>>108
Exactly, the problem with the whole Altaic issue is, since Turkish and Mongolian are so diverse, if you "group" them together you might aswell go and group these somewhat similar other languages too, but none really have the amount of similarity like most indo-european languages have. Including the Sumerian bit -which I know as my mom was a sumerologist (and apparently that's not a word in english)- I think it just shows a linguistic ancestry sharing far, far away and nothing really more.
>>110
No, it's important in the sense that languages showing correlation are easier to learn for the speakers, and of course there's the pure academic aspect.