Martine Robbeets

Martine Robbeets is a Belgian comparative linguist. She is known for the Transeurasian languages hypothesis, which groups the Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages together into a single language family.

Martine Robbeets
Born
Martine Irma Robbeets
NationalityBelgian
OccupationLinguist
Academic background
Alma materLeiden University
Academic work
InstitutionsMax Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and University of Mainz
Main interestsHistorical linguistics
Notable ideasTranseurasian languages hypothesis

Education

Robbeets received a Ph.D. in Comparative Linguistics from Leiden University, and also received a master's degree in Korean studies from Leiden University. She also holds a master's degree in Japanese studies from KU Leuven.

Career and research

In addition to being a lecturer at the University of Mainz, she is also a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.

In 2017, Robbeets proposed that Japanese (and possibly Korean) originated as a hybrid language. She proposed that the ancestral home of the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages was somewhere in northwestern Manchuria. A group of those proto-Altaic ("Transeurasian") speakers would have migrated south into the modern Liaoning province, where they would have been mostly assimilated by an agricultural community with an Austronesian-like language. The fusion of the two languages would have resulted in proto-Japanese and proto-Korean.[1][2]

In 2018, Robbeets and Bouckaert used Bayesian phylolinguistic methods to argue for the coherence of the Altaic languages, which they refer to as the Transeurasian languages.[3] Their results include the following phylogenetic tree:[4]

Transeurasian
 
 

Japonic

 
 

Koreanic

 
 
 
 

Tungusic

 
 
 

Mongolic

 
 

Turkic

 
 
 
 

Selected works
  • Robbeets, M.; Savelyev, A.: Language dispersal beyond farming. John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam (2017)
  • Robbeets, M.: Diachrony of verb morphology: Japanese and the Transeurasian languages. de Gruyter Mouton, Berlin (2015)
  • Robbeets, M.; Bisang, W. (eds.): Paradigm change: in the Transeurasian languages and beyond. Benjamins, Amsterdam (2014)
  • Robbeets, M.: Is Japanese related to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic? Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden (2005)

References
  1. Martine Irma Robbeets (2017): "Austronesian influence and Transeurasian ancestry in Japanese: A case of farming/language dispersal". Language Dynamics and Change, volume 7, issue 2, pages 201–251, doi:10.1163/22105832-00702005
  2. Martine Irma Robbeets (2015): Diachrony of verb morphology – Japanese and the Transeurasian languages. Mouton de Gruyter.
  3. Robbeets, M.; Bouckaert, R.: Bayesian phylolinguistics reveals the internal structure of the Transeurasian family. Journal of Language Evolution 3 (2), pp. 145 - 162 (2018) doi:10.1093/jole/lzy007
  4. Structure of Transeurasian language family revealed by computational linguistic methods. 2018. Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
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