first syllable." (Starostin et al. 2003:135) Morphological correspondences Starostin et al. (2003) have reconstructed the following correspondences between the case and number suffixes (or clitics) of the (Macro-)Altaic languages (taken from Blažek, 2006): /V/ symbolizes an uncertain vowel. Suffixes reconstructed for Proto-Turkic, Proto-Mongolic, Proto-Korean, or Proto-Japonic, but not attested in Old Turkic, Classical Mongolian, Middle Korean, or Old Japanese are marked with asterisks. This correspondences, however, have been harshly criticized for several reasons: There are significant gaps resulting in the absence of etymologies for certain initial segments: an impossible situation in the case of a genetic relationship; lack of common paradigmatic morphology; in many cases, there are ghosts, invented or polished meanings; and word-list linguistics rules supreme, as there are few if any references to texts or philology. There are also many reconstructions proved to be totally false. For instance, regarding Korean, Starostin et al. state that Middle Korean genitive is /nʲ/, while it actually was /s/ in its honorific form, and /ój/ or /uj/ as neutral forms. In addition, some "cognates" are visibly forced, like the comparison between Turkish instrumental and Japanese locative /ni/. A locative postposition expresses an absolutely different meaning to that of an instrumental, so it is evident that both of them are not related whatsoever. The same applies for Japanese /ga/ and Proto Tungusic /ga/. The first of those particles expresses genitive case, while the second is the partitive case, which bear no resemblance of meaning at all either. A different kind of issue is that of the Old Turkish genitive /Xŋ/ (where "X" stands for any phoneme) and Old Japanese genitive /no/. Although they share the same consonant, the fact that the former is a vowel plus a consonant, and the second is a fixed set of the consonant /n/ plus vowel /o/ makes the fact that those two are cognates extremely unlikely. Selected cognates Personal pronouns The table below is taken (with slight modifications) from Blažek (2006) and transcribed into IPA. As above, forms not attested in Classical Mongolian or Middle Korean but reconstructed for their ancestors are marked with an asterisk, and /V/ represents an uncertain vowel. There are, however, several problems with this proposed list. Aside from the huge amount of non-attested, free reconstructions, some mistakes on the research carried out by Altaicists must be pointed out. The first of them is that Old Japanese for the first person pronoun ("I",