Uralic languages

• 1. Origins And Homeland Debates

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  The Uralic languages are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia, yet their ancestral home remains a subject of intense scholarly debate. Julius Klaproth first proposed the name Uralic in 1823, linking it to the vicinity of the Ural Mountains as the purported original homeland. Modern research has shifted this focus significantly. Zeng et al. identified a connection between Uralic speakers and ancient populations in Northeastern Siberia around 4500 years ago. This study places the first speakers of the Yeniseian language family at the southern shore of Lake Baikal. These two groups overlapped geographically in south-central Siberia along the Yenisei River basin. Historian Gyula László placed its origin in the forest zone between the Oka River and central Poland. E.N. Setälä and M. Zsirai located it between the Volga and Kama Rivers. Juha Janhunen suggests a homeland in between the Ob and Yenisei drainage basins in Central Siberia. A group of scholars including Janhunen traced the Proto-Uralic homeland to a region East of the Urals using linguistic, paleoclimatic and archaeological data. They specifically pointed to an area close to the Minusinsk Basin while rejecting a homeland in the Volga or Kama region. The ancestral area extended to the Baltic Sea according to E. Itkonen. Uralic-speakers were commonly thought to have spread westwards with the Seima-Turbino route. However, Uralic speakers might be secondary to the phenomenon due to West Siberian Hunter Gatherer and Sintashta-Andronovo genetic profiles being primarily associated with the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon.

• 2. Historical Development Of Linguistics

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  The first plausible mention of a people speaking a Uralic language appears in Tacitus's Germania from 98 AD. This text mentions the Fenni usually interpreted as referring to the Sámi and two other possibly Uralic tribes living in the farthest reaches of Scandinavia. Herodotus described the Iyrcae perhaps related to Yugra living in what is now European Russia. He also described the Budini notably red-haired living in northeast Ukraine and adjacent parts of Russia. In the late 15th century European scholars noted the resemblance of the names Hungaria and Yugria. They assumed a connection but did not seek linguistic evidence. The affinity of Hungarian and Finnish was first proposed in the late 17th century. Three candidates can be credited for this discovery: the German scholar Georg Stiernhielm, the Swedish courtier Bengt Skytte, and an unnamed German scholar whose unpublished study was commissioned by Cosimo III of Tuscany. Fogel established several grammatical and lexical parallels between Finnish and Hungarian as well as Sámi. Stiernhielm commented on the similarities of Sámi Estonian and Finnish. In 1717 the Swedish professor Olof Rudbeck proposed about 100 etymologies connecting Finnish and Hungarian. About 40 of these are still considered valid today. Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published his book The Northern and Eastern Parts of Europe and Asia in 1730 surveying the geography peoples and languages of Russia. All the main groups of the Uralic languages were already identified here. Nonetheless these relationships were not widely accepted. Hungarian intellectuals especially were not interested in the theory and preferred to assume connections with Turkic tribes. The Hungarian Jesuit János Sajnovics traveled with Maximilian Hell to survey the alleged relationship between Hungarian and Sámi while they were also on a mission to observe the 1769 Venus transit. Sajnovics published his results in 1770 arguing for a relationship based on several grammatical features. In 1799 the Hungarian Sámuel Gyarmathi published the most complete work on Finno-Ugric to that date.

• 3. Classification And Family Tree Models

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  The Uralic family comprises nine undisputed groups with no consensus classification between them. An agnostic approach treats them as separate branches. These groups include Sámi Finnic Mordvinic Mari Permic Hungarian Mansi Khanty and Samoyedic. There is also historical evidence of a number of extinct languages of uncertain affiliation such as Merya Muromian and Meshcherian which disappeared by the 16th century. A traditional classification of the Uralic languages has existed since the late 19th century. Otto Donner's model from 1879 divided the family into Ugric and Finno-Permic branches. As the Samoyedic languages became better known in the early 20th century they were found to be quite divergent and assumed to have separated already early on. The terminology adopted for this was Uralic for the entire family and Finno-Ugric for the non-Samoyedic languages. Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic are listed in ISO 639-5 as primary branches of Uralic. No explicit evidence has however been presented in favour of Donner's model since his original proposal and numerous alternate schemes have been proposed. Especially in Finland there has been a growing tendency to reject the Finno-Ugric intermediate protolanguage. A recent competing proposal instead unites Ugric and Samoyedic in an East Uralic group for which shared innovations can be noted. Lexicostatistics has been used in defense of the traditional family tree but a re-evaluation fails to find support for Finno-Ugric and Ugric suggesting four lexically distinct branches. One alternative proposal for a family tree with emphasis on the development of numerals classifies the languages differently. Computational phylogenetic studies by Honkola et al. in 2013 classify the Uralic languages with estimated divergence dates from that study.

• 4. Grammatical Typology And Structure

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  Structural characteristics generally said to be typical of Uralic languages include extensive use of independent suffixes known as agglutination. These languages feature a large set of grammatical cases marked with agglutinative suffixes averaging 13 to 14 cases though Proto-Uralic is reconstructed with only 6 cases. Finnish has 15 cases while Hungarian has 18 cases together forming 34 grammatical cases and case-like suffixes. Komi dialects contain as many as 27 cases. The unique Uralic case system derives all modern Uralic languages from it. The nominative singular has no case suffix while the accusative and genitive suffixes are nasal consonants. Many languages have merged these two suffixes. A lack of grammatical gender exists including one pronoun for both he and she such as hän in Finnish or ő in Hungarian. A negative verb exists in many Uralic languages notably absent in Hungarian. Use of postpositions occurs as opposed to prepositions which are uncommon. Possessive suffixes mark possession in various ways. In Finnish the possessor is in the adessive case literally meaning At me is fish. In Hungarian the possessor is in the dative case but appears overtly only if contrasted. Vowel harmony exists in many but by no means all Uralic languages. It exists in Hungarian and various Baltic-Finnic languages and is present to some degree elsewhere. It lacks in Sámi Permic Selkup and standard Estonian. Large vowel inventories exist with some Selkup varieties having over twenty different monophthongs. Palatalization of consonants involves a secondary articulation where the middle of the tongue is tense. Pairs like hattyú swan demonstrate this in Hungarian. Stress is always on the first syllable though Nganasan shows essentially penultimate stress.

• 5. Lexical Cognates And Vocabulary

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  Basic vocabulary of about 200 words includes body parts family members animals nature objects basic verbs and numerals. Selected cognates show sound changes involved across the Uralic family. The word for fire appears as tuli in Finnish and Estonian but as dolla in Southern Sámi and tűz in Hungarian. Water is vesi in Finnish and Estonian but víz in Hungarian. Ice is jää in Finnish and jiekna in Northern Sámi. Fish is kala in Finnish and guolli in Northern Sámi. Hand or arm is käsi in Finnish and giehta in Northern Sámi. Eye is silmä in Finnish and čalbmi in Northern Sámi. Blood is veri in Finnish and varra in Northern Sámi. Liver is maksa in Finnish and máj in Hungarian. To go is mennä in Finnish and mannat in Northern Sámi. To live is elää in Finnish and eallit in Northern Sámi. To die is kuolla in Finnish and halni in Hungarian. Finnish is the most conservative of the Uralic languages presented here with nearly half the words identical to their Proto-Uralic reconstructions. Most of the remainder have only minor changes such as the conflation of ś into s. Finnish has also preserved old Indo-European borrowings relatively unchanged. An example is porsas pig loaned from Proto-Indo-European porkos unchanged since loaning save for loss of palatalization. Mutual intelligibility remains limited despite shared roots. The Estonian philologist Mall Hellam proposed cognate sentences that she asserted to be mutually intelligible among Hungarian Finnish and Estonian. However linguist Geoffrey Pullum reports that neither Finns nor Hungarians could understand the other language's version of the sentence.

• 6. Controversial Macro-Family Hypotheses

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  Many relationships between Uralic and other language families have been suggested but none are generally accepted by linguists at the present time. All of these hypotheses remain minority views at the present time in Uralic studies. The Uralic-Yukaghir hypothesis identifies Uralic and Yukaghir as independent members of a single language family. Diverging views suggest similarities are due to ancient contact between the proto-languages. The Eskimo-Uralic hypothesis associates Uralic with the Eskimo-Aleut languages. This is an old thesis whose antecedents go back to the 18th century. An important restatement was made by Bergsland in 1959. Uralo-Siberian is an expanded form of the Eskimo-Uralic hypothesis associating Uralic with Yukaghir Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut. It was propounded by Michael Fortescue in 1998. Theories proposing a close relationship with the Altaic languages were formerly popular based on similarities in vocabulary as well as grammatical and phonological features. These theories are now generally rejected and most such similarities are attributed to language contact or coincidence. The Indo-Uralic hypothesis suggests that Uralic and Indo-European are related or more closely related than either is to any other language family. The Nostratic hypothesis associates Uralic Indo-European Altaic Dravidian Afroasiatic and various other language families of Asia. It was first propounded by Holger Pedersen in 1903 and subsequently revived by Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky in the 1960s. The linguist Angela Marcantonio has argued against the validity of several subgroups of the Uralic family claiming Hungarian is a language isolate. Her proposal has been strongly dismissed by most reviewers as unfounded and methodologically flawed.