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He's mentioned 6 times, including the citations list, but half the time he doesn't have a year next to his name like the rest of the people he's listed with do. Even in the citations, it just lists "Alexander Shcherbak (1963)." No article names or anything. It seems really hard to find stuff about this guy online, as someone more modern has his name with a completely different career path. He appears to be a real person that was a linguist, and I've found him referenced in https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/18646907 in the one review this book has listed here, so if someone could find a way to access this book's citations we could maybe get some article names and more sources here. Anafyral (talk) 07:12, 8 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The article reads like it's trying to strike a balance on a very touchy issue, which is fair. Obviously the Altaic hypothesis has some small degree of mainstream support, but it's important that the article be clear that the support it experiences is fairly minor, because as is it feels like undue weight is being given to perspectives which are either old enough that our improved understanding of the comparative method and greater corpus renders them moot, or which are coming from a small group of researchers who accept the hypothesis in the absence of much evidence or consensus. The article definitely needs to spend less time treating both sides of this discussion as coming from equal places. Warrenmck (talk) 04:02, 15 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. This hypothesis had a very brief moment of near acceptance back when it was first proposed in the middle of the last century and data on these languages (especially Tungusic) was sparse and not widely disseminated, but as data became more readily available, support dropped to a much lower level and has never recovered. --TaivoLinguist (Taivo) (talk) 04:29, 15 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Article requires rewrite based on latest DNA revelations[edit]
Multiple studies now published including data from the Reich lab at Blavatnik @ Harvard, part of the human atlas project funded by the John Templeton foundation, have conclusively demonstrated that the once so-called Altaic theory is no longer a theory, but fact. The language developed approximately 9000 years ago in what is today China, before splitting into three sub branches. This article is therefore completely wrong. Historiaantiqua (talk) 07:04, 28 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
No it doesn't need a complete rewrite because DNA is NOT language. The Altaic hypothesis is not proven by DNA evidence, nor is any other language family proven by DNA evidence. This is just a way for people to ignore actual linguistic evidence that doesn't prove what they want it to prove. Historical linguistics has its own scientific methodology that is independent of biology, just as DNA evidence is independent of language (there is no "language" gene since language is behavioral, not physical). When DNA evidence matches historical linguistic evidence, then talking about DNA evidence makes sense, but the historical linguistic evidence ALWAYS comes first when talking about language families. DNA evidence never proves a linguistic hypothesis without the solid linguistic evidence coming first. The majority of historical linguists still find the Altaic hypothesis unconvincing based on the linguistic evidence. Thus DNA is a trivial issue and never conclusive. It is clear from your comments and your user page that you are not a linguist, but a historian, so you should leave linguistics to the linguists when they tell you that your assertions are not based on the science of linguistics. The DNA evidence shows that the modern humans of the area derive from older humans in the area, but that proves absolutely nothing about what languages they were speaking as they interbred and reproduced. --TaivoLinguist (Taivo) (talk) 09:37, 28 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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