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Also Turkish and Hungarian. There are too many similarities between Uralic and Altaic languages that at some point in history they were considered a single language family by some experts (conveniently named Ural-Altaic). According to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages

"There is general agreement on several typological similarities being widely found among the languages considered under Ural–Altaic:

head-final and subject–object–verb word order

in most of the languages, vowel harmony

morphology that is predominantly agglutinative and suffixing zero copula

non-finite clauses

lack of grammatical gender

lack of consonant clusters in word-initial position

having a separate verb for existential clause which is different from ordinary possession verbs like "to have""



Lots of interestingly similar words between Japanese and Turkish. For example, yabanjin meaning barbarian in Japanese, and yabancı meaning foreigner in Turkish. The word for "good" is basically the same in both languages (ii/iyi), and the particle -de at the end of a word means "at" in both languages.


This is one of those traps the article cautions about. Yabanjin 野蛮人 is not native Japanese, but a borrowing from Chinese yemanren, which is a composite word (barbarian+person) and sounds nothing like yabancı ("yabanjuh").

It's actually even more complicated than that: yabanjin is a kan'on/Tang dynasty era borrowing, so it came from the Middle Chinese spoken in Chang'an/Xi'an around the 8th century, which would have been quite different from the modern Mandarin yemanren.




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