Altaic

THE ALTAIC HYPOTHESIS 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 morphological harmony.

ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE HYPOTHESIS are mostly based upon criteria used in Indo-European research. The main weaknesses of the AH as alleged by the anti-Altaicists are:

• Absence or scarcity of cognates among numerals.
• Scarcity of cognates among terms for parts of the body.
• Turkic-Mongolic and Mongolic-Tungusic "pseudo-cognates" but no direct Turkic-Tungusic ones.

LINGUIST DISCUSSION ON ALTAIC

LINGUIST DISCUSSION ON THE COMPARATIVE METHOD