Liao

I've seen Robbeets knocking around for about a week now. I didn't really want to mention it.

The notion is that the Altaic family is real: that Japanese, Korean, Manchu, Mongol, and Turkic form the same family. Branching from the Liao basin 7000 BC or so. Note: long before Old Indo-European including Tocharian; more like same with the Anatolians added in.

Except that there's no analog for the Hittites who'd given us that Bronze Age checkpoint. It would be nice if Shimao had a literature but it didn't. We don't know what the Tarim spoke either, before the Tocharoi and then the Sogdians showed up from, you know, way out West. I'd long thought we knew but we didn't.

My thought is that the steppe languages comprise a Sprachbund: nomads learnt just enough of the farmers' languages to converse across the steppe. Even if their languages adopted a lot of their neighbours' vocabulary and even sentence structure, like Coptic with Iranian and then Greek, or like Etruscan with Italo-Celtic; still, these remained recognisably not Indo-European to the end. Pending a Shimao archive that remains my thought on "Altaic".

TOLJASO 6/14/22: It's bunk, time to dunk it... into the junk.