Throughout Asia, they speak languages that
are so strikingly similar it's uncanny. So it seems obvious to connect the dots and see if they belong to one and the same language family. Yet who could've guessed that filling out
that family tree would lead to what may just be the most bitter dispute in the history
of historical linguistics, where Altaic would get labeled a linguistic religious cult? So, uhm, ever heard language nerds fight? Well you will today. Let me describe a language to you, and you
guess what it is. It's spoken on the continent of Asia. Its normal word order is subject, object,
verb. Its words have a stem and lots of endings
built off to the right of that stem. It has vowels that harmonize, postpositions
instead of prepositions, no grammatical gender, no consonant clusters at the start of words,
and pronouns for "me" and "you" that start with b- and s- or c-. Did you say Turkish? You're right, of course! Thinking back to this video though, you might've
guessed Mongolian, which is also correct. Or maybe you're one of those next-level language
enthusiasts and I reminded you more of a language that proudly adorns the Forbidden City but
is today rarely heard as a first language: Manchu. Three languages from three different families. Turkish is Turkic. Mongolian is Mongolic. Manchu is Tungusic. There are other languages in each of these
families. Yet they share such similar traits that combined with their shared history of the
horse, the bow, the Steppe, the Silk Road, centuries ago, scholars started to wonder
if they could link them into one large "superfamily". I'll spare us some of dates and people involved. Much is written about the origins of this
idea. Our story starts with what they hypothesized:
a family called Altaic, named after the Altai Mountains. These Altai mountains where four countries
meet: Kazakhstan, Russia, China, Mongolia, the epicenter of a new, or really old, Turkic-Tungusic-Mongolic
superfamily. Even more languages were about to be added
beyond the inland steppes thanks to a simple observation made in Japan in 1781. Writer Tō Teikan (藤貞幹), while spilling
historical opinions onto the page, at one point has this aha moment for as far as I
know the first time in history: could Japanese be related to Korean? The idea seemed to fade with the author's
ink, but a century later it was picked up off the shelf and mounted enough support in
Japan that by the mid 1900s, one linguist was practically alone standing against the
idea. Now in my notes I keep abbreviating this duo
as KJ or JK, but it's no joke and it's not simple. Sidestories for another day, but, speaking
broadly, "Korean" and "Japanese" are actually clusters of Koreanic and Japonic dialects
and languages. These clusters do have something in common. They're traditionally considered isolates,
lone language families unrelated to anyone else in the world. Unless... well, let's go back to my guessing
game. Altaic defenders saw K and J ticking many
of the same boxes. And with that, they looped them into their
hypothesis. And now, every Japonic, every Koreanic, Tungusic,
Mongolic and Turkic language was part of Altaic. By the second half of the 20th century this
big concept of Altaic was gaining steam and winning converts. As it did, Moscow emerged as the epicenter
of this work. Moscow's Altaicists were faithful but not
unquestioning believers. They spotted a possible issue, one we've also
met here before. Remember that shared history? Languages living side by side for a long time
can end up sharing structure and grammar even if they don't share a common ancestor, and
if they don't share a common ancestor, they're not part of the same family tree. Altaicists knew that their languages had this
kind of contact throughout history, so here was their strategy: shun grammar, seize on
vocabulary. They turned their focus increasingly to comparing
words and sounds. In their eyes, they were undertaking exactly
the kind of comparative thinking that formed the bedrock of historical linguistics and
had already helped establish language families like Indo-European: compare words across various
languages, weed out borrowed vocabulary to find possible inherited cognates, establish
regular sound correspondences between the languages. Easy, right? That done, they could then reconstruct what
they saw as the original shared ancestral Altaic form of a word. Everywhere they searched, they found clearly
related words and "embarrassing parallels" leading them to real breakthroughs in their
large Altaic project. The wider historical linguistics community,
though, they were... uh, less impressed. Some brushed Altaic aside. Others became openly critical. Let the spats begin. Too much of Altaic looked to them just like
borrowed words and grammar. By borrowed, I mean they didn't see Altaic
words as coming down the ages from a proto-parent. Instead, they were pretty sure these words
had transfered sideways from one unrelated language to another. The influence of widespread families like
Mongolic and Turkic in particular was strong across the steppes. Similar words and similar features actually
converged in the present and diverged in history rather than converging on a common past. And instead of predictable sound correspondences,
historical linguists saw haphazard phonemes and one-off explanations. They were increasingly skeptical. As criticisms mounted, Altaicists kept responding. They demanded that if experts didn't want
to be labeled hypocritical they should apply the same level of scrutiny to their own families
like Indo-European. Moscow's collection of cognates, words with
apparent family resemblances, that keeps growing and growing. And by the early 2000s three of the best-known
Altaic proponents feel like it's time to publish their own reconstructions in this, the massive
Etymological Dictionary of Altaic Languages. It might've seemed like a definining moment
for Altaic. Instead, it was fuel for even greater controversy. You can already sense it brewing in the book's
very first chapter, an odd start for a dictionary. It tries to get out ahead of the competition
with responses to critics. The words herein aren't borrowed between different
families, I swear they're really inherited in one single family. The critics were unamused and were ready with
even more criticism. Things were about to turn ugly. In an unexpected twist, one of Altaic's proponents,
whose work was cited in this dictionary's bibliography, turned on the theory. Vovin charged that this dictionary merely
showcased how the whole Altaic project had been a failure. Ooh, the betrayal! To him, something was fishy. On page 1076 we meet the reconstructed Proto-Altaic
pā́li, a kind of fish. Somehow supposedly this root found its way
to Korea and Japan even though Middle Korean has no ending like this and the Japanese word
"clearly" just means flat fish. To Vovin, this sounded less like skillful
etymology and more like summoning creatures to life through make-believe word history. And so he lashed out. The dictionary still does do enough to account
for borrowed words, especially between Turkic and Mongolic. You're trying to make those lateral moves
look like parent-child relatedness. It doesn't stop with borrowings; you're boldly
stretching sounds and meanings until utterly unrelated words looked related. Some of your etymologies draw on only two
families or even one. When there were perfectly good internal explanations
for the origin of a word, your dictionary wishes them away as "folk etymologies" and
replaces them with concocted Proto-Altaic ancestors. Worst of all, the sound correspondences seem
random, not predictable like truly related languages. But he saved his most scathing judgments for
the Moscow Altaicists themselves. They are in the end little more than the kind
of "Proto-Worlders" we met back in my Tower of Babel animation, long-rangers doing word-list
linguistics fishing for resemblances where a trained mind sees differences and complex
histories behind words and texts. In his eyes, they had ignorantly resorted
to a "prescientific" method and were indoctrinating followers into "a set of beliefs" that had
basically become a "religion". This dictionary amounted to a holy book for
their "true believers". Gauntlet thrown. Whew. You know those times when a response requires more words than the criticism you're responding to? Well, Moscow felt like this was one of those
times. Two of the dictionary's authors declared Altaic
undead, calling for an end to the controversy over the controversy. They sum up their sentiments with this Kazakh
proverb, they dub their onetime ally turned opponent AV and give us the sense they'll
be taking the high road. Of course, they could stoop to AV's level
and say AV just "switched from one church to another" and brand his article a "propaganda
piece". But no no, mostly they'lll stand by their
dictionary and defend the etymologies therein. Your hypocritically rigorous expectations
would rule out even well-established families like Indo-European. Long-rangers are routinely misunderstood anyway,
and even if we were forced to throw away those fifty entries with flat fish folk etymologies,
the foundations of Altaic would still stand strong. Stronger than ever, I say! AV was unphased and would keep joining the
charge to topple more and more of the "startling" parallels attributed to Altaic. The shared words, the pronouns, the grammatical
features could all be explained common ancestry. AV dared Altaicists to come up with real proposals
that would pass even basic historical linguistics tests. Six words, just give me six words with the
same meaning and completely predictable sound correspondences between these languages... c-come on, I dare you! AV may be unique in his bluster, but today
he is in good company. Time has not been kind to Altaic. For "traditional" linguists, the current was
already flowing downstream. The family is now commonly labeled "discredited"
or even "pseudolinguistic", a has-been. There are people who still do Altaic. In the hunch of conventional linguists, their
advocacy often extends into other "fringe" megafamilies. On the other hand, even among non-Altaicists,
there are calls for moving peacefully beyond devotion or denunciation to a common ground
of understanding the languages together. But outside of dedicated Altaicists, who continue
to feel misunderstood, linguists see in these resemblances a handful of unrelated families
with intertwined history and geography and filled with ancient linguistic tales we're
barely starting to recover. Stick around and subscribe for language.
