Ural-Altaic languages
Ural-Altaic, Uralo-Altaic, Uraltaic, or Turanic is a linguistic convergence zone and abandoned language-family proposal uniting the Uralic and the Altaic (in the narrow sense) languages.It is now generally agreed that even the Altaic languages do not share a common descent: the similarities between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic are better explained by diffusion and borrowing.In his book An historico-geographical description of the north and east parts of Europe and Asia,[19] published in 1730, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, Swedish prisoner-of-war and explorer of Siberia, who accompanied Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt on his expeditions, described Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Samoyedic, Mongolic, Tungusic and Caucasian peoples as sharing linguistic and cultural commonalities.20th century scholarship has on several occasions incorrectly credited him with proposing a Ural-Altaic language family, though he does not claim linguistic affinity between any of the six groups.[20][note 1] Danish philologist Rasmus Christian Rask described what he called "Scythian" languages in 1834, which included Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Samoyedic, Eskimo, Caucasian, Basque and others.Between the 1850s and 1870s, there were efforts by Frederick Roehrig to including some Native American languages in a "Turanian" or "Ural-Altaic" family, and between the 1870s and 1890s, there was speculation about links with Basque.[27] In Hungary, where the national language is Uralic but with heavy historical Turkic influence—a fact which by itself spurred the popularity of the "Ural-Altaic" hypothesis—the idea of the Ural–Altaic relationship remained widely implicitly accepted in the late 19th and the mid-20th century, though more out of pan-nationalist than linguistic reasons, and without much detailed research carried out.[28] The contradiction between Hungarian linguists' convictions and the lack of clear evidence eventually provided motivation for scholars such as Aurélien Sauvageot and Denis Sinor to carry out more detailed investigation of the hypothesis, which so far has failed to yield generally accepted results.Nicholas Poppe in his article The Uralo-Altaic Theory in the Light of the Soviet Linguistics (1940) also attempted to refute Castrén's views by showing that the common agglutinating features may have arisen independently.[30] 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".[50] Similarly, according to Janhunen, the common typology of the Altaic languages can be inferred as a result of mutual contacts in the past, perhaps from a few thousand years ago.