together with pitch as a prosodic feature. Prosody As reconstructed by Starostin et al. (2003), Proto-Altaic was a pitch accent or tone language; at least the first and probably every syllable could have a high or a low pitch. Sound correspondences If a Proto(-Macro)-Altaic language really existed, it should be possible to reconstruct regular sound correspondences between that protolanguage and its descendants; such correspondences would make it possible to distinguish cognates from loanwords (in many cases). Such attempts have repeatedly been made. The latest version is reproduced here, taken from Blažek's (2006) summary of the newest Altaic etymological dictionary (Starostin et al. 2003) and transcribed into the IPA. When a Proto-Altaic phoneme developed differently depending on its position in a word (beginning, interior, or end), the special case (or all cases) is marked with a hyphen; for example, Proto-Altaic disappears (marked "0") or becomes at the beginning of a Turkic word and becomes elsewhere in a Turkic word. Consonants Only single consonants are considered here. In the middle of words, clusters of two consonants were allowed in Proto-Altaic as reconstructed by Starostin et al. (2003); the correspondence table of these clusters spans almost seven pages in their book (83–89), and most clusters are only found in one or a few of the reconstructed roots. 1 The Khalaj language has instead. (It also retains a number of other archaisms.) However, it has also added in front of words for which no initial consonant (except in some cases , as expected) can be reconstructed for Proto-Altaic; therefore, and because it would make them dependent on whether Khalaj happens to have preserved any given root, Starostin et al. (2003: 26–28) have not used Khalaj to decide whether to reconstruct an initial in any given word and have not reconstructed a for Proto-Turkic even though it was probably there. 2 The Monguor language has here instead (Kaiser & Shevoroshkin 1988); it is therefore possible that Proto-Mongolian also had which then became (and then usually disappeared) in all descendants except Monguor. Tabgač and Kitan, two extinct Para-Mongolic languages not considered by Starostin et al. (2003), even preserve in these places (Blažek 2006). 3 This happened when the next consonant in the word was , , or . 4 Before . 5 When the next consonant in the word was . 6 This happened "in syllables with original high pitch" (Starostin et al. 2003:135). 7 Before