Modern Turkish is, not surprisingly, part of the Turkic language family tree, derived from Proto-Turkic, which is actually part of the Altaic family! That surprised me a lot because I never would’ve guessed Korean and Japanese came from the same family (although when looking at some of the words I just don’t see a relationship). I think modern Turkish is a good example of how much a language can change over thousands of years, borrowing and lending influence from other languages as people move, whether through conquest or peace. I think the creation and change of language is so interesting, and it sparked my interest in how language is currently changing! Apparently there are morphophonological similarities and sentence structures between other Altaic languages, but I don’t know enough about Japanese or Korean to see those similarities.
Because I was so confused about this I looked at this website and it was really helpful, so I’m linking it here.
http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/Ling450ch/reports/altaic.htm
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