I get Japanese being its own little chunk due to their isolationist views for so long. But Turkish is surprising given how they were basically the gateway between Europe and Asia for so long.
The chunks are language families. Turkish is the only Turkic language which meets the cutoff; wikipedia says the second most spoken language in the family is Uzbek, but that only has 44 million speakers (native + second combined)
Well the Ottoman Turks didn’t show up till around the 1400s so that is a bit later anyway… and they were Muslim so that kind of shutdown influence from the west for a bit.
I get Japanese being its own little chunk due to their isolationist views for so long. But Turkish is surprising given how they were basically the gateway between Europe and Asia for so long.
The chunks are language families. Turkish is the only Turkic language which meets the cutoff; wikipedia says the second most spoken language in the family is Uzbek, but that only has 44 million speakers (native + second combined)
Well the Ottoman Turks didn’t show up till around the 1400s so that is a bit later anyway… and they were Muslim so that kind of shutdown influence from the west for a bit.