He advocated the theory of close Turkic-Hungarian linguistic and ethnic relationship, and his publications on the subject provoked a harsh scientific and public debate in Hungary, remembered as the "Ugric-Turk War". Vámbéry argued that the large number of similarities between Turkic languages and Hungarian pointed to a shared origin of these languages and peoples in Northern Asia. His strongest evidences were the large corpus of ancient Turkish words in Hungarian word-stock (300–400 for a minimum, and even more with good alternative Turkic etymologies), and the strong typological similarity of Hungarian and Turkic languages. In his opinion Hungarian is a contact language, more precisely a mixed language, and a fruit of the intermingling of early Hungarians with Turkic peoples; as a result of this merger, the Hungarian language got a unique, distinctly dual (Ugric AND Turkic) character. (The intriguing problem of Turkic-Hungarian language relations is far from settled even after centuries of research.) Vámbéry was not the first to suggest such mixed origin; the German linguist and Orientalist Wilhelm Schott (1802–1889) was a proponent of Finn-Turk-Hungarian kinship, and considered the Hungarians (and their language) a mixture of Turkic and Hyperborean / i.e. Saami, Samoyed etc. / elements. Nonetheless, Vámbéry's theory was opposed by proponents of the Finno-Ugric theory of the origins of Hungarian, who gradually triumphed in Hungary but not in Turkey. In Turkey, Hungarian and Turkish are still considered as two branches of the same language family, the Ural-Altaic.