Editing Altaic languages (section)

===Origins===
The earliest known reference to a unified language group of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages is from the 1692 work of [[Nicolaes Witsen]] which may be based on a 1661 work of [[Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur]], ''[[Shajara-i Tarākima|Genealogy of the Turkmens]]''.<ref name=robeets31>{{cite book |last1=Robeets |first1=Martine |title=The Classification of Transeurasian languages |date=2020 |publisher=Oxford University Press |page=31}}</ref>

A proposed grouping of the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages was published in 1730 by [[Philip Johan von Strahlenberg]], a Swedish officer who traveled in the eastern [[Russian Empire]] while a prisoner of war after the [[Great Northern War]].<ref name=poppe65>Nicholas Poppe (1965): ''Introduction to Altaic Linguistics.'' Volume 14 of ''Ural-altaische Bibliothek''. Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden.</ref>{{rp|page 125}} However, he may not have intended to imply a closer relationship among those languages.<ref name=ramer>[[Alexis Manaster Ramer]] and [[Paul Sidwell]] (1997): "The truth about Strahlenberg's classification of the languages of Northeastern Eurasia." ''Journal de la Société finno-ougrienne'', volume 87, pages 139–160.</ref> Later proposals to include the Korean and Japanese languages into a "Macro-Altaic" family have always been controversial. The original proposal was sometimes called "Micro-Altaic" by [[retronym]]y. Most proponents of Altaic continue to support the inclusion of Korean, but fewer do for Japanese.<ref name="China 2008">Roger Blench and Mallam Dendo (2008): "[https://web.archive.org/web/20190227035752/http://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7b96/c6177913c04c7972abe56fcd86a9b6294686.pdf Stratification in the peopling of China: how far does the linguistic evidence match genetics and archaeology?]" In Alicia Sanchez-Mazas et al., eds. ''Human migrations in continental East Asia and Taiwan: genetic, linguistic and archaeological evidence'', chapter 4. Taylor & Francis.</ref> Some proposals also included [[Ainu languages|Ainuic]] but this is not widely accepted even among Altaicists themselves.<ref name="georg1999" /> A common ancestral Proto-Altaic language for the "Macro" family has been tentatively reconstructed by [[Sergei Starostin]] and others.<ref name="staro2003" />

Micro-Altaic includes about 66 living languages,<ref>{{cite web |title=Browse by Language Family |url=http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=7-16 |access-date=18 June 2013 |publisher=Ethnologue}}</ref> to which Macro-Altaic would add Korean, [[Jeju language|Jeju]], Japanese, and the [[Ryukyuan languages]], for a total of about 74 (depending on what is considered a language and what is considered a [[Language or dialect|dialect]]). These numbers do not include earlier states of languages, such as [[Middle Mongol language|Middle Mongol]], [[Old Korean]], or [[Old Japanese]].