Ural–Altaic Languages - Relationship Between Uralic and Altaic

Relationship Between Uralic and Altaic

The Altaic language family was generally accepted by linguists from the late 19th century up to the 1960s. For simplicity's sake, the following discussion assumes the validity of the Altaic language family, although for linguists who do not accept Altaic a relation of Altaic to Uralic is obviously a non-starter, though some part of "Altaic" (e.g. Turkic) might be related to Uralic, in theory.

It is important to distinguish two senses in which Uralic and Altaic might be related.

1. Do Uralic and Altaic have a demonstrable genetic relationship?
2. If they do have a demonstrable genetic relationship, do they form a valid linguistic taxon? For example, Germanic and Iranian have a genetic relationship via Proto-Indo-European, but they do not form a valid taxon within the Indo-European language family, whereas in contrast Iranian and Indic do via Indo-Iranian, a daughter language of Proto-Indo-European that subsequently calved into Indic and Iranian. In other words, showing genetic relationship does not suffice to establish a language family, such as the proposed Ural–Altaic family; it is also necessary to consider the family tree of the languages concerned to determine which language goes where.

This distinction is often overlooked but is fundamental to the genetic classification of languages (Greenberg 2005).