Soooooo lately I've been seeing a lot of articles

[conuly]

(really the same article over and over again) about "Transeurasian languages".

This is Altaic. It's been pretty debunked. As a language family, I mean - it's generally accepted as a sprachbund, though most people don't include Japanese, Korean, or Ainu here. The person pushing this new model with this new name has been banging the Altaic drum for a long time with no results, because there's no such thing. These languages all share a number of features in common because they're spoken in the same area and they borrowed off each other and also Chinese. (The Sinitic languages are not a part of this.)

It is theoretically possible that some astounding new scholarship or methodology will appear one day that will vindicate the Altaicists. That day is not today.

Comments

[pauamma]

I haven't kept track, but I think even similarities between Tugunsic and Mongolic languages (what used to be called "Micro-Altaic" IIRC), are now chalked up to contact and not a language family?

Tangentially, I don't remember seeing anything about the posited Dene-Yeniseyan grouping since the mentions in http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005462.html and https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=40 since early 2008. Have you?

[conuly]

1. Yup.

2. No, I haven't, but I'll keep watching.

[bitterlawngnome]

When I was a kid the model they were pushing was "Ural-Atlaic" largely promoted by Hungarian ulna-nationalists. I wouldn't be surprised if orban and his merry men start pushing something along those lines again sometime soon.

[conuly]

Oh, they have not stopped pushing it. A recurring complaint on /r/badlinguistics is that somebody heard it in their high school or college classroom from a teacher or in the textbook.

Could be worse. Could be the Tamil and Sanskrit nationalists duking it out once more.

[bitterlawngnome]

Hungary is *tiny gap* that far away from becoming violently ethno-nationalist again. Dependence on EU money has slowed it down so far but they are testing the limits.

[pauamma]

I'm pretty sure the Hindutva and the BLP government are already talking up that myth, to the tune of (paraphrased and summarized) "Sanskrit was spread throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East by Hindu missionaries and that, nothing else, is the reason for the spread of Indo-European languages, all of which are totes corrupted Sanskrit. No, really." I can't find it now, but I remember seeing a report about that in the Indian Express, 2-3 months ago.

[conuly]

I really want to get the Sanskrit stans and the Tamilists in a room together.

[pauamma]

Cage fights as fantasies or gedankenexperiments are tempting, but as actual endeavors... no, because when it comes to subsequently cleaning the bodies and body parts and returning the survivors, their kin, and the kin of the dead to some semblance of physical and mental sanity, everyone (which, in this part of the world, probably means the UN and ASEAN) wants the brownie points of having done it, but no one wants to actually do it, which leads to fingerpointing until they agree on a joint effort that will only deal with the easy part of the clean-up, because the PRC is looking for another opportunity to muscle in and willing to weaponize its UNSC veto to make sure it gets it) and... no. Just no. Look at the mess the Sri Lanka civil war was, and (if you haven't seen it already) at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/29/sri-lanka-troops-tamil-remembrance-civil-war-dead.

[conuly]

Fine, I'll lock them in separate rooms with video games and let them trash talk each other until they give up.

[pauamma]

Don't forget crunchy, noisy snack foods for more annoyance. :-)