"The Ural-Altaic language comprises a wide range. Ural includes present-day Finnish and Hungarian. Altaic indicates Turkish, Mongolian, Samoyed, Tungus and Korean. H. J. Klaproth, the German traveller and scholar is credited with first suggesting the relation between Japanese and the Ural-Altaic languages (Asia Polyglotta 1823). Castren (1857) further elaborated the category of 'Altaisch' and ongoing research on language typology led subsequent investigators to place Japanese and Korean in that group: Rosny (1864), Winkler (1884, 1894), Grunzel (1895). The Austrian Anton Boller (1857) emphasised the connection thus: "Nachweiss, dass das Japanische zum ural-altaischen Stamme gehort". J. Hoffman, Professor of Japanese at Leiden University voiced the same opinion (1867). By the turn of the century, evidence for the Altaic relationship led at least one scholar of Old Japanese to describe it as: "the primal extant deliverances of the whole Ural-Altaic stock" (1906: 2xxv).
Much attention has been focused on vowel harmony in the establishment of the Japanese- Altaic connection. K. Fujioka in 1908 isolated fourteen essential features of Ural-Altaic languages and identified thirteen of those features shared by Japanese: all except vowel harmony. Shinkichi Hashimoto's discovery that 8th century Japanese had 3 more vowels than had previously been thought led to the discovery that Japanese also exhibited vowel, harmony as in Ural-Altaic. Roy Miller (1971) in his Japanese and Other Altaic Languages, Shibata Takeshi (1949) and a substantial number of other scholars now favour the Altaic connection."
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