The road of Altaic linguistics was long and meandering. It grew out from the biblical tales and their concepts. Adam begat Seth, Seth begat Enos, etc. We all had a common root and common language. And as all kids are different from their parents, languages started to differ. At some point humanity went through a bottleneck, and differentiation process started again. Noah produced Semitic Shem, African Ham, and Eurasian Japheth. The Semitic and African lines remained simple well into linguistic fecundity period, but Japheth turned out a linguistic mother lode. He produced lines and lines of offsprings, some identified linguistically, the others geographically or ethnically. The modern linguistic terminology still uses biblical tales, Semites are from Shem, and Hamites are from Ham. Simple. The unfortunate people who missed blessings of Judeo-Islamic-Christian enlightenment had to come up with their own terminology that identified languages by the name of the speaker. While other sciences developed alternate terminology to identify alternate phenomena, linguistics stayed faithful to its roots, and now those who were not endowed with the biblical ideas also use these long begotten scientific names. In physics, the undetectable ether was replaced by undetectable dark matter, reflecting scientific progress, but in the linguistics, Shem is Shem, and Ham is Ham, reflecting an unshaken fidelity. The biblical ancestors were only raised to eponymic status.

The biblical model not only stays untouched, it continues to fecundate, producing Nostratic, Sino-Caucasian, Dene-Caucasian, and the like offshoots. It took hundreds of years to reflect that the model is no good, and come up with a supplanting Wave model. It might take another generations for linguists' die out to bring the Family Tree model to its size. No hurry. The science can wait.

The biblical model implies that at one remote point in time existed a formed language that split off into various dialects that grew into languages and language families. In most cases, that is a fallacy. The tiny bands of hunter-gatherers needed large tracts to forage, reaching into other's territories and initiating social exchanges. Creolization held the day, or rather many millennia. The Family Tree had a shape of grass lawn with stolons extending from every base and criss-crossing with stolons of their neighbors. After a drought, the surviving islands were restarting the process uncountable number of times. The emergence of the roving agriculture and animal husbandry tilted creolization toward the more fecund side, the Family Tree took a shape of brush spots in grassy lawn. Leveling became a greater force in communications, all linguistic aspects were affected by leveling, typology, syntax, morphology, and phonetics. That trend grew with introduction of 3-field system starting in 800s AD, which reduced agricultural roving, with companion linguistic fallout. The resultant leveling gave Family Tree a shape of trees in brushy tracts surrounded by grassy lawns. The printing presses of the Late Middle Ages at the expense of minority languages and dialects made leveling ubiquitous. At the same time, increased productivity of agriculture allowed rulers to engage in permanent warfare that stirred and dispersed subject population along the path travelled by cattlemen ranchers five millennia earlier. It took another 1000 years for the emergence of linguistics and its biblical-type etiology. Some linguists might have thought of the example of biological evolution. It took another 200 years for some linguists to realize that their model is faulty, and come up with the Wave model.

The potencies of the Family Tree and of the Wave models are barely compatible. Their effects are analogous to the differences of asexual and sexual reproduction. For the first 2.5 bln years, the asexual reproduction did not move beyond most primitive forms of life; explosive development started with the sexual reproduction 1 bln ybp. It had brought in the exchange and amalgamation of the genetic material, diffusion of beneficial traits, and let biological experimentation loose. The Family Tree model expects a formed initial language and relies on slow inner mutations of asexual reproductive type. The Wave model postulates exchange, forms language in exchange process, and uses all available mutations across linguistic lines akin to sexual reproductive type. Results are shaped by interplay of change and leveling. In a single generation, a white cow becomes a brown cow, a blond becomes a mulatto, a flexive language becomes a creole without flexivity. Within the Family Tree model, changes are asynchronous, random, and isolated one from another. Within the Wave model, changes are synchronous, massive, simultaneous across numerous traits, directional, and, most importantly, predictable. Within the Wave model arise recognizable patterns, bravely termed “linguistic laws” in the 19th cent. They describe typical phonetical idiosyncrasies peculiar to the languages adopted by foreign speakers, like the Southern drawl, Spanglish, African American, the Russian or Oriental accents in English. A period of bilingualism smothers out transition, a direct adaptation makes it a partial abrupt transition. In the case of adaptation, is acquired typology of language, its structure, and its lexical and morphological material begins with the most primitive, and accumulates over the centuries. Superficially, some symptoms of the adopted languages may, and historically have been, confused with internal development model, but on closer observation any peculiar difference is manifesting because it is complemented by numerous other linguistic traits of syntactic, morphologic, and lexical changes. To ignore inconvenient facts, European linguistics came up with a thesis that typological, syntactic, and morphologic changes are spurious, that languages can randomly change them globally, switching from one typology to another like changing hats or religions. That was the only postulate that could keep the Family Tree model alive against uproar of mounting objections.

Adorned by flowery speculations, the concept of Japhethic linguistic line had survived till the mid of the 20th cent., and would have kept living if not for the linguistic genius and firm hand of Stalin, who toiled in all disciplines save for computer sciences, genetics, and gynecology. Japheth fathered the Cimmerian-Scythian son Gomer with his offsprings the Scythian-Ashkuz Ashkenaz, the Uralic Riphath, and Türkic Togarmah; the son Magog with his offsprings the Anatolian and N. Pontic Scythians; the son Madai with his offsprings the Medes of Northwest Iranian plateau; the son Javan with his offsprings the Ionians, otherwise known as Greeks; the son Tubal with his offsprings the three tongues of Europe, namely Iberian, Italic, and Illyrian; the son Meshech with his offsprings the Anatolian Mushki of the 2nd-1st mill. BC, otherwise unknown; and the son Tiras with his offsprings of NW Pontic Scythians who taught Greeks the art of cheese making. According to this scheme, Scythians not only had numerous fathers, but also were spread like eggs in a salad, the Near East Ashkenaz, further on Togarmah, than Near East and N. Pontic Scythians, and than NW Pontic Scythians. The Scythians alone are named 5 times, while the rest of the biblical world has only 9 groups of Semites, Hamites, Uralic Riphaths, Medes, Ionians, Iberians, Italics and Illirians, and Mushki. With time, linguistics included all 6000 languages of the world, using a single model to dissect and interpret all of them, save for few embarrassing cases like English, Germanics, Russian, Romance, Chinese, Japanese, and a few other minor cases. Altaic languages, in a paradigm that mirrors the Indo-European paradigm, are one of those minor cases too.

Altaic is a hypothetical language family that shares numerous defining characteristics, such as agglutination, vowel harmony, and SOV word order. De facto it is no hypothetical, it is called out, named, and used like it is a proven thing, a controversial assumption. In many European minds, it was for real for 150 years, or 6 generations. In others, it became one of the standing substitute euphemisms for the Türkic languages, when in a period from 1944 to about 1960s in the large chunk of the Eurasia the very name Türkic was proscribed. From the inception, it was postulated that Altaic languages are eastern languages, that they have reached Europe only in the New Era. They were conceptually squeezed out from Europe, and relegated to the remote areas way away from the ennobled European languages.

The term Altaic was introduced by a Finnish philologist of Uralic languages Matthias Castren in 1844 for a family that included Türkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Finno-Ugric, and Nenets (called Samoed at the time, i.e. Self-Eater), plus optional Koreanic and Japonic, plus very optional Ainu (Far Eastern Ainu, not the Uigur Ainu) languages, for a hundred years it was called Ural-Altaic and initially also Tataric.

Unbeknown to M. Castren, the group included Y-DNA genetic markers of R1b + R1a (Türkic); C + O (Mongolic Mongols), C + N (Mongolic Buryats); C (Tungusic); N (Finno-Ugrians); N (Nenetses); D + O (Japanese); O (Koreans); D (Ainu). From a demographical aspect, this allows to discern major lines of R (Türkic, aka Central Asian), C (Tungusic, aka Coastal South Asian), N (Finno-Ugrian, aka Northern Eurasia), D (Far Eastern aborigines, aka Maritime Migration), O (Far Eastern aborigines, aka East Asian - Southeast Asian). This genetically very diverse cosmopolitan tracing would positively exclude any kind of Noah-type linguistic model, and conveniently explain the unrelated origin of the lexus for each suspect. It also would conveniently explain the torturous linguistic history that tried to construct various models, at first based on general typological principles, then on anecdotal evidence, and now on statistical assessment of the anecdotal evidence. In a single-dimension world, a faulty premise may accidentally lead to a right result, but any additional dimension would surely negate such thesis.

The Castren's Ural-Altaic lived for 150 years, till the 21st cent. and the S. Starostin's dismissal of it (2003), which reaffirmed independent Altaic and Uralic families. Meanwhile, during those 150 years, the Altaic portion lived its own life. An Austrian scholar Anton Boller in 1857 suggested adding Japanese to the Altaic group of the Ural-Altaic. In 1920s G.J. Ramstedt and E.D. Polivanov suggested adding Korean to the Altaic group. In 1962, John C. Street suggested adding Ainu to the Altaic group, with Türkic-Mongolic-Tungusic forming one grouping and Korean-Japanese-Ainu forming another grouping. The Castren's hypothesis, and every new modification, commenced fragmentation among linguists, with ardent pro and con partisanship coming in ebbs and tides, which benefited the printing industry throughout the world. The first 100 years was a period of burgeoning nationalism, when each European polity was studying and manufacturing its past, with linguistics playing not a last role in the enterprise. Whether pro or con, the entire debate was to condition the Family Tree model. Or that part of reality that could form the Family Tree model. The other part, driven by migrations, amalgamation, and cultural exchanges, still remains a peripheral issue unrelated to the main subject, that of “does or does not my subject belong to this Tree, or it grows from another Tree”. Various Tree models offer various groupings, thus the terminological proliferation: Ural-Altaic, Altaic, Macro-Altaic, Micro-Altaic, Macro-Tungusic, North Asiatic, Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Karasuk languages, Dene-Caucasian, Sino-Caucasian, Altaicists, anti-Altaicists, Altaists, anti-Altaists, and more. To make things worse, each language and linguistic group has overgrown with pra- and proto- varieties of the type “Adam begat Seth, Seth begat Enos”. A bedlam is raining, attesting to a general unawareness. The poor to none state of awareness was noted not only in the critical reviews, but also in the body of the pro and con studies.

Since 1950s, the Altaic Family Tree model is in turmoil and bleeding. It lost its Uralic component, turning into Macro-Altaic, did not absorb outliers Korean-Japanese-Ainu, turning into Micro-Altaic, sprung Macro-Tungusic of Tungusic-Korean-Japanese triplet, and fractured along Türkic-Mongolic-Tungusic lines. As it stands, the Türkic-Mongolic-Tungusic (and Uralic) Altaic group is a Sprachbund, a result of convergence through intensive borrowing and long contact among speakers of languages that are not related. Essentially, in the extremal case, the Türkic languages are the sole member of the Altaic group. In case when the Macro-Tungusic group is called Altaic, the Türkic languages lose even that last moniker. The relicts of the past, however, are still enduring, the reference materials, and even the newest encyclopedias still offer different definitions and versions under the term Altaic, each one extensively clouded by qualifications and apparently important citations.

With chaff and chad shed, the Altaic Theory is reduced to a Türkic theory. The qualifications, re-qualifications, and re-classifications are normal scientific processes, they reshape the models and modify how they reflect reality; reality is the driving force behind reshaping the phantom images of reality and the phantom linguistic models. The past fluidity of the Altaic Theory parallels that of the Nostratic Theory, an alternative super-model that had to account for linguistic commonalities accross Eurasia and beyond. The decay of the Altaic Theory impinges heavily on the Nostratic Theory, since the commonalities underlay both theories. A shift from the Family Tree model for the Altaic paradigm transfers commonalities from exclusively genetic sphere to genetic plus cultural sphere. Hence, the Family Tree Nostratic model has to face the challenge that its theoretical base has been undermined, it should be based on cultural amalgamation instead of inherited traits. What stratified the Altaic Theory created a new paradigm for the Nostratic Theory; instead of the phantom image of a single phantom pra-pra-language leaving its imprints in the live languages, these traces are cultural commonalities spread by the mobile Türkic nomads of the latter times, and by the mobile pra- (or pre-)Türkic hunter-gatherers of the previous times. In that correction, the genetic and cultural commonalities reaching Atlantic seaboard in the west and Pacific seaboard in the east are merely short-range events: the outer reaches participated in seeding the Americas. Rectification of the Nostratic Theory is a corollary of the rectification of the Altaic Theory: a single linguistic process over temporal and spatial space created reality which was distortedly reflected in the images depicted by the initial Altaic and Nostratic theories.

Somehow linguists remain aloof of the realm. The purely linguistic processes are devoid of the history that drives them, devoid of the people that carry them. In the linguistics, demography, ethnology, biology, technology are not driving mechanisms, at best they are a consequence of the linguistic tracings and past administrative reorganizations. For the proponents of the biblical model, Altaic historiography is a firestorm followed by rearguard retreat under growing weight of reality. For the proponents of the convergence model, it is an eternal uphill battle. The ultimate line of doctrinal defense is that linguistics is a stand-alone self-contained science, isolated from biology, demography, and other earthly matters. Its core by definition is ad hoc and ad hominem. Its laws are condensed to a single phrase with appended volumes of exceptions called exceptions under Family Tree model and influences under Wave model.

The importance of the known reality for linguistics is immeasurable. A discipline divorced from other sciences is not a science, it is an occupation. Few key examples demonstrate that. Demography: 1/2 million Huns joined the 100 K Syanbi Mongols in 93 AD; this convergence could not escape creating a Türkic-Mongolic linguistic amalgamation, now found and speculated on; a vanishingly small group of Enisean hunter-gatherers was described as a major military power of the Eastern Asia that taxed and ruled Chinese and Roman empires and a greater part of Eurasia, a clear demographic non-starter. Archeology: the role and impact of Zhou-type Scythians on the people of the Far East is annalistically dated from 2300 BC, and their traces reach the Pacific, they brought a wealth of technologies and innovations to the Far East; not only this readily explains the linguistic influence of the Türkic on Sinitic (Sino-Caucasian suggestion), Tungisic, Korean, and Japanese, but for linguistic studies should be a premise and a torch pointing the direction of the studies. History: Germanic sources recorded Scythians and Sarmatians in the Germanic history, and Germanic languages contain 30% of substrate lexicon; Turkisms in the Germanic languages are long and widely known; not only history readily explains the Türkic linguistic influence on the Germanic languages, it defines the convergence and is a torch pointing the direction of the studies. Biology: known major components in the genetic composition point to the sources,  C + O Y-DNA of Mongolic Mongols indicates an amalgamation of Tungusic people and Far Eastern aborigines, while the C + N Y-DNA of  Mongolic Buryats indicates an amalgamation of Tungusic people and Nenets people; knowing this unambiguous biological fact readily explains the phenomena of the absence of the shared words in all three of the Türkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic groupings, this weird phenomena is readily predictable; it is not a puzzle, it is an open book.

The relationship between the Türkic and Mongolic languages remains a partisan and hot topic, although the discussion could have tapered down two centuries ago, after publication of the Chinese annals by J. de Mailla (1669-1748), who in the 18-th century published a French translation in 12 volumes: Histoire générale de la Chine, ou Annales de cet Empire; traduit du Tong-kien-kang-mou par de Mailla, Paris, 1777-1783. The annals made known a key fact: in 93 AD, 500,000 Huns (or 100,000 families, or 15% of the Hunnic state population) joined an unknown number of the Syanbi Mongols. Through the centuries, Mongols are known to be a not numerous group compared with all their neighbors. Manipulating Türkic and Mongolic demographic data, it is not hard to come to a conclusion that the Türkic tribes of the Hunnic Confederation outnumbered Mongolic tribes by a factor of at least 10:1. Nowadays the ratio is about 10:1, with 120 mln vs. 12 mln speakers, and there are many ways to come up with an order of magnitude estimate for the past 2000 years. Calibrated by numerous historical data and historical events, and crosschecked with the accepted demographic growth factors, estimates would invariably fall into this ballpark range. Chingiz-khan demographic imprint was infinitesimal, Mongols in his armies numbered in low 5-digit numbers. Another event of 1600s AD replaced the western Mongol tribes, who could be way more Türkic than Mongolic, with the eastern Mongols, whose language we call Mongolic today, and which was not as much Turkified or Mongolised as the western Mongolic. Other than documented archaic Turkisms in Mongolic, there are way more reasons to seek Türkic in Mongolic than the other way around.

The genetic data weightily corroborates the demographic trend. Genetically, the Türkic and Mongolic people come from entirely different genetic trunks, both on the male and female lines. As far as the original languages, the two unrelated trunks of the Türkic and Mongolic people could not have a common “pra-Altaic” language. Not any more than any other genetic lines that are not direct descendents one from the other. Here the genetics sides with the party that argues for cultural influence against a genetic connection. Under a pan-Altaic hypothesis, the Türkic - Mongolic - Tungusic genetic unity is stipulated with no reservations, and the Korean and Japanese are added as a footnote, under a qualifier “possible”. The archeology contravenes the genetic connection thesis, definitely so in the China-controlled territories, and extrapolates its findings to the Korean and Japanese origins. Archeology has detected an influx of the Scythian-type horse nomadic tribes into the Far East, into the area of the modern Northern China, extending as far south as the southern watershed of the Yellow river and as far east as the Liaoang bay coast of the Northern China, deep into the Mongolic and Tungusic lands of the late 3rd mill. BC. In the Central China, these Scythians go under a codename Zhou 周, starting from 2300 BC, without much amalgamation they coexisted with the local agricultural population, and culturally influenced the Far Eastern tribes. That influence predates the first Koreans and Japanese by at least a millennium. At their birth, the Koreans and Japanese already carried into their incipient cultures a load of amalgamated linguistic influence. The archeological finds also corroborate the thesis of the immense and mutual nomadic cultural and biological influence on the sedentary tribes of the Far East, and contravene the linguistic genetic connection. The linguistic Ursprache Family Tree model conflicts with the historical and physical records, which outright support the Wave model of the historical linguistics.

A part of the Alataic paradigm also includes the problem of self-inflicted injury, as well as numerous excuses and disclaimers that support it. It is true that within a framework of biblical model much of what is known is of little use. The Neolithic Sprachbunds of 5000 ybp were as dispersed as the Sprachbunds of the 19th cent., and the Mesolithic Sprachbunds of 10,000 ybp were not less diversified. Other than the Bible, there are no sources that support an opposite view, and all accumulated experience up to the 20th cent. does support this view. Up to the Middle Ages, written sources are absent for the majority of the humanity, and without writing there are no records related to linguistics. Linguistics may deduce, speculate, and infer, but it can't produce anything calibratable and verifiable, first of all because language is a stochastic process. For a period before the appearance of writing, linguistics is a scholastic discipline, and after that, it becomes a descriptive discipline, like genogeography or population genetics. Paleolinguistics, that is the one adorned with asterisks to mark phantom words, is an one way street, there is no chance for verification, no field testing procedure. Paleodictionary is a listing of “he said, she said” opinions justified by conjectures of possibly applicable and notoriously irregular “sound laws”. A search for a pinpointed Urheimat is as fruitful as a search for the biblical Noah or his ark. Absent a Time Machine, we will never know precise phonetics of the unrecorded languages. Even if we dig up all the bones from the past millennia, and run their DNA, in addition to the archeological knowledge we will only learn the biological aspects, and will be able to trace physical migration. Since language is a cultural trait, at best we will learn of the linguistic aspects only circumstantially and by implication. The noted in numerous critical reviews deficiencies presented by the general unawareness will, if ever, be mitigated only spotty and partially. We will have to descend from the biblical heights to the realities of life. Convergences will largely supplant the linguistic splits.

Our Altaic linguistic epopee continues with all its glorious bells and whistles.