Wili Bang and the Theory of Ural Altaic Languages

Willi Bang, who examined the Ural-Altaic languages during his pre-doctoral and doctoral studies, argued that these languages were related. Whereas Bang was actually a professor of the English language, his work on the Ural-Altaic languages arose from his interest in Turkology in pre-World War I Belgium. Bang’s theory of the Ural-Altaic languages is based on the concept of “agglutination”, the theory that words are formed through the addition of suffixes. Accordingly, the bold etymological formulations in Bang’s writings from 1890 and beyond, reflect his efforts to explain the origin of constructional and inflectional suffixes by means of verb stems or roots.