There are many excellent books dealing with Old Turkic, Preclassical and Classical Mongolian and Literary Manchu individually, but none providing in a single volume a comprehensive survey of all the three major Altaic languages. The present volume attempts to fill this gap; at the same time it reviews also the much debated Altaic Hypothesis. The book is intended for use by students at university level as well as by general readers with a basic knowledge of linguistics. The 39 language texts analysed in the volume are discussed within their historical and cultural context, thus vastly enlarging the scope of the purely linguistic investigation.

Igor de Rachewiltz, Ph. D. (1961) in History at the Australian National University, Canberra, and currently Emeritus Fellow in the same university, is a historian and philologist specializing in China and Mongolia in the 12th - 14th centuries. He is the author and editor of numerous books and articles on the subject, his major work being an annotated translation of the epic chronicle known as The Secret History of the Mongols (Brill, 2004).
Volker Rybatzki, Ph. D. (2006) in Altaic Studies, University of Helsinki, is Associate Professor of Altaic Studies at Helsinki University. He has published chiefly on Mongolian language and culture from the 13th to the 15th centuries. He is at present engaged in the preparation of an etymological dictionary of the Mongolian language in that period.