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Uralic languages
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The Uralic languages constitute a language family of 39 languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt. Countries that are home to a significant number of speakers of Uralic languages include Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Slovakia.
The name "Uralic" refers to the suggested Urheimat (original homeland) of the Uralic family, which was often located in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains.
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Encyclopedia
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of 39 languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt. Countries that are home to a significant number of speakers of Uralic languages include Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Slovakia.
The name "Uralic" refers to the suggested Urheimat (original homeland) of the Uralic family, which was often located in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains. However, there is no reliable proof of this, and modern scientists often place the Urheimat further to the west and south, close to the Urheimat of the Indo-European languages.
Family tree
The internal structure of the Uralic family has been debated since the family was first proposed. Nevertheless, three distinct subfamilies are usually recognized: Finno-Permic, Ugric and Samoyedic. Historically, Finno-Permic and Ugric have tended to be grouped as the Finno-Ugric family.
All Uralic languages are thought to have descended, through independent processes of language change, from Proto-Uralic. There is some disagreement in the two views as to whether Proto-Uralic originally split into two or three branches. However, severe doubt has been raised about the validity of most of the higher-order branchings, and the traditional binary tree.
The homeland of Proto-Uralic
The Urheimat, the location of the people who spoke Proto-Uralic, is considered by three main theories. Gy. Laszlo has placed the origin in the forest zone between the Oka River and Central Poland. E.N Setala and M. Zsirai place it between the Volga and Kama Rivers. According to E. Itkonen, the ancestral area extended to the Baltic Sea. P.Hajdu has suggested the Uralic homeland being in Western and North-western Siberia.
Possible relations with other families
Many efforts have been made to identify the relationship between Uralic and the world’s other major language families, but none are generally accepted today. The Uralic-Yukaghir hypothesis identifies Uralic and Yukaghir as independent members of a single language family; this is only accepted by a minority of historical linguists today, though it is often mentioned. Theories proposing a special relationship with the Altaic languages were popular, based on shared vocabulary as well as grammatical and phonological features (e.g., agglutination and vowel harmony). But these are now generally rejected and most such similarities are attributed to coincidence and language contact, and a few to a relationship at a deeper genetic level. In either case, a special relationship with Altaic seems improbable.
Theories that include the Uralic family as a node in a proposed macrofamily include the following:
Classification of languages
The traditional classification of the Uralic languages is as follows. Obsolete names are displayed in italics.
Samoyedic
- Northern Samoyedic
- Southern Samoyedic
- Kamassian (Kamas) — Extinct (20th century)
- Mator (Motor) — Extinct (19th century)
- Selkup (Ostyak-Samoyed)
Finno-Ugric
- Ugric (Ugrian)
- Hungarian (Magyar)
- Ob Ugric (Ob Ugrian)
- Finno-Permic (Permian-Finnic)
- Permic (Permian)
- Finno-Volgaic (Finno-Cheremisic, Finno-Mari, Volga-Finnic)
- Mari (Cheremisic)
- Mordvinic (Mordvin, Mordvinian)
- Extinct Finno-Volgaic languages of uncertain position
- Finno-Lappic (Finno-Saamic, Finno-Samic)
- Sami (Samic, Saamic, Lappic, Lappish)
- Western Sami (Western Samic)
- Eastern Sami (Eastern Samic)
- Baltic-Finnic (Balto-Finnic, Balto-Fennic, Finnic, Fennic)
The term Volgaic was used to denote a branch previously believed to include Mari and Mordvinic, but is now obsolete. Modern linguistic research has shown that it was a geographic classification rather than a linguistic one. The Mordvinic languages are more closely related to the Finno-Lappic languages than to Mari languages.
Typology
Structural characteristics generally said to be typical of Uralic languages include:
- extensive use of independent suffixes, a.k.a. agglutination.
- a large set of grammatical cases marked with agglutinative suffixes (13–14 cases on average; mainly coincidental: Proto-Uralic had 6 cases), e.g.:
- Erzya: 12 cases
- Estonian: 14 cases (and one is still under some debate)
- Finnish: 15 cases
- Hungarian: 18 cases (and some more case-like suffixes)
- Inari Sami: 9 cases
- Komi: in certain dialects as many as 27 cases
- Moksha: 13 cases
- Nenets: 7 cases
- North Sami: 6 cases
- Udmurt: 16 cases
- Veps: 24 cases
- unique Uralic case system, from which all modern Uralic languages derive their case systems.
- nominative singular has no case suffix.
- accusative and genitive suffixes are nasal sounds (-n, -m, etc.)
- three-way distinction in the local case system, with each set of local cases being divided into forms corresponding roughly to "from", "to", and "in/at"; especially evident, e.g., in Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian, which have several sets of local cases, such as the "inner", "outer" and "on top" systems in Hungarian, while in Finnish the "on top" forms have merged to the "outer" forms.
- Uralic locative suffix exists in all Uralic languages in various cases, e.g., Hungarian superessive, Finnish essive, North Sami essive, Erzyan inessive, and Nenets locative.
- Uralic lative suffix exists in various cases in many Uralic languages, e.g., Hungarian illative, Finnish lative, Erzyan illative, Komi approximative, and Northern Sami locative.
- vowel harmony (recently lost in standard Estonian, but exists in dialects).
- a lack of grammatical gender.
- negative verb, which exists in almost all Uralic languages, e.g., Nganasan, Enets, Nenets, Kamassian, Komi, Meadow Mari, Erzya (in the first preterite, the conjunctional, optative and imperative moods, sometimes there are alterations in choice of negative verb stems), North Sami (and other Samic languages), Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, etc. (Some innovative languages have lost this feature, e.g., Hungarian.)
- palatalization of consonants; in this context, palatalization means a secondary articulation, where the middle of the tongue is tense. For example, pairs like - [n], or [c] - [t] are contrasted in Hungarian, as in hattyú "swan". Some Sami languages, for example Skolt Sami, distinguish three degrees: plain [l], palatalized <'l> , and palatal , where <'l> has a primary alveolar articulation, while has a primary palatal articulation. Original Uralic palatalization is phonemic, independent of the following vowel and traceable to the 6000-year-old Proto-Uralic. It is different from Russian palatalization, which is of more recent origin. Baltic-Finnic languages have lost palatalization, but eastern varieties have reacquired it, so Baltic-Finnic palatalization (where extant) was originally dependent on the following vowel.
- lack of phonologically contrastive tone.
- lots of postpositions (prepositions are very rare).
- basic vocabulary of about 200 words, including body parts (e.g., eye, heart, head, foot, mouth), family members (e.g., father, mother-in-law), animals (e.g., viper, partridge, fish), nature objects (e.g., tree, stone, nest, water), basic verbs (e.g., live, fall, run, make, see, suck, go, die, swim, know), basic pronouns (e.g., who, what, we, you, I), numerals (e.g., two, five); derivatives increase the number of common words.
- possessive suffixes.
- no possessive pronouns.
- dual, which exists, e.g., in the Samoyedic, Ob Ugrian and Samic languages.
- plural markers -j (i) and -t (-d) have a common origin (e.g., in Finnish, Estonian, Erzya, Samic languages, Samoyedic languages). Hungarian, however, has -i- before the possessive suffixes and -k elsewhere. In the old orthographies, the plural marker -k was also used in the Samic languages.
- no verb for "have". Note that all Uralic languages have verbs with the meaning of "own" or "possess", but these words are not used in the same way as English "have". Instead, the concept of "have" is indicated with alternative syntactic structures. For example, Finnish uses existential clauses; the subject is the possession, the verb is "to be" (the copula), and the possessor is grammatically a location and in the adessive case: "Minulla on kala", literally "I_on is fish", or "I have a fish (some fish)". In addition, Finnish can also employ possessive suffixes, e.g. "Minulla on kalani", literally "I_on is fish_my", or "I do have my own fish". In Hungarian: "Van egy halam", literally "Is a fish_my", or "I have a fish".
- expressions that include a numeral are singular if they refer to things which form a single group, e.g., "négy csomó" in Hungarian, "njeallje cuolmma" in Northern Sami, "neli sőlme" in Estonian, and "neljä solmua" in Finnish, each of which means "four knots", but the literal approximation is "four knot". (This approximation is inaccurate for Finnish and Estonian, where the singular is in the partitive case, such that the number points to a part of a larger mass, like "four of knot(s)".)
- the stress is always on the first syllable, except for the Mari, Udmurt and Komi-Permyak languages. The Erzya language can vary its stress in words to give specific nuances to sentential meaning.
Selected cognates
The following is a very brief selection of cognates in basic vocabulary across the Uralic family, which may serve to give an idea of the sound changes involved. This is not a list of translations: cognates have a common origin, but their meaning may be shifted and loanwords may have replaced them.
Peoples
Uralic is not an ethnic group, but rather a linguistic construct. Therefore it makes little sense to speak of "Uralic people" as a group apart from the languages they speak. This is even true of subgroups of Uralic. For example, Hungarian nationalists deny any connection, ethnic or linguistic, to the Ob-Ugric peoples. The ethnicities speaking Uralic languages include the following:
Bibliography
- Abondolo, Daniel M. (editor). 1998. The Uralic Languages. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-08198-X.
- Collinder, Björn. 1955. Fenno-Ugric Vocabulary: An Etymological Dictionary of the Uralic Languages. (Collective work.) Stockholm: Almqvist & Viksell. (Second, revised edition: Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag, 1977.)
- Collinder, Björn. 1957. Survey of the Uralic Languages. Stockholm.
- Collinder, Björn. 1960. Comparative Grammar of the Uralic Languages. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.
- Collinder, Björn. 1965. An Introduction to the Uralic Languages. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Décsy, Gyula. 1990. The Uralic Protolanguage: A Comprehensive Reconstruction. Bloomington, Indiana.
- Hajdu, Péter. 1963. Finnugor népek és nyelvek. Budapest: Gondolat kiadó.
- Hajdu, Péter. 1975. Finni-Ugrian Languages and Peoples, translated by G. F. Cushing. London: André Deutsch. (English translation of the previous.)
- Künnap, A. 2000. Contact-induced Perspectives in Uralic Linguistics. LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 39. München: LINCOM Europa. ISBN 3895869643.
- Laakso, Johanna. 1992. Uralilaiset kansat ('Uralic Peoples'). Porvoo – Helsinki – Juva. ISBN 951-0-16485-2.
- Rédei, Károly (editor). 1986-88. Uralisches etymologisches Wörterbuch ('Uralic Etymological Dictionary'). Budapest.
- Sammallahti, Pekka, Matti Morottaja. 1983. Säämi – suoma – säämi škovlasänikirje ('Inari Sami – Finnish – Inari Sami School Dictionary'). Helsset/Helsinki: Ruovttueatnan gielaid dutkanguovddaš/Kotimaisten kielten tutkimuskeskus. ISBN 951-9475-36-2.
- Sammallahti, Pekka. 1988. "Historical phonology of the Uralic Languages." In The Uralic Languages, edited by Denis Sinor, pp. 478-554. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
- Sammallahti, Pekka. 1993. Sámi – suoma – sámi sátnegirji ('Northern Sami – Finnish – Northern Sami Dictionary'). Ohcejohka/Utsjoki: Girjegiisá. ISBN 951-8939-28-4.
- Sauvageot, Aurélien. 1930. Recherches sur le vocabulaire des langues ouralo-altaďques ('Research on the Vocabulary of the Uralo-Altaic Languages'). Paris.
- Sinor, Denis (editor). 1988. The Uralic Languages: Description, History and Foreign Influences. Leiden: Brill.
- Wickman, Bo. 1955. The Form of the Object in the Uralic Languages. Uppsala: Lundequistska bokhandeln.
- Önija komi kyv. ('Modern Komi language') Morfologia/Das’töma filologijasa kandidat G.V.Fed'un'ova kipod ulyn. — Syktyvkar: Komi n’ebög ledzanin, 2000. — 544 s. ISBN 5-7555-0689-2.
See also
External links
General
- at Ethnologue
- The Economist, December 20, 2005
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"Rebel" Uralists
- by Dr. László Marácz, a minority opinion on the language family
- by Angela Marcantonio, Pirjo Nummenaho, and Michela Salvagni
- by Johanna Laakso — a book review of Angela Marcantonio’s The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics
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