Ural–Altaic Languages - History of The Hypothesis

History of The Hypothesis

Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, Swedish explorer and war prisoner in Siberia, described Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Caucasian languages as sharing common features by 1730.

Rask described what he vaguely called "Scythian" languages in 1834, which included Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Samoyedic, Eskimo, Caucasian, Basque and others.

The hypothesis was elaborated at least as early as 1836 by W. Schott and in 1838 by F. J. Wiedemann.

The Altaic hypothesis, as mentioned by Finnish linguist and explorer Matthias Castrén by 1844, included Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic, collectively known as "Chudic", and Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic, collectively known as "Tataric".

Subsequently, Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic were grouped together, on account of their especially similar features, while Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic were grouped as Uralic. Two contrasting language families were thereby formed, but the similarities between them led to their retention in a common grouping, named Ural–Altaic.

The Ural–Altaic family was widely accepted by linguists who studied Uralic and Altaic until well into the 20th century. In his article The Uralo-Altaic Theory in the Light of the Soviet Linguistics (1940), Nicholas Poppe attempted to refute Castren's views by concluding that the common agglutinating features may have arisen independently. Beginning in the 1960s, the hypothesis came to be seen as controversial, largely due to the Altaic family itself not being universally accepted. Today, the hypothesis that Uralic and Altaic are related more closely to one another than to any other family has almost no adherents (Starostin et al. 2003:8). There are, however, a number of hypotheses that propose a macrofamily consisting of Uralic, Altaic and other families. None of these hypotheses has widespread support.

In his Altaic Etymological Dictionary, co-authored with Anna V. Dybo and Oleg A. Mudrak, Sergei Starostin characterized the Ural–Altaic hypothesis as "an idea now completely discarded" (2003:8). In Starostin's sketch of a "Borean" super-phylum, he puts Uralic and Altaic as daughters of an ancestral language of ca. 9,000 years ago from which the Dravidian languages and the Paleo-Siberian languages, including Eskimo-Aleut, are also descended. He posits that this ancestral language, together with Indo-European and Kartvelian, descends from a "Eurasiatic" protolanguage some 12,000 years ago, which in turn would be descended from a "Borean" protolanguage via Nostratic.

Angela Marcantonio (2002) argues that the Finno-Permic and Ugric languages are no more closely related to each other than either is to Turkic, thereby positing a grouping very similar to Ural–Altaic or indeed to Castrén's original Altaic proposal.