Turanian
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Turanian. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the title formerly conferred on a vast family of combinatory or agglutinative languages, which is made to comprise every tongue of Asia and Europe that is not either Aryan or Semitic, with the exception of Chinese and its cognate dialects. This family falls, according to Max Müller, into two great divisions, the northern and the southern; the northern being subdivided into five classes, Tungusic, Mongolic Turkic, Finnic, and Samoyedic; the southern into fou or the Drafour, Tamulic vidian languages of the Dekkan, Bhotîya or the dialects of Bhotan and Tibet, Taїc of Siam, and Malaic of the Malay and Polynesian islands. Under these nine , and even classes he groups 116 dialects then he does not stretch the term Turanian to its widest limits, which with many philologists include Accadian, the language of the Chaldæan inventors of cuneiform, and Basque, and by some are extended to North America. Naturally there is a dispute as to the correctness of the term at all; and while Max Müller asserts that the Turanian languages "share elements in common which they must have borrowed from the same source, and after formal elements are such that it would be impossible to ascribe them to mere accident," ." Peile in "Philology" (1877) maintains that the title Turanian "had better be avoided, the agglutinative languages are much too different to give any ground at all for believing that they all belong to the same family. They agree only in the general principle of forming their speech; but no common bond has yet been found to bring together the main groups of the so-called Turanian peoples; and it is not likely there is any." This principle, the combinatory, might certainly have been independently arrived at by different nations, and it is equally rash to regard Japanese as necessarily cognate to Finnish because both are agglutinative languages, as it would be to connect the Semitic and Aryan tongues on the score of their common possession of inflection.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a name applied largely to designate a family of Asiatic languages and peoples. The word is derived from Tur, a legendary ancestor of the Turks. In European history the term is restricted chiefly to the Turks, Finns, Mongols, and Tartars.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's already recorded the doubt that killed the term: Peile's judgment in 1877 that "Turanian" "had better be avoided" is now the settled view, and no linguist today groups Finnish, Tamil, Tibetan, Siamese and Malay in one family. Müller's nine classes have been reassigned to separate stocks — Uralic, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai and Austronesian — while the proposed Altaic link between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic remains contested rather than accepted. Sumerian, called "Accadian" here, and Basque are both treated as language isolates with no known relatives. The word survives mainly outside linguistics, in the nationalist Turanism that flourished in Hungary and Turkey in the early twentieth century, and in Aiton's sense of a loose ethnic label rather than a demonstrated family.
Written for this edition, 2026.