That it's almost certainly bullshit (I don't like absolutes, weird shit happens). What's more likely is that talk of the Blue Turks, Uyghur Khanate, Attila's horde etc. got mixed in with the wectoid lack of understanding of how exactly territory works in that part of the world, to think of a megablob where it was just a bunch of tribe and/or clans in various barely-existing 'states'. Also keep in mind that for a long time, western scholarship considered Turkic people, Tatars and Mongolic people to all be from Tatary or Turkestan. A good understanding of the cultural divides wasn't really there. Hell, there were strange misnomers into the 1920s, like the Kazakh ASSR being named for the Kyrgyz, who were not really part of its territory.

Regarding communist rewriting: true but it was to eliminate the 'counterrevolutionary' bits. They weren't fans of the Alash leaders for example, and in general a lot of the oral tradition was frowned upon for fear of it being nationalist and/or separatist.

Second post. The first one refers to a book I'm only seeing on conspiracy sites at first glance (not a good look) and 2 even they say it's from the mid nineteenth century, so well within the range of having remnants of builders in the area, even back to Timur who brought about a very particular style of architecture whose earliest example is in Kazakhstan (nomad territory) iirc. Assuming a legitimate source, this speaks more to the authors ignorance than anything else.

Regarding language, it's unsourced and reads like one of the many sensational books of the time. Not a good look, and appears that it was read uncritically to boot, taking the author's claims as truth because they agree. The idea of one language probably comes from the fact that the Turkic family of languages is pretty closely interconnected.

I mean, it also contravenes what the local tradition of history says which provides a much more believable timeline that doesn't involve superhumans and burying cities. So wectoids going in and talking about Grand Tatary is like a random steppe dweller talking about Uly Europa as a single country, single people with one language and one culture. It's stupid and at this point in time wilfully ignorant.

>>47094

>Totally unrelated for the most part but how much are the French and German parts of your borderzone blurred?

You mean the Romance–Germanic linguistic border in eastern France near Germany, right?

I can't tell from first-hand experience, having only spent a couple of minutes in that area after taking a wrong lane in Basel and accidentally emerging in France, so the following may be wrong.

In today's southwestern Germany, I think there has not been any indigenous Romance-speaking territory for many centuries, and no continuous minority communities either, unless you include urban expat communities whose members either assimilate or leave, never keeping French for more than a generation within any one family, unless perhaps Huguenot refugee communities long ago, if there even were any in those parts.

In today's eastern France, I think the situation in 2020 is very different from 1870. I think in 2020, the Germanic topolects are on the way out. I would be surprised if the 19th and 20th centuries didn't see the educational systems on both sides of the border exerting strong pressure to discourage the use of the "wrong" language or topolect, hoping this will in the long term turn everyone into loyal subjects of the respective nation state. My guess is that in 1870 (and perhaps as late as the 1940s), what would after the war become Alsace-Lorraine consisted of monolingually Germanic-speaking areas as well as mixed areas with varying percentages of Romance speakers, probably with few discernible linguistic borders, plus – in the far west – small amounts of monolingually Romance-speaking territory which Prussia-Germany deemed too economically or militarily advantageous to not annex in 1871, whereas in less important areas, the new border somewhat aligned with the linguistic one of westernmost extent of Germanic or significant Germanic minorities. So, west of Alsace-Lorraine, no significant minorities of Germanic speakers. East of Alsace-Lorraine, no significant minorities of Romance speakers, see above. Romance presence always less significant in Alsace than Lorraine.

Between the late 18th century and now, the Alsace-Lorraine area must have seen states of di- or even triglossia (a village's indigenous topolect vs. standard German and/or standard French), varying over time and place.

After each generation of schoolchildren, language policy enforced by schools as mentioned above must have caused topolect use to diminish greatly, which, combined with the linguistic effects of emigration to and immigration from other parts of either France or Germany, resulted in many people of newer generations being monolingual speakers of the respective national standard. While this was very much intended and done forcibly up until the 20th century, which has probably caused quite some resentment lasting to this day, my guess is that people do not perceive what little remains of the topolects to be under attack from the state in 2020, continued decline instead stemming from parents more or less voluntarily choosing not to pass on their topolect, and topolect speakers dropping it because it provides no advantage in a by now thoroughly standard French environment, which is now self-reinforcing since it has reached a critical point, no longer being driven mainly by state measures.

>and it occurred to me looking at my family how much they all actually looked like they were part French as much if not more than part German.

I strongly doubt people look any different depending on whether their remote ancestry lived mostly in what is today eastern France as opposed to today's southwestern Germany, much less depending on whether more of their ancestors self-identified as being of "French" or "German" ethnicity, or what lect(s) they spoke.

Picture not related other than being about France.