Altaic

Altaic is the standard example in linguistics of a proposed family that did not hold. In its usual form it joins Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic; in wider versions it adds Korean and Japonic and is sometimes called Transeurasian. The proposal is old, dating from the nineteenth century, and it was mainstream for much of the twentieth. The evidence for it is real and consists of shared vocabulary, shared vowel harmony and broadly similar grammatical structure. The case against it is that all three of those are exactly what centuries of contact between neighbouring steppe languages would produce, and that the specific kind of evidence a family requires, basic vocabulary showing regular sound correspondences, and shared irregular morphology, has not been assembled to the standard the comparative method demands. The strongest form of the argument against it is that the shared words cluster in the semantic fields associated with borrowing, herding, warfare and material culture, rather than in the core vocabulary that resists it.

Most Turkologists, Mongolists and Tungusologists now work without the hypothesis, and the atlas carries it as a proposal with its classification marked debated. The name has an additional problem. Altaic was coined from the Altai mountains on an assumption about where the ancestral speakers lived, so the label asserts a homeland for a family that has not been shown to exist, which is one reason recent work defending the grouping prefers the neutral term Transeurasian.

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.