German Turkologist theory

[avqust23]

Hi

I read about a German turkologist who wrote books in the 60s and 70s, and one of his books was basically about the turkic languages being separate from mongolic and that they shouldn't be classified under the same category (altaic), despite any similarities to which he described were consequential to the geographic circumstances that made cultural exchange between the two respective peoples more freeflowing.

I will add another topic later. I trimmed this down because it had originally two points of discussion.

[H. İhsan Erkoç]

I don't remember any German Turkologist who opposed the Altaic theory, but the British Turkologist Sir Gerard Clauson did.

[jamyangnorbu]

Claus Schönig is a contemporary German critic of the Altaic hypothesis. He proposes that many of the common words found in Mongolian and Turkic languages can be discerned as borrowings between the languages at different stages when under a diacrhonic ana. He has a good piece in Routledge's The Mongolic Languages.

[H. İhsan Erkoç]

That is also what Clauson thought. I incline to think that way too.