Ural-Altaic

Jankowski (general and Ural-Altaic linguistics, Adam, Mickiewicz U., Poland) presents this dictionary as a means of recovering these lost names and their historical and etymological roots.

Because the word "Gobi" means desert in many of the Ural-Altaic languages, it is somewhat of a misnomer.

They arrived eventually in Anatolia, but their origins lie in Turan, a region between the Caspian Sea and the Mongolian desert, and their Ural-Altaic language is distinct from the Indo-European or Semitic language groups.

Why should a compound of two pure stems with the meaning 'four-ten' mean 'ten minus four' in a language with normal Ural-Altaic syntax remain a mistical enigma--to say nothing about the procedure of the analysis of this kind: its non-scientific character needs in principle no comment for those working outside Nostratics.

In conclusion, I would have to say this: first, there are degrees of similarities in phonetic shape and meaning: thus Ural-Altaic and Dravidian, or Elamite and Dravidian seems to be more "similar" (i.e., the phonetic-semantic correspondences seem to be more plausible) than Dravidian and IE, or Dravidian and Hamito-Semitic.

It has been possible to calculate thc distances between the languages of the Finno-Ugric family (Tambovtsev 1983, 1991b, 1992a) and to compute the compactness of the Turkic, Tungus-Manchurian, Paleo-Asiatic, Finno-Ugric, and Indo-European language families and even such super-families as Ural-Altaic and Nostratic (Tombovtsev 1990a).

Marcantiono also deals with the idea of Hungaro-Turkic genetical relationship and, in general, with the Ural-Altaic hypothesis, arguing that J.