Linguistic Warfare: The Bitter Battle Over Micro-Altaic (Altaic Hypothesis Part 1)

In this video, we will be exploring one of the most controversial long-range language family proposals in academia. Altaic is not a new proposal - in fact, linguists have for a long time suspected a genealogical connection between the language families of Altaic, typically Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic, and sometimes also Koreanic and Japonic. The problem is, finding reliable evidence to demonstrate such a relationship has been very hard to come across. Many linguists have tried, and are still trying to demonstrate a connection, and whilst there are flashes of promising lexical and structural data, so far it has failed to win broad acceptance within the linguistic community.

There are other problems too. It doesn’t help that no one can quite seem to define what “Altaic” is and what languages should be included. Then there is the new Transeurasian rebranding - we can call it Altaic 2.0.

Transeurasian has hoped to unify Altaicists and move away from some of the methodological issues that have dogged research in the past, with an emphasis on more explicit methodological frameworks. Will it be successful? Only time will tell.

This video is part one where we will cover some of the foundation history of Altaic, look briefly at some of the evidence supporting it, and then move on to one of the most detailed and influential critiques of first- and second-generation Altaicists - Vovin’s 2005 article on this issue. Part two, which will follow shortly, will cover Altaic studies post-2005, with a focus on Transeurasian.

I do hope you all enjoy!
Please check out NativLang’s video if you haven’t already done so:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0zkHH6ZOEk

Selected citations (others appear on screen during the video)
Blažek, V., Schwarz, M., & Srba, O. (2019). Altaic Languages: History of Research, Survey, Classification and a Sketch of Comparative Grammar. Brno, Czech Republic: Masaryk University Press.

Clauson, G. (1959). The earliest Turkish loan words in Mongolian. Central Asiatic Journal, 4(3), 174–187.

Georg, S., Michalove, P. A., Ramer, A. M., & Sidwell, P. J. (1999). Telling general linguists about Altaic. Journal of Linguistics, 35(1), 65–98.

Janhunen, J. (2013). Personal pronouns in Core Altaic. In M. Robbeets & H. Cuyckens (Eds.), Shared grammaticalization: With special focus on the Transeurasian languages (pp. 211–226).

Janhunen, J. A. (2023). The unity and diversity of Altaic. Annual Review of Linguistics, 9, 135–154.

Poppe, N. (1965). Introduction to Altaic linguistics. Otto Harrassowitz.
Starostin, S. A., Dybo, A. V., & Mudrak, O. A. (2003). An etymological dictionary of Altaic languages (Vols. 1–3). Brill.

Thomason, S. G., & Everett, D. L. (2001). Pronoun borrowing. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 27(1).

Vovin, A. (2005). The end of the Altaic controversy in memory of Gerhard Doerfer. Central Asiatic Journal, 49(1), 71–132.

Видео Linguistic Warfare: The Bitter Battle Over Micro-Altaic (Altaic Hypothesis Part 1) канала Learn Hittite