ALTAIC • FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • Definition of Altaic

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/æltˈeɪɪk/ Listen

noun

Altaic n. A collective term for a group of related linguistic families including the Turkic, Tungusik and Mongolian languages, spoken over a broad area from southeastern Europe and Asia, as far east as the Pacific.

adjective

Altaic, Altaian adj. Of or pertaining to the Altai, a mountain chain in Central Asia.

Altaic adj.

Of or pertaining to the Altaic languages. "Altaic languages"

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Etymology of 'Altaic'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Altaic" Quotes from Famous Books

... call their country Suomi or Marshland; and it is often spoken of as the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. The language they speak belongs to a group called Finnish-Ugrian, or Altaic, and is allied to Lappish and Esthonian, and more distantly to Turkish and Hungarian, There are only twenty-one letters in the alphabet; the letter J is pronounced like Y (as a consonant), and Y almost as a short I. The first syllable of every word is accented. This renders it difficult to accommodate ...

— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous

... were inhibited from modifying these consonants in accordance with what seems to have been a general Germanic phonetic drift? Even more striking than these instances is the peculiar resemblance, in certain special phonetic respects, of Russian and other Slavic languages to the unrelated Ural-Altaic languages[168] of the Volga region. The peculiar, dull vowel, for instance, known in Russian as "yeri"[169] has Ural-Altaic analogues, but is entirely wanting in Germanic, Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian, the nearest Indo-European congeners of Slavic. We may at least suspect that the ...

— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir