Proto-Altaic language
The Proto-Altaic language is a hypothetical extinct language that has been proposed as the common ancestor of the disputed Altaic languages. In the 18th century, some similarities between the Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic languages led to the conjecture that they would be a single language family with a common ancestral language. Starting in the 19th century, some linguists proposed to include also the Japonic and/or Koreanic languages as well as the Ainu language, forming what would later be called the "Macro-Altaic family" (the original one being then dubbed "Micro-Altaic"). Around the same time others  proposed to include the Uralic languages in a Ural-Altaic family. Versions of the Altaic family hypothesis were widely accepted until the 1960s, and it is still listed in many encyclopedias and handbooks. However, in recent decades, the proposal has received substantial criticisms and has been rejected by many comparative linguists. Nevertheless, "Altaicists" (supporters of the theory of a common origin for the Altaic languages) such as Václav Blažek and Sergei Starostin have endeavored to reconstruct "Proto-Altaic," the hypothetical common ancestral language of the family. Some Altaicists have proposed that the original area where Proto-(Macro-)Altaic would have been spoken  was a relatively small area comprising present-day North Korea, Southern Manchuria, and Southeastern Mongolia. The date for its split into the major recognized families was estimated at around 5,000 BC or 6,000 BC. This would make Altaic a language family about as old as Indo-European (4,000 to 7,000 BC according to several hypotheses) but considerably younger than Afroasiatic (c. 10,000 BC or 11,000 to 16,000 BC according to different sources). Reconstruction. , the most comprehensive attempt at reconstructing a Proto-(Macro)-Altaic language is the 2003 "Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages" by Starostin, Dybo, and Mudrak, which was summarized in  2006 by Blažek. Reconstructed phonology. Based on the proposed correspondences listed below, the following phoneme inventory (in notation) has been reconstructed for the hypothetical Proto(-Macro)-Altaic language. Consonants. This phoneme only occurred at the beginnings of words. Vowels. It is not clear whether , , were monophthongs as shown here (presumably ) or diphthongs (); the evidence is equivocal. In any case, however, they only occurred in the first (and sometimes only) syllable of any word. Every vowel occurred in long and short versions which were different phonemes in the first syllable. Starostin et al. (2003) treat length together with pitch as a prosodic feature . Prosody. As reconstructed by Starostin et al. (2003), Proto-Altaic was a pitch accent or tone language; at least the first and probably every syllable could have a high or a low pitch. Sound correspondences. If a Proto(-Macro)-Altaic language really existed, it should be possible to reconstruct regular sound correspondences between that protolanguage and its descendants; such correspondences would make it possible to distinguish cognates from loanwords (in many cases). Such attempts have repeatedly been made. The latest version is reproduced here, taken from Blažek's (2006) summary of the newest Altaic etymological dictionary (Starostin et al. 2003) and transcribed  into the . When a Proto-Altaic phoneme developed differently depending on its position in a word (beginning, interior, or end), the special case (or all cases) is marked with a hyphen; for example, Proto-Altaic disappears (marked "0") or becomes at the beginning of a Turkic word and becomes elsewhere in a Turkic word. Consonants. Only single consonants are considered here. In the middle of words, clusters of two consonants were allowed in Proto-Altaic as reconstructed by Starostin et al. (2003); the correspondence table of these clusters spans almost seven pages in their book (83–89), and most clusters are  only found in one or a few of the reconstructed roots. Vowels. Vowel harmony is pervasive in the languages attributed to Altaic: most Turkic and Mongolic as well as some Tungusic languages have it, Korean is arguably in the process of losing its traces, and it is controversially hypothesized for Old Japanese. (Vowel harmony is also typical of the neighboring Uralic languages and was often counted among the arguments for the Ural–Altaic hypotheses.) Nevertheless, Starostin et al. (2003) reconstruct Proto-Altaic as lacking vowel harmony. Instead, according to them, vowel harmony originated in each daughter branch as assimilation of  the vowel in the first syllable to the vowel in the second syllable (which was usually modified or lost later). "The situation therefore is very close, e.g. to Germanic [see Germanic umlaut] or to the Nakh languages in the Eastern Caucasus, where the quality of non-initial vowels can now only be recovered on the basis of umlaut processes in the first syllable." (Starostin et al. 2003:91) The table below is taken from Starostin et al. (2003): Prosody. Length and pitch in the first syllable evolved as follows according to Starostin et al. (2003), with the caveat that it is  not clear which pitch was high and which was low in Proto-Altaic (Starostin et al. 2003:135). For simplicity of input and display every syllable is symbolized as "a" here: ¹ "Proto-Mongolian has lost all traces of the original prosody except for voicing *p > *b in syllables with original high pitch" (Starostin et al. 2003:135). ² "[...] several secondary metatonic processes happened [...] in Korean, basically in the verb subsystem: all verbs have a strong tendency towards low pitch on the first syllable." (Starostin et al. 2003:135) Morphological correspondences. Starostin et al. (2003) have reconstructed the following correspondences between the  case and number suffixes (or clitics) of the (Macro-)Altaic languages (taken from Blažek, 2006): /V/ symbolizes an uncertain vowel. Suffixes reconstructed for Proto-Turkic, Proto-Mongolic, Proto-Korean, or Proto-Japonic, but not attested in Old Turkic, Classical Mongolian, Middle Korean, or Old Japanese are marked with asterisks. This correspondences, however, have been harshly criticized for several reasons: There are significant gaps resulting in the absence of etymologies for certain initial segments: an impossible situation in the case of a genetic relationship; lack of common paradigmatic morphology; in many cases, there are ghosts, invented or polished meanings; and word-list  linguistics rules supreme, as there are few if any references to texts or philology. There are also many reconstructions proved to be totally false. For instance, regarding Korean, Starostin et al. state that Middle Korean genitive is /nʲ/, while it actually was /s/ in its honorific form, and /ój/ or /uj/ as neutral forms. In addition, some "cognates" are visibly forced, like the comparison between Turkish instrumental and Japanese locative /ni/. A locative postposition expresses an absolutely different meaning to that of an instrumental, so it is evident that both of them are not related whatsoever. The same applies for  Japanese /ga/ and Proto Tungusic /ga/. The first of those particles expresses genitive case, while the second is the partitive case, which bear no resemblance of meaning at all either. A different kind of issue is that of the Old Turkish genitive /Xŋ/ (where "X" stands for any phoneme) and Old Japanese genitive /no/. Although they share the same consonant, the fact that the former is a vowel plus a consonant, and the second is a fixed set of the consonant /n/ plus vowel /o/ makes the fact that those two are cognates extremely unlikely. Selected cognates. Personal pronouns. The  table below is taken (with slight modifications) from Blažek (2006) and transcribed into IPA. As above, forms not attested in Classical Mongolian or Middle Korean but reconstructed for their ancestors are marked with an asterisk, and /V/ represents an uncertain vowel. There are, however, several problems with this proposed list. Aside from the huge amount of non-attested, free reconstructions, some mistakes on the research carried out by Altaicists must be pointed out. The first of them is that Old Japanese for the first person pronoun ("I", in English) was neither /ba/ or /a/. It was /ware/ (和禮), and sometimes  it was abbreviated to /wa/ (吾). Also, it is not a Sino-Japanese word, but a native Japanese term. In addition, the second person pronoun was not /si/, but either /imasi/ (汝), or /namu/ (奈牟), which sometimes was shortened to /na/. Its plural was /namu tachi/ (奈牟多知). Other basic vocabulary. The following table is a brief selection of further proposed cognates in basic vocabulary across the Altaic family (from Starostin et al. ). Their reconstructions and equivalences are not accepted by the mainstream linguists and therefore remain very controversial. Numerals and related words. In the Indo-European family, the numerals  are remarkably stable. This is a rather exceptional case; especially words for higher numbers are often borrowed wholesale. (Perhaps the most famous cases are Japanese and Korean, which have two complete sets of numerals each – one native, one Chinese.) Indeed, the Altaic numerals are less stable than the Indo-European ones, but nevertheless Starostin et al. (2003) reconstruct them as follows. They are not accepted by the mainstream linguists and are controversial. Other reconstructions show little to no similarities in numerals of the proto-languages.