Why a Rejected Family Still Matters Here

A grouping that most linguists have set aside would not need an entry if it had stayed inside linguistics. It did not. The word Altaic circulates freely in writing about religion, where phrases like Altaic shamanism and pan-Altaic Tengrism do real work in describing a supposed common religious inheritance running from Anatolia to Manchuria. Those phrases carry the family with them.

If Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic peoples are not descended from a common ancestral speech community, then the similarities between their religious practices need a different explanation, and contact, shared ecology and the common demands of pastoral nomadism on an open steppe are all available and all sufficient. The atlas records the grouping so that a reader who meets the term elsewhere can see what it rests on. It also records the camps by name, because the argument is live rather than closed: the Moscow school of Sergei Starostin, Anna Dybo and Oleg Mudrak published a full etymological dictionary of the family in 2003 and continues to defend it, and Alexander Vovin's review of that dictionary, titled The End of the Altaic Controversy, is the sharpest statement of the case against. Neither side is fringe.