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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Why is Uralic not related to Altaic???
In-Reply-To: John Cowan's message of Thu, 17 Oct 1996 17:14:05 GMT
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Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 20:04:53 GMT
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The reason Uralic and Altaic were thought to be related is that both families
have members with strong vowel harmony systems, and members with agglutinative
rather than synthetic morphology.  Working out the phonological correspondences
was thought to be a mere detail.

We no longer, on theoretical grounds based on the study of many more languages
of the world, accept either of these as valid indicators of relationship; we
instead rely solely on phonological correspondences.  As these have not been
forthcoming for Ural-Altaic, the family is not now accepted by most historical
linguists.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
