turkic rune stone

Found in Russia in the 1800s, the inscription is in Old Turkic using 'orkhon' script. I think it looks interesting. Much of the similarity to other runes is to be expected because straight lines are the easiest to carve in stone.

Wikipedia says that modern Turkish is not a direct descendent of this old Turkic, but the example quote of each on the page (using roman letters) are very close to each other.

This is apparently deliberate and artificial. Part of Attaturk's reforms were to deliberately reintroduce words from Old Turkic, and no longer used older Turkish words to replace all the Persian and Arabic words that the Ottomans had used. So otherwise it would be way different. I wonder if words the Ottomans left behind in their empire (esp areas with a lot of Turkish speakers) are ones of Turkic or Arabic or Persian origins?

I think I may need to see if yvonr can teach me any of this IPA, as it is Pimsleur's got me confused with stuff that sometimes sounds like it ends in m and sometimes in n to me. And several other words that seem like r or j or rj. I suspect the truth in both cases is it's some sound that doesn't exist in English. Especially this last case.

Vakratunda was right again!

Turkish is clearly NOT an Indo-European language.

So I mentioned to vakratunda that I wondered what Turkish was related to and he said Hungarian and Finnish.

This piqued my interest, but the first glance at google results were just saying Altaic or Ural-Altaic.

Well so are Finnish and Hungarian apparently : http://www.allaboutturkey.com/dil.htm starts with

Turkish belongs to the Altay branch of the Ural-Altaic linguistic family, same as Finnish and Hungarian. It is the westernmost of the Turkic languages spoken across Central Asia and is generally classified as a member of the South-West group, also known as the Oguz group.

Guess I'm not too clear on what all the language families are and who is in which family. I did already know that Hungarian and Finnish were related to each other and not Indo-European at least.