Therefore, the present state of knowledge of Ming Chinese phonology furnishes an important key to the solution of Jurchen sound equivalences transcribed by Chinese characters. It goes without saying also that linguistically the Manchu language plays a supplementary role in the solution of Jurchen phonology.
Thus, the pronunciations of individual Jurchen characters, of which some are phonograms and some are ideograme, can be reconstructed by comparison of all occurrences of a given character with its transliterations into Chinese, and then by setting up the phonemes that leave the fewest contradictions. After establishing Ming Jurchen phonology in this fashion, it is then possibleto reconstruct Chin Jurchen phonology via historico-linguistic methods.
As a result, one may discover such facts as: the Tunguz initial *p- was still preserved in Chin Jurchen, which then changed to *f-in Ming Jurchen; the back vowel series *a, *o, and *u contrasted with the front vowels *e, *ö, and *ü in addition to the neutral *i in the Chin period, whereas in the Ming period are found only five vowels, *a and *o of the back series, only *e in the front, and two neutral vowels *i and *u; etc. In addition, although it is known that there are no native Manchu words ending in a consonant but -n, some words ending in the consonant-*γ are to be found in Jurchen; there is no labial attraction in Jurchen, unlike Manchu; there is no phonological distinction between final-*n and-*η even in Chinese loans, as there is in Manchu; etc.

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