Indo-Uralic languages
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Indo-Uralic is a hypothetical language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic. It may be considered a subset of the larger Nostratic hypothesis. Most linguists still consider this theory speculative and its evidence insufficient to conclusively prove genetic affiliation.
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[edit] Geography of the proposed Indo-Uralic family
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.
[edit] Arguments for Indo-Uralic
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 millenia. 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 *šatám in Indo-Iranian (compare Sanskrit šatám, Avestan satəm). This makes it clear that the word was borrowed into Finno-Ugric from Indo-Iranian.
This borrowing may have occurred in the region north of the Caspian Sea around 2500 BC. It provides interesting evidence for the geographical location of these languages around that time. It also provides external confirmation for the forms of Indo-Iranian reconstructed through comparison of Sanskrit and Old Iranian.
A later borrowing is Finnish kuningas 'king'. This word corresponds almost exactly in form to the reconstructed Proto-Germanic word *kuningaz 'king'. Again, we have fascinating confirmation for a reconstructed proto-form. In the Germanic word, *-az is the nominative singular ending (< PIE *-os), but is quite meaningless in Finnish, which has borrowed the whole word as a unit. This shows that the word was borrowed into Finnish and is not part of the original Uralic vocabulary.
Thus, *śata cannot be Indo-Uralic on account of phonology and kuningas 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 : Proto-Indo-European *wot’er- (or *wodr̥), oblique stem wet’en-, both meaning 'water', and Proto-Uralic *nime (or *nimi) : Proto-Indo-European *nomen- (or *H₁nōmn̥), both meaning 'name'. In contrast to *śata and kuningas, the phonology of these words shows no sound changes from Indo-European daughter languages such as Indo-Iranian. In contrast to kuningas, 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.[citation needed] 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.
[edit] Possible cognates
| 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 [nomen agentis] |
| [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]
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.
[edit] Some example words
Indo-European: French 'moi', English 'me', Russian 'menja'; Finno-Ugric: Estonian 'ma', 'mina', Finnish 'minä'.
IE: English 'water', 'wet', Russian 'vodá'; FU: Finnish 'vesi', 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'
