Altaic Languages - Postulated Urheimat

Postulated Urheimat

The earliest known texts in a Turkic language are the Orkhon inscriptions, of which the earliest dates from around 720 AD and the latest from 735 AD (Miller 1971: 3). They were deciphered in 1893 by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in a scholarly race with his rival, the Germano-Russian linguist Wilhelm Radloff. However, Radloff was the first to publish the inscriptions.

The first Tungusic language to be attested is Jurchen, the language of the ancestors of the Manchus. A writing system for it was devised in 1119 AD and an inscription using this system is known from 1185 (see List of Jurchen inscriptions).

The earliest Mongolic language of which we have written evidence is known as Middle Mongol. It is first attested by an inscription dated to 1224 or 1225 AD and by the Secret History of the Mongols, written in 1228 (see Mongolic languages). The earliest Para-Mongolic text is the Memorial for Yelu Yanning, written in the Khitan Large Script and dated to 986 AD.

The prehistory of the peoples speaking these languages is largely unknown. Whereas for certain other language families, such as the speakers of Indo-European, Uralic, and Austronesian, we are able to frame substantial hypotheses, in the case of the proposed Altaic family everything remains to be done. In the absence of written records, there are several ways to study the (pre)history of a people:

• Identification of archaeological cultures: the material remains found at dwelling sites, burial grounds, and other places where people left traces of their activity.
• Physical anthropology, which studies the physical characteristics of peoples, ancient and modern.
• Genetics, in particular the study of ancient DNA.
• Philology, which studies the evidence in language families for their primitive locations and the nature of their cultures. (For an example, see Proto-Uralic language.) Mythology and legend often contain important clues to the earlier history of peoples.
• Glottochronology, which attempts to estimate the time depth of a language family based on an assumed rate of change in languages. Related to this is lexicostatistics, which attempts to determine the degree of relation between a set of languages by comparing the percentage of basic vocabulary (words like "I", "you", "heart", "stone", "two", "be", "and") they share in common.
• Developing a family tree of languages and noting the relative distance of the splits that occur in it.
• Observing evidence for contact between languages, which may indicate approximately when and where they were adjacent to each other.

All of these methods remain to be applied to the languages attributed to Altaic with the same degree of focus and intensity they have been applied to the Indo-European family (e.g. Mallory 1989, Anthony 2007).