Oh tish, Acsenray, who cares about Altaic language family anyway? You pickaxers weren’t content to pick away at Ural-Altaic until you broke it. No, then you had to go and pick Altaic and break it up too. Even before we’d had a chance to get Korean and Japanese properly stuck on. Well, who cares? Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungus-Manchu all go back to Nostratic anyway. They form some sort of loose local “node” within Eastern Nostratic, as Merritt Ruheln would put it.
I think you meant Excalibre ;).
By the by since this thread was resurrected, I’ll mention that The Lion’s Grave:Dispatches from Afghanistan by John Lee Anderson does briefly go into hisimpression of the rather ornate nature of Pashtun culture in the south of the country and Qandahar’s reputation as a hotbed of pederasty ( deserved or not ):
*The austerity of the Taliban was particularly anomalous in the Pashtun homelands of eastern and southern Afghanistan, of which Kandahar is the principal city. Mosques, for instance, are more architecturally ornate in the Pashtun regions than the north. The streets are filled with motorized rickshaws covered with fanciful bronze embossing and shiny decals. Trucks are decorated with painted tin panels and wooden bulwarks like the prows of old-fashioned schooners. Metal geegaws dangling from their fenders tinkle as the trucks lumber along.
Pashtun men, Kandaharis in particular, are very conscious of their personal appearance. Many of them line their eyes with black kohl and color their toenails, and sometimes their fingernails, with henna. Some also dye their hair. It is quite common to see otherwise sober-seeming older men with long beards that are a flaming almost punklike orange color. Burly, bearded men who carry weapons also wear chaplis, colorful high-heeled sandals. I noticed that to be really chic in Kandahar you wear your chaplis a size or too small, which means that you mince or wobble as you walk.
Afghans from other regions joke about the high incidence of pederasty among Kandahari men. They say that when crows fly over Kandahar they clamp one wing over their bottoms, just in case. One of the first things the Taliban did - a popular move - was to punish mujahideen commanders who were accused of rape or pederasty. Homosexuals who were sentenced to death faced a particularly grisly end. Tanks or bulldozers crushed them and buried them under mud walls. Pederasty was evidently a continuing source of concern to Mullah Omar, who decreed that Taliban commanders couldn’t have beardless boys in their ranks.*
- Tamerlane
And bone we shall! (If the plane ticket goes through)
You’re confusing me with that jackass? 
And anyway, it’s very important to demonstrate the falsehood of the Altaic hypothesis because the relationship between Turkic and the Indo-European languages (did you know that the Turkic languages are actually a group of Romance dialects?) is key to my Proto-World theory proving that all languages are descended from Euskara.
I’m very close to finished with the website that I will use to prove this claim to the world. Within weeks, it (alongside its sister project at http://www.timecube.com/) will “absolutely blow the lid off the present civilization.” Finally I will end the reign of evil of educated stupid people like you, Johanna.
In conclusion, I am of Nature’s Harmonic Time Cube - in which both word and god are outlawed. No plant nor animal speaks word, a fraud by evil adults.
My apologies, acsenray! You were nice to me and I snarked out on you (by mistake). Got snarked at in return.
Excalibre, I may snark, but I don’t call fellow Dopers “stupid.” Not here in the hallowed halls of The Dope.
I’m sorry. That wasn’t how that was intended to come across. I was making a reference to various crazy theories of language evolution, and comparing them to the Timecube website, which uses the phrase “educated stupid” in reference to academia. I thought it was a familiar reference around here.
:smack: whoops
OK, I’ve had enough hijacking this thread, how about you?
Excalibre, don’t feel too bad. I’ve gotten bit by someone misunderstanding that ‘educated stupid’ thing as well.
Johanna, great information. You are a real wealth of knowledge.