Editing Altaic languages (section)

====Phonological and grammatical features====
The original arguments for grouping the "micro-Altaic" languages within a Uralo-Altaic family were based on such shared features as [[vowel harmony]] and [[agglutinative language|agglutination]].

According to Roy Miller, the most pressing evidence for the theory is the similarities in [[verb]]al [[morphology (linguistics)|morphology]].<ref name=miller96/>

The ''Etymological Dictionary'' by Starostin and others (2003) proposes a set of sound change laws that would explain the evolution from Proto-Altaic to the descendant languages. For example, although most of today's Altaic languages have vowel harmony, Proto-Altaic as reconstructed by them lacked it; instead, various vowel assimilations between the first and second syllables of words occurred in Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic. They also included a number of grammatical correspondences between the languages.<ref name=staro2003/>