Altaic hypothesis
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The Altaic hypothesis (AH) holds that there is an Altaic language family which consists minimally of the following branches: Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic. These languages are of the SOV type, are agglutinative and share morphophonological harmony.
Some have argued that there is a Ural-Altaic super-family. While the Uralic languages (Finnic, Ugric, Samoyedic) share important typological (particularly morphophonological) features with Altaic, the Ural-Altaic hypothesis is currently considered unproven.
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Other language connections
Korean
Some Altaists have proposed Korean-Altaic affinity. Others, including solidly mainstream ones like Nicholas (Nikolaj Nikolaevi?) Poppe, have supported or at least not rejected this proposal. Poppe's assumption that such a Korean-Altaic relationship goes back to a pre-Altaic stage ought to be noted.
Japanese
Some, notably Roy Andrew Miller, have argued for Japanese-Altaic affinity.
Dravidian
Notable among the less accepted hypotheses is that of Dravidian-Altaic affinity.
Criticism of the hypothesis
The main arguments used by the critics of the Altaic hypothesis (in recent years particularly Gerhard Doerfer and a number of European Turcologists and Mongolists) to discredit the hypothesis are mostly based upon criteria used in Indo-European research, criteria they seem to assume to be universally applicable. Evidence for this is found in two of the main weaknesses of the AH as alleged by the anti-Altaists:
Absence or scarcity of cognates among numerals
This poses questions regarding the universal validity of numerals as mandatory indicators of genealogical affinity. The fact that numerals seem to supply evidence for the Indo-European hypothesis ought not lead us to assume that this applies universally. In this regard it would be interesting to hear from those who specialize in numeral systems development as well as from those who deal with genealogical groups in which numeral systems are relatively less developed (e.g., among Australian languages).
Scarcity of cognates among terms for parts of the body
This appears to be a weak argument. Quite a large number of cognates have been identified among Altaic terms for parts of the body. Many of these have undergone considerable semantic shifts among the main branches, which is why they were not immediately apparent to earlier investigators.
Turkic-Mongolic and Mongolic-Tungusic "pseudo-cognates" but no direct Turkic-Tungusic ones
This has been taken as one of the main indicators that we are dealing with lexical borrowing rather than with genealogical affinity. This is mostly based on geographical distribution and thus on the assumption that there used to be no direct Turkic-Tungusic contacts.
An impressive number of direct Turkic-Tungusic cognates have been identified especially in recent years. However, most of these have only been presented to small audiences or to institute-internal readers so far. Extensive distribution of this information is needed. In the light of such research data, maintaining the lexical borrowing argument (e.g., by arguing that in all such cases the corresponding words were lost in all Mongolic languages) could be seen as taking the anti-Altiac argument beyond its inherent limits.
Proto-Altaic
The Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic pronominal systems bear astonishing resemblance, which enables us to reconstruct a proto-Altaic system. However, this has been dismissed by many linguists as irrelevant, since this proto-Altaic system bears great resemblance not only to the proto-Uralic one but also to the Indo-European one.
References
LINGUIST Mailing List, 18 Aug 1994, Reinhard F. Hahn