Cantraps of the Master Philologist [The word for World is 'florist']

Once again another odd topic of discussion comes up at Open-Mike night at the Old Entomologist, for Open Mike may know nothing of mixing a floofy cocktail but he has a generous hand when he's pouring the pints of Gleamhound's Sobriety Draught. Namely: what are we to make of oblique references such as this, which speak of a far-fetched speculative linguistic clade as if it were once an accepted reality?

"Perhaps it is a manifestation of some historical calamity, one that wreaked such widespread psychic trauma that the painful memories were nigh-universally suppressed. But the repression bubbled up as a cultural neurosis, and residual engrams seeped through the seams of amnesia like blood through a cheap suitcase. This always happens. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something."

ALTERNATIVE URAL-ALTAIC EXPLAINING VOICE:
In the time-line we presently inhabit, linguists evidently did not accept the notion that the Uralic group of languages (which is to say, the Fenno-Ugric group, broadened by the inclusion of the Samoyedic language outliers, spread out across the Siberian steppes) evolved from the same common ancestor as the Altaic languages (i.e. the Turkic and Tungusic and Mongolic families).* Uralic languages are weird of grammar and morphology, also agglutinative, so should be avoided if you have a wheat intolerance. The weirdness peaks in the Ugric branch which gave us Hungarians.** Meanwhile Altaic languages are united by their own forms of weirdness.

In the absence of a phylogenetic connection as accepted fact, philologists did not set out to reconstruct that shared ancestor... nor did they bring up their own children to speak Proto-Uraltaic as their mother tongue, to see what effect would come of exposing formative minds to the two combined forms of weirdness. Never wondering what happened to the tribes originally speaking the language, that left their descendents dispersed all across Eurasia.

Endless Steppes

Perhaps someone went back in a time machine and destroyed the most cogent written records... or discredited the theorists who were promoting the Uralic-Altaic hypothesis most persuasively... or convinced them to switch to more remunerative careers as bakers specialising in the manufacture of novelty muffins. Leaving a few fugitive traces, disguised as fictions, but you can't expect a thorough job from independent contractors.***

So in this time-line, the speakers of Proto-Uraltaic did not raise up armies seeking the world domination to which they felt entitled, and the world was not plunged into a cauldron of war. But do we get any thanks? DO WE BOGROLL.

Never mind, we've forgotten the whole thing ourselves.
"You are still loonies", opined head barmaid Evangeline van Holsterin.

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* There are still a few dead-enders -- not all of them cultural chauvinists and racial supremacists! -- convinced that Hungarian is too exotic and Romantic and Outsider to be just another European language, and must instead be linked to Turkish; this leads to entertaining academic knife-fights. At least they have abandoned the notion that Hungarians are galactic explorers, stranded on Earth amid savages when the mothership left prematurely.

** In one example of Weird, the colour lexicon in Komi-Zyrian -- a member of the Permian branch -- fits into MacLaury's aberrant developmental trajectory,  in contrast to the usual Berlin-Kay sequence. That is, the language developed through a stage of having a single "Yellow-with-Green" colour category, stretching the same basic term to cover "warm" yellows as well as "cool" greens, only recently making a lexical distinction... so now ‘yellow’ in Komi is koĺkviž (egg-viž) while 'green' is turunviž (grass-viž). There are similar traces of the same pathway in other Fenno-Ugric tongues. I was going to write a paper about this but Ryabina got there first.