Page "Altaic languages" Paragraph 14

Anti-Altaicists Gerard Clauson ( 1956 ), Gerhard Doerfer ( 1963 ), and Alexander Shcherbak argued that the words and features shared by Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic were for the most part borrowings and that the rest could be attributed to chance resemblances.

They noted that there was little vocabulary shared by Turkic and Tungusic but not Mongolic.

They reasoned that if all three families had a common ancestor, we should expect losses to happen at random, not only at the geographical margins of the family, and that the observed pattern is consistent with borrowing.

Furthermore, they argued that many of the typological features of the supposed Altaic languages, such as agglutinative morphology and SOV word order, usually co-occur in languages.

In sum, the idea was that Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic form a Sprachbund – the result of convergence through intensive borrowing and long contact among speakers of languages that are not necessarily closely related.