Dear PIAC Members,
The PIAC Prize for Altaic Studies continues the tradition of the Indiana University Prize for Altaic Studies which was awarded between 1963 and 2014. Inaugurated in 2017, the PIAC Prize for Altaic Studies was awarded for the first time in 2018. Unlike its predecessor which had been made possible by a generous donation of Indiana University, the PIAC Prize for Altaic Studies is financed by the members of the PIAC and thus represents a reward for scholarly achievement by peers for peers.
While the endowment of the PIAC Medal has changed, the mechanism for the award has remained unchanged. At the Business Meeting of a PIAC Meeting, a Medal Committee is elected which comprises five members. Two of them are members ex officio: Secretary General and the President under whose Presidency the PIAC Medal will be awarded. Three more members are elected by secret ballot, with the only condition that voting rights are bestowed only on PIAC members who have participated at least three times (the current meeting counts) in two different countries. This rule was introduced at the 40th Annual Meeting of the PIAC in Provo, Utah in 1997.
This year’s Medal Committee, elected last year in Göttingen at the Business Meeting of the 66th Meeting of the PIAC, has as members Ákos Bertalan Apatóczky, Marcel Erdal and Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, with Miyawaki-Okada Junko and Oliver Corff as ex officio members.
Last year in Göttingen, the PIAC Medal Committee found itself unable to cast an unanimous vote for the recipient of the PIAC Medal. This year, the deliberations of the Medal Committee were surprisingly short. It was decided unanimously that this year’s PIAC Medal should be awarded to Juha Janhunen who luckily came to join us today.
Please allow me to illuminate the reasoning behind the decision of the Medal Committee. Juha Janhunen is an outstanding linguist who represents the finest tradition of Finland’s linguistics. His numerous books and articles cover an impressive horizon of languages. His contributions to the scholarly community include a journal, International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics, which he founded together with the late Alexander Vovin, himself an outstanding linguist of Central and East Asian languages, and an old friend of the PIAC. We miss him dearly.
Beyond the volume of his body of work, the quality of his scholarly work deserves praise. Let me explain this point by referring to the topic of the (Ural-)Altaic and later Altaic hypothesis. Based on a modest number of arguments and criteria, the language family first proposed in the 18th century included Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families. In the 1950s and 1960s, new analysis lead to the conclusion to regard the idea of a common origin of languages as obsolete, explaining the observable phenomena by long-term contact, also known as Sprachbund.
Today, both supporters and critics of the Altaic hypothesis continue to engage in debates on whether at least some of the languages can be regarded as sharing a common origin.
This debate is actually a part of the raison d’être of the Permanent International Altaistic Conference even though the general focus of the PIAC lies on an interdisciplinary approach which does by far not restrict itself to language and linguistics.
If I were asked which single text to recommend to a reader interested in the general subject of the Altaic debate, Juha Janhunen’s paper “The Unity and Diversity of Altaic” published in 2023 comes immediately to my mind. In a lucid, clear and precise language Juha Janhunen epitomizes the history of the concept, the language families involved, and the linguistic features considered as reference points. Most crucially, he does not stop there or takes obvious sides, but points out the fallacies and political implications that can be hidden in over-simplified attributions. He thus demonstrates a view reaching far beyond the linguistic question alone, a view which demonstrates the necessity for the type of comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach that is the driving force behind the PIAC.
Last but not least it should be mentioned that Juha Janhunen joined the PIAC at the 19th Meeting in 1976 with a report on “Samoyedic-Altaic contacts”, and shouldered the responsibility of being the President of the 41st Meeting 1998.
In a nutshell, this year’s PIAC Medal could not find a worthier recipient. Dear Juha, may this Medal be a small token of our appreciation in recognition of your life-long scholarly contributions to Altaic studies.
Oliver Corff
Secretary General