Ural-Altaic languages: Encyclopedia - Ural-Altaic languages

Ural-Altaic languages

The Ural-Altaic language family was a grouping of languages which was once widely accepted by linguists, but has since been generally rejected^{[citation needed]}. It comprises of the Altaic languages (Turkish, Mongolian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Tatar, Manchu, and its derivatives, plus perhaps Korean and Japanese), and the Uralic languages (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and its derivatives.

The theory of a Uralo-Altaic group has now been widely disapproved by historical linguists as a misnomer. Even the existence of the Altaic language family has become controversial (see Altaic languages), although Uralic is somewhat accepted. Most modern linguists argue either that these two families (or more than two, if Altaic is rejected) are unrelated, ascribing any similarities to coincidence or mutual influence resulting in "convergence". Other critics see this as problematic, pointing to strong similarities in their pronouns and other elements — although pronoun borrowing, while rare, is attested. They suggest that they may instead be related through a larger family, either Nostratic or Eurasiatic, within which Uralic and Altaic are no more closely related to each other than to this macrofamily's other members. See: Uralo-Siberian languages.

Both groups follow the principle of vowel harmony, are agglutinative (stringing suffixes, prefixes or both onto a single root) and lack grammatical gender (see noun class). However, these typological similarities do not, on their own, constitute evidence of genetic relationship, as they may be a result of areal influences or coincidence. These features are consistent with a proto-language or a loose collection of areal influences spanning Proto-Uralic, Proto-Indo-European and Turkic languages. Vowel harmony is found in other, unrelated language groups. Moreover, there is no evidence for noninitial labial vowels in Proto-Uralic, thus leaving the remaining /a/ and /i/ open for allophony controlled by the initial syllable, creating vowel harmony from scratch. However, the prevalence of the above-noted features among the languages of the proposed Ural-Altaic languages suggests a strong relationship—whether genetic or not—whose name may still refer to the languages which share these features.

This proposed language family has also sometimes been termed Turanian. The term derives from the Persian word for places beyond the Oxus, Turān.

See also

• Turanian Army
• Nihal Atsiz

Categories: Articles lacking sources | Proposed language families

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Ural-Altaic languages", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki