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<blockquote data-quote="tarchon" data-source="post: 834428" data-attributes="member: 5990">Well, at this level of relationship things get a little speculative, but, yeah, Uralic does subsume Finno-Ugric.&nbsp; The Ural-Altaic group is really the tenuous one, and quite a lot of linguists (which I amn't neither) don't accept it.&nbsp; Just the putative Proto-Uralic period goes back 7000 years, so you can imagine how wispy the proposed consanguinity between Uralic and Altaic is (there are connections, but there are plausible alternative explanations for them).&nbsp; And Japanese is a pretty tenuous member of Altaic anyway.&nbsp; Most other Altaic languages jump up and down screaming &quot;I am Altaic&quot; but Japanese only has a few solidly identifiable Altaic roots, no clear evidence of vowel harmony, and it's not even agglutinative.&nbsp; If it is Altaic, there's been some sort of major creolization in its past, in which case it's not entirely clear whether the Altaic component was the creole-er or the creole-ee.If I had to make a simplistic guess, I'd say it came in with the Yayoi culture, and was probably well off to the periphery of the Central-Asian Sprachbund, but who knows?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="tarchon, post: 834428, member: 5990"] Well, at this level of relationship things get a little speculative, but, yeah, Uralic does subsume Finno-Ugric. The Ural-Altaic group is really the tenuous one, and quite a lot of linguists (which I amn't neither) don't accept it. Just the putative Proto-Uralic period goes back 7000 years, so you can imagine how wispy the proposed consanguinity between Uralic and Altaic is (there are connections, but there are plausible alternative explanations for them). And Japanese is a pretty tenuous member of Altaic anyway. Most other Altaic languages jump up and down screaming "I am Altaic" but Japanese only has a few solidly identifiable Altaic roots, no clear evidence of vowel harmony, and it's not even agglutinative. If it is Altaic, there's been some sort of major creolization in its past, in which case it's not entirely clear whether the Altaic component was the creole-er or the creole-ee. If I had to make a simplistic guess, I'd say it came in with the Yayoi culture, and was probably well off to the periphery of the Central-Asian Sprachbund, but who knows? [/QUOTE]

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