Ural-Altaic
languages
Some
linguists
propose the
Ural-Altaic grouping of the
Altaic
languages (
Turkish,
Mongolian,
Kazakh,
Uzbek,
Tatar,
Manchu,
etc., plus perhaps
Korean
and
Japanese)
and
Uralic
languages (
Hungarian,
Finnish
and
Estonian
mostly) into one language group. Cases can be made both for and against this.
Both groups follow the principle of
vowel
harmony, are
agglutinative
(stringing suffixes, prefixes or both onto a single root) and lack any way for
expressing grammatical gender (see
noun
case). However, the vocabulary of both groups does not correspond, except
for borrowings. Thus it remains for the linguists of the future to prove or disprove
this proposal.