Altaic: Rise and Fall of a Linguistic Hypothesis

Languages throughout Asia are startlingly similar, but are they all part of one huge family? Thus began the biggest fight in the history of historical linguistics. Subscribe for more: Become my patron: ~ Briefly ~ Starting with my little quiz, see how languages from Turkey to Northern China have “embarrassing“ parallels. Some linguists explained these similarities by linking the languages together into one large family. They called the family “Altaic“, with a core containing Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic. Capitalizing on connections between Korean and Japanese, Altaic proponents added these two apparent isolates to form an even larger “macro“ family. The result was a sweeping hypothesis: all Turkic, Tungusic, Mongolic, Koreanic and Japonic languages are genetically related. The idea at first seemed to take off, with Moscow at the helm of the research. However, linguists increasingly criticized results and the