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Indo-Uralic languages
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Indo-Uralic is a hypothetical language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic.
A genetic relationship between Indo-European and Uralic was first proposed by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in 1869 but was received with little enthusiasm (Pedersen 1931:336). Since then, the prevailing opinion in the linguistic community has remained that the evidence for such a relationship is insufficient. However, a minority of eminent linguists has always taken the contrary view (e.g. Henry Sweet, Holger Pedersen, Björn Collinder, and Jochem Schindler), making it hard to dismiss the relationship out of hand.
There are two distinct questions here:
(1) Are Indo-European and Uralic genetically related?
(2) If so, do Indo-European and Uralic constitute a valid genetic node? The Eurasiatic and Nostratic hypotheses both consider Indo-European and Uralic (or Uralic-Yukaghir) to be genetically related. However, the Indo-Uralic hypothesis in the strict sense is something different from this: it holds that Indo-European and Uralic have an especially close genetic relationship; it does not necessarily include assertions that Indo-European and Uralic are related to any other language families.
At the same time, most of the prominent supporters of a relationship between Indo-European and Uralic have also supported their relationship to additional language families, leading some to regard Indo-Uralic as a subset of the larger Nostratic hypothesis.
The following article treats only of question (1), genetic relationship, and does not treat of question (2), possible relation to other language families.
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The Dutch linguist Frederik Kortlandt supports a model of Indo-Uralic in which the original Indo-Uralic speakers lived north of the Caspian Sea, and the Proto-Indo-European speakers began as a group that branched off westward from there to come into geographic proximity with the Northwest Caucasian languages, absorbing a Northwest Caucasian lexical blending before moving farther westward to a region north of the Black Sea where their language settled into canonical Proto-Indo-European. Allan Bomhard suggests a similar schema in Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1996). Alternatively, the common protolanguage may have been located north of the Black Sea, with Proto-Uralic moving northwards with the climatic improvement of post-glacial times.
The most common arguments in favour of a relationship between Indo-European and Uralic are based on seemingly common elements of morphology, such as the pronominal roots (*m- for first person; *t- for second person; *i- for third person), case markings (accusative *-m; ablative/partitive *-ta), interrogative/relative pronouns (*kw- 'who?, which?'; *y- 'who, which' to signal relative clauses) and a common SOV word order. Other, less obvious correspondences are suggested, such as the Indo-European plural marker *-es (or *-s in the accusative plural *-m̥-s) and its Uralic counterpart *-t. This same word-final assibilation of *-t to *-s may also be present in Indo-European second-person singular *-s in comparison with Uralic second-person singular *-t. Compare, within Indo-European itself, *-s second-person singular injunctive, *-si second-person singular present indicative, *-tHa second-person singular perfect, *-te second-person plural present indicative, *tu 'you' (singular) nominative, *tei 'to you' (singular) enclitic pronoun. These forms suggest that the underlying second-person marker in Indo-European may be *t and that the *u found in forms such as *tu was originally an affixal particle.
A second type of evidence advanced in favor of an Indo-Uralic family is lexical. Numerous words in Indo-European and Uralic resemble each other. The problem is to weed out words due to borrowing. Uralic languages have been in contact with a succession of Indo-European languages for millennia. As a result, many words have been borrowed between them, most often from Indo-European languages into Uralic ones.
An example of a Uralic word that cannot be original is Finno-Ugric *śata 'hundred'. The Proto-Indo-European form of this word was *km̥tóm (compare Latin centum), which became *śatám in Indo-Iranian (compare Sanskrit śatám, Avestan satəm). This is evidence that the word was borrowed into Finno-Ugric from Indo-Iranian.
This borrowing may have occurred in the region north of the Black Sea around 2500 BC (the approximate floruit of Indo-Iranian). It provides linguistic evidence for the geographical location of these languages around that time, agreeing with archeological evidence that Uralic speakers were established in their historical locations by 6700 BC (Mithen 2003:171) and that Indo-European speakers occupied the steppe zone to their south as of ca. 4500 BC (the Kurgan hypothesis). It also provides external confirmation for the forms of Proto-Indo-Iranian reconstructed through comparison of Sanskrit and Old Iranian.
Another old borrowing is Pre-Finnic, possibly Proto-Finno-Permic, *porćas ‘piglet’. This word corresponds almost exactly in form to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word **porḱos that gives Latin porcus 'hog', OE fearh (> Engl. farrow 'young pig'), Lithuanian par̃šas ’piglet, castrated boar’. Again, we have fascinating confirmation for a reconstructed proto-form. In the PIE word, *-os is the nominative masculine singular ending, but it is quite meaningless in Finnic, which has borrowed the whole word as a unit. This shows that the word was borrowed into Finnic and is not part of the original Uralic vocabulary.
Thus, *śata cannot be Indo-Uralic on account of phonology and *porćas cannot be Indo-Uralic on account of morphology.
Advocates of the Indo-Uralic hypothesis maintain that such borrowings can be filtered out by application of phonological and morphological analysis and that a core of vocabulary common to Indo-European and Uralic remains. As examples they advance such comparisons as Proto-Uralic *weti- (formerly reconstructed *wete-): Proto-Indo-European *wot’er- (or *wodr̥), oblique stem wet’en-, both meaning 'water', and Proto-Uralic *nimi- (formerly *nime-) : Proto-Indo-European *nomen- (or *H₁nōmn̥), both meaning 'name'. In contrast to *śata and *porćas, the phonology of these words shows no sound changes from Indo-European daughter languages such as Indo-Iranian. In contrast to *porćas, they show no morphological affixes from Indo-European that are absent in Uralic.
According to advocates of the Indo-Uralic hypothesis, the resulting core of common vocabulary can only be explained by the hypothesis of common origin. It has been countered that nothing prevents this common vocabulary from having been borrowed between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic. For the old loans, also uncontroversial ones from Proto-Baltic and Proto-Germanic, it is more a rule than an exception that only the stem is borrowed, without any endings. Proto-Uralic *nimi- has been explained according to sound laws governing substitutions in borrowings (Koivulehto 1999), if the original was a zero grade oblique stem PIE *(H)nmen- as attested in later Balto-Slavic *inmen- and Proto-Celtic *anmen-. Proto-Uralic *weti- could be a loan from the PIE oblique e-grade form for 'water'. Proto-Uralic *toHį- 'give' and PFU *wetä- 'lead' also make perfect phonologic sense as borrowings.
From the point of view of history and archeology, either a common Indo-Uralic language or an Indo-European / Uralic Sprachbund would have interesting implications. However, to prove the Indo-Uralic hypothesis, it would be necessary to show why the common vocabulary must be due to common origin, and not a result of prehistoric borrowing.
It is also objected that some or all of the common vocabulary items claimed are false cognates—words whose resemblance is merely coincidental, like English bad and Persian bad.
| Meaning | Indo-European | Uralic |
|---|---|---|
| I, me | *me 'me' [acc], *mene 'my' [gen] |
*mVnV 'I' 1 |
| you (sg) | *tu [nom], *twe [obj], *tewe 'your' [gen] |
*tun |
| [demonstrative] | *so 'this, he/she' [animate nom] | *ša [3ps] |
| who? [animate interrogative pronoun] |
*kʷi- 'who?, what?' *kʷo- 'who?, what?' |
*ken 'who?' *ku- 'who?' |
| who, which [relative pronoun] |
*yo- | *-ja [agent noun] |
| [definite accusative] | *-m | *-m |
| [ablative/partitive] | *-od | *-ta |
| [dual] | *-H₁ | *-k |
| [nominative/accusative plural] | *-es [nom.pl], *-m̥-s [acc.pl] |
*-t |
| [oblique plural] | *-i [pronominal plural] (as in *we-i- 'we', *to-i- 'those') |
*-i |
| [1ps] | *-m [1ps active] | *-m |
| [2ps] | *-s [2ps active] | *-t |
| [stative] | *-s- [aorist], *-es- [stative substantive], *-t [stative substantive] |
*-ta |
| [negative] | *nei *ne |
*ei- [negative verb] |
| to give | *deH₃- 2 | *toHi- |
| to moisten, water |
*wed- 'to wet', *wódr̥ 'water' 3 |
*weti 'water' |
| to assign, name |
nem- 'to assign, to allot', *H₁nōmn̥ 'name' 4 |
*nimi 'name' |
Notes
1 Finnish minä /minæ/, Estonian mina, Nenets /mønjə/. [1] Uralic reconstruction *mun.
2 Latin dō, Greek dídōmi, Sanskrit dā-, etc.
3 Hittite wātar, instrumental wēdanda; English water.
4 Latin nōmen, Greek ónoma, Sanskrit nāman-, Anglo-Saxon nama > English name, etc.
Indo-European: French 'moi', English 'me', Russian 'menja'; Finno-Ugric: Estonian 'ma', 'mina', Finnish 'minä'.
IE: English 'water', 'wet', Russian 'vodá'; FU: Finnish 'vesi' (oblique 'vete-'), Hungarian 'víz', Estonian 'vesi', 'vete', 'vedel'.
IE: Russian 'vodít' (to lead), FU: Finnish 'vetää' (to pull, to lead), Hungarian 'vezetni' (to lead)
Some Indo-European roots (I.E.) and their equivalents in Finno-Ugric languages (F.U.)(examples are added from different languages too):
I.E. mey-, to exchange (derivatives include Latin 'mutare' (to change), German 'mischen' (to mix), , F.U. meqi-, to sell, give > Estonian 'müük' I.E. mesg-, to wash, F.U. moski-, to wash > Estonian 'mõskma', Hungarian 'mosni'
- Mithen, Steven (2003). After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000 - 5000 BC. Orion Publishing Co.
- Pedersen, Holger (1931, translated from the Danish by John Webster Spargo). Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century: Methods and Results,. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
- Koivulehto, Jorma (1991). Uralische Evidenz für die Laryngaltheorie, Veröffentlichungen der Komission für Linguistik und Kommunikationsforschung nr. 24. Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. ISBN 3-7001-1794-9.
- Koivulehto, Jorma (1999). Verba mutuata. Quae vestigia antiquissimi cum Germanis aliisque Indo-Europaeis contactus in linguis Fennicis reliquerint. (in German). Helsinki: Mémoires de la societé Finno-Ougrienne 237. ISBN 952-5150-36-4.
- Koivulehto, Jorma (2001). "The earliest contacts between Indo-European and Uralic speakers in the light of lexical loans", in C.Carpelan, A.Parpola P.Koskikallio (ed.): The earliest contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archeological Considerations. Helsinki: Mémoires de la societé Finno-Ougrienne 242, pp. 235–263. ISBN 952-5150-59-3.