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The Finno-Ugric languages form a subfamily of the Uralic languages. The majority of linguists believe that Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian, among other languages, should be included in the group. Unlike most of the other languages spoken in Europe, the Finno-Ugric languages are not part of the Indo-European family of languages. The Uralic languages also include the Samoyedic languages, and some linguists use the terms Finno-Ugric and Uralic as synonyms. Many of the smaller Finno-Ugric languages are endangered and near extinction.
Origins The birthplace of the Finno-Ugric languages cannot be located with any certainty. Central and northern Russia west of the Ural mountains is generally assumed to be the most likely spot, perhaps around the 3rd millennium BC. This is suggested by the high intralinguistic family diversity around the middle Volga River where three highly distinct branches of the Uralic family, Mordvin, Mari and Permic are located. Also reconstructed plant and animal names (including spruce, Siberian pine, Siberian Fir, Siberian larch, brittle willow, elm, and hedgehog) are consistent with this localization. Reconstructed Proto-Finno-Ugric contains Indo-Iranian loanwords, notably the words for "honeybee" and "honey", probably from the time when Indo-Iranian tribes (such as Scythians and Sarmatians) inhabited the Eurasian steppes. There is evidence that before the arrival of the Slavic speaking tribes to the area of modern-day Russia, speakers of Finno-Ugric languages may have been scattered across the whole area between the Urals and the Baltic Sea. This was the distribution of the Comb Ceramic Culture, a stone age culture which appears to have corresponded to the Finno-Ugric speaking populations, c. 4200 BC–c. 2000 BC. There have been attempts to relate the Finno-Ugric languages to the Indo-European languages, but there are not enough similarities to link them with any certainty. Similar inflectional endings exist, but whether or not they are genetically related is not resolvable. A common lexicon not attestable to borrowing is thin, and no sound laws are established. A portion of the Baltic-Finnic lexicon is not shared with the remaining Finno-Ugric languages and may be due to a pre-Finnic substrate, which may coincide in part with the substrate of the Indo-European Baltic languages. As far as the Sami (Lappic) languages are concerned, a hypothesis has been advanced that the ancestors of the Sami originally spoke a different language, but adopted their current tongue under the pressure of their Finnic-speaking neighbours. The theory that the Finno-Ugric birthplace originally covered a very large area in Northern Europe has been supported more by archaeological and genetic data than by linguistic results. Notably, Kalevi Wiik has argued that Proto-Finno-Ugric was the original language in most of Northern and Central Europe, and that the earliest Finno-Ugric speakers and their languages originated in the territory of modern Ukraine (the so-called "Ukrainian refuge") during the last glacial period, when the whole of northern Europe was covered with ice. This hypothesis, however, has been rejected by nearly all experts in Finno-Ugric comparative linguistics; Wiik's model has been criticized for confusing genetic, archaeological and linguistic concepts, and many see the theory as unscientific. History The first mention of a Uralic people is in Tacitus' Germania, mentioning the Fenni (usually interpreted as referring to the Sami) and two other possibly Finno-Ugric tribes living in the farthest reaches of Scandinavia. In the late 15th century, European scholars noted the resemblance of the names Hungaria and Yugria, the names of settlements east of the Ural. They assumed a connection, but did not look into linguistic evidence. In 1671, Swedish scholar Georg Stiernhielm commented on the similarities of Lapp, Estonian and Finnish, and also on a few similar words in Finnish and Hungarian, while the German scholar Martin Vogel tried to establish a relationship between Finnish, Lapp and Hungarian. These two authors were thus the first to outline what was to become the classification of a Finno-Ugric family. In 1717, Swedish professor Olof Rudbeck proposed about 100 etymologies connecting Finnish and Hungarian, of which about 40 are still considered valid (Collinder, 1965). In the same year, the German scholar J. G. von Eckhart (published in Leibniz' Collectanea Etymologica) for the first time proposed a relation to the Samoyedic languages. By 1770, all constituents of Finno-Ugric were known, almost 20 years before the traditional starting-point of Indo-European studies. Nonetheless, these relationships were not widely accepted. Especially Hungarian intellectuals were not interested in the theory and preferred to assume connections with Turkic tribes, an attitude characterized by Ruhlen (1987) as due to "the wild unfettered Romanticism of the epoch". Still, in spite of the hostile climate, the Hungarian Jesuit János Sajnovics suggested a relationship of Hungarian and Lapp in 1770, and in 1799, the Hungarian Samuel Gyarmathi published the most complete work on Finno-Ugric to that date. At the beginning of the 19th century, research on Finno-Ugric was thus more advanced than Indo-European research. But the rise of Indo-European comparative linguistics absorbed so much attention and enthusiasm that Finno-Ugric linguistics was all but eclipsed in Europe; in Hungary, the only European country that would have had a vested interest in the family (Finland and Estonia being under Russian rule), the political climate was too hostile for the development of Uralic comparative linguistics. Some progress was made, however, culminating in the work of the German Jozsef Budenz, who for 20 years was the leading Finno-Ugric specialist in Hungary. Another late-19th-century contribution is that of Hungarian linguist Ignac Halasz, who published extensive comparative material of Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic in the 1890s, and whose work is at the base of the wide acceptance of the Samoyed-Finno-Ugric relationship today. During the 1990s, linguists Kalevi Wiik, Janos Pusztay and Ago Künnap and historian Kyösti Julku announced a "breakthrough in Present-Day Uralistics", dating Proto-Finnic to 10,000 BC. The theory was almost entirely unsuccessful in the scientific community (cf. Merlijn de Smit, see external links). Structural features All of the Finno-Ugric languages share structural features and basic vocabulary. Around 200 basic words have been proposed and include word stems for concepts related to humans such as names for relatives and body parts. This common vocabulary includes, according to Lyle Campbell, at least 55 words related to fishing, 33 related to hunting and eating animals, 12 related to reindeer, 17 related to plant foods, 31 related to technology, 26 related to building, 11 related to clothing, 18 related to climate, 4 related to society, 11 related to religion, and 3 related to commerce, giving an interesting picture of proto-Finno-Ugric society. The structural features are seen by linguists as strong evidence for a common ancestry. These include inflection by adding suffixes (instead of prepositions as in English). The Finno-Ugric languages are also famous for having a large number of grammatical cases, of which Finnish has at least 15 and Hungarian has at least 24. Another feature of the Finno-Ugric languages is that verbs are inflected, that is, conjugated, by person and number. (This is the familiar way verbs are conjugated in most Indo-European languages; but Chinese, Vietnamese and other isolating languages do not share this feature.) The Finno-Ugric languages are also remarkable for a lack of grammatical gender. For instance, one and the same pronoun has the meaning of he and she, for example, hän in Finnish, tämä in Votic, ta in Estonian, ő in Hungarian. Finally, the Finno-Ugric languages lack possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns, such as my and your, communicating the same information via declension. In some languages, the genitive of the personal pronoun is used to express possession. Examples: Estonian mu koer 'my dog' (literally 'dog of me'), Northern Sami mu beana 'my dog' (literally 'dog of me') or beatnagan 'my dog' (literally 'dog-my'). In others, a pronominal suffix is used, optionally together with the genitive case of a pronoun: thus Finnish (minun) koirani, 'my dog' (literally 'I-gen. dog-my'), from koira "dog". Similarly, Hungarian, lacking possessive adjectives, uses possessive noun suffixes, optionally together with pronouns; cf. 'the dog' = a kutya vs. 'my dog' = az én kutyám (literally, 'the I dog-my') or simply a kutyám (literally, 'the dog-my'). Hungarian, however, does have independent possessive pronouns; for example, enyém 'mine', tiéd 'yours', etc. These are declined; for example, nom. enyém, acc. enyémet, dat. enyémnek, etc. Classification It is generally agreed that the Finno-Ugric subfamily of the Uralic languages has the following members: Ugric (Ugrian) Disputes The classification of Finno-Ugric within Uralic, and of Finnic and Ugric within Finno-Ugric, is accepted by practically all scholars. Dispute is at present largely confined to the Finno-Permic family, surrounding different proposals for the arrangement of its subgroups and regarding the validity of the Volgaic group. The term Volgaic denoted a branch believed to include the Mari and Mordvinic languages, but it has now become obsolete: 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 they are to the Mari languages. Another dispute surrounds the affinity of the Yukaghir languages, which is traditionally regarded as a language isolate, with some scholars proposing a strong affinity to Uralic (Collinder, 1965). The relation of the Finno-Permic and the Ugric groups is remote by some standards. With a time depth of only 3 or 4 thousand years, it is far younger than many major families such as Indo-European or Semitic, and about the same age as, for instance, the Eastern subfamily of Nilotic. But the grouping is still far from transparent — the absence of early records constitutes an obstacle to exact reconstruction not found in, for example, Indo-European or Semitic. While much has been speculatively deduced about the Finno-Ugric Urheimat, little is certain, and, of course, the relatedness of the languages does not necessarily imply any racial or cultural unity of the peoples speaking them. Linguists criticizing the Finno-Ugric group (especially Angela Marcantonio, see References) believe that Ugric and Finnic are more distantly related than proponents advertise, and possibly no closer than, for example, the Turkic and Ugric groups. These linguists propose a Ural-Altaic supergroup and deny the validity of the Uralic node within this grouping. Such proposals do not contest the ultimate relatedness of Finno-Ugric, but rather try to include more languages (on even more tenuous grounds) into the family. However, this approach has been rejected by nearly all specialists in Uralic linguistics. Other unorthodox comparions have been advanced such as Uralo-Dravidian, Finno-Basque, Hungaro-Sumerian. These are considered spurious by specialists. For the most part these belong to the field of pseudoscientific language comparison rather than scientific comparative linguistics. Common vocabulary This is a small sample of cognates in basic vocabulary across Uralic, illustrating the sound laws (based on the Encyclopædia Britannica and Hakkinen 1979). Note that in general two cognates do not have the same meaning; they merely have the same origin. Thus, the English word in each row should be regarded as an approximation of the original meaning, not a translation of the other words. According to Estonian philologist Mall Hellam, the only entire sentence that is mutually intelligible is, "The living fish swims in water". (Orthographical notes: The hacek (š) denotes postalveolar articulation, while the accent (ś) denotes a secondary palatal articulation. The Finnish letter 'y' y represents the same phoneme (a rounded or centralized i) as the letter 'ü' in other languages. The voiced dental spirant ð is the origin of the standard Finnish 'd', which is realized differently in each dialect today. The same sound is marked with the letter đ in the Sami languages. The Sami 'č' is a voiceless postalveolar affricate ʧ. Hungarian 'gy' is the palatalized dʲ, not a 'g'.) Numbers The numbers from 1 to 10 in Finnish, Estonian, Võro, North Sami, Erzya, Meadow Mari, Mansi, Hungarian, and Proto-Finno-Ugric. One reconstruction for numbers 8 and 9 is Finno-Ugric Swadesh lists 100-word Swadesh lists for certain Finno-Ugric languages can be compared and contrasted at the Rosetta Project website: Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Erzya. Notice that particularly the Finnish list is unreliable, because it contains several neologisms or formal words, for example, henkilö (from henki life + place suffix) instead of the more commonly used ihminen, which is a Baltic Finnic word. The Finnish list has also spelling errors suggesting it was compiled by a person who does not know Finnish. See also | |||||||||||||||||||||
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