Finno-Ugric languages

Finno-Ugric
Geographic
distribution:		 Eastern and Northern Europe, North Asia
Genetic
classification:		 Uralic
 Finno-Ugric
Subdivisions:
Ugric (Ugrian)
Finno-Permic (Permian-Finnic)
ISO 639-2: fiu

Finno-Ugric (IPA: [ˌfɪnoʊˈjuːgɹɪk]) is a group of languages in the Uralic language family, comprising Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and related languages. It comprises the Finno-Permic and Ugric language families.

Contents

Status

The term Finno-Ugric is somewhat controversial today, with many historical linguists feeling that the Finno-Permic languages are as distinct from the Ugric languages as they are from the Samoyedic languages spoken in Siberia. Thus it is felt that the early Finno-Permic and Ugric groups may have diffused from proto-Uralic at the same time as proto-Samoyedic. It was earlier thought that the Finno-Ugric had separated first, and the branching into Ugric and Finno-Permic took place later, but this does not have strong support in the linguistic data. However, some proponents of the Finno-Ugric grouping have provided extra-linguistic arguments by marshalling archaeological evidence of separate Finno-Ugric peoples originally living across a large swath of Northern Europe.

The fact that the Finno-Ugric languages, unlike most of the other languages spoken in Europe, are not part of the Indo-European family, gave some initial impetus to the Finno-Ugric grouping. Indeed, in the past, and occasionally today as well, the term Finno-Ugric was used for the entire Uralic language family.

Origins

The birthplace of the Finno-Ugric languages cannot be located with certainty. Central and northern Russia west of the Ural mountains is generally assumed to be the most likely spot, perhaps around the 3rd millennium BCE. This is suggested by the high intralinguistic family diversity around the middle Volga River where three highly distinct branches of the Uralic family, Mordvinic, 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 Iranic loanwords, notably the words for "honeybee", "honey" and "hatchet" (tappara in Finnish, tabar in Iranic), probably from the time when Iranic 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, in the so called Indo-Uralic theories, 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 evidence. Notably, the controversial Finnish academic 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 some see the theory as unscientific.

The controversy over the Finno-Ugric grouping is politically sensitive because the foreign rulers of Finland in the 18th and 19th centuries attempted to link the Finnish to the Sami people (supposed to be culturally inferior) through the similarity of their languages. Subsequently, with the independence of Finland, the Finno-Ugric theory grew in strength there. On the other hand, the Hungarian groups have sometimes claimed relations to the Altaic languages, particularly the Turkish language family.

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 Johann Georg 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 (Sami) in 1770, and in 1799, the Hungarian Sámuel 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 Ignác Halász, 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

See also: Typology of Uralic languages

All Finno-Ugric languages share structural features and basic vocabulary which find their origins in the hypothetical proto-Finno-Ugric language. Around 200 basic words in this language have been suggested, including 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.

Most Finno-Ugric languages typologically belong to the agglutinative languages, which share common features like inflection by adding suffixes (instead of prepositions as in English) and syntactic coordination of suffixes. Furthermore, Finno-Ugric languages lack grammatical gender and thus use one pronoun for both he and she; for example, hän in Finnish, tämä in Votic, tema in Estonian, ő in Hungarian.

In many Finno-Ugric languages possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns, such as my and your, are rarely used. Speakers suggest possession via declension. In those that have developed further towards fusional languages, the genitive of the personal pronoun is used to express possession. Examples: Estonian mu koer 'my dog' , colloquial Finnish mun koira, 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 book Finnish (minun) koirani, 'my dog' (literally 'I-gen. dog-my'), from koira "dog". Similarly, Hungarian, lacking possessive pronouns in their own right, 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 also declined; for example, nom. enyém, acc. enyémet, dat. enyémnek, etc.

Classification

Geographical span of Uralic languages. Nenets, Enets, Selkup and Nganasan are Samoyedic, the rest are Finno-Ugric.

It is generally agreed that the Finno-Ugric subfamily of the Uralic languages has the following members:

Ugric (Ugrian)

Finno-Permic (Permian-Finnic)

Disputes

The classification of Finno-Ugric within Uralic, and of Finno-Permic 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 Finno-Permic 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 (for critical reviews, see e.g. Aikio 2003; Bakró-Nagy 2003, 2005; De Smit 2003; Georg 2003; Kallio 2004; Laakso 2004; Saarikivi 2004).

Other unorthodox comparisons 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" (even though it isn't really mutually intelligible [1]).

English Finnish Estonian North Sami Inari Sami Mari Komi Khanty Hungarian Finno-Ugric reconstruction
heart sydän, sydäm- süda, südam- - - šüm śələm səm szív *śiδä(-mɜ)/*śüδä(-mɜ)
lap syli süli salla, sala solla šəl syl jöl öl *süle/*sile
vein suoni soon suotna, suona suona šön sən jan ín 'sinew' *sōne/*se̮ne
go mennä, men- minna, min- mannat moonnađ mije- mun- mən- menni, megy *mene-
fish kala kala guolli, guoli kyeli kol kul hal hal *kala
hand käsi, käte-
gen. käden, part. kättä		 käsi, kät-
gen. käe, part. kätt		 giehta, gieđa kieta kit ki köt kéz *käte
eye silmä silm čalbmi, čalmmi čalme šinča śin sem szem *śilmä
one yksi, yhte-
gen. yhden, part. yhtä		 üks, üht-
gen. ühe, part. üht(e)		 okta, ovtta ohta ikte ət'ik ĭt egy *ykte
two kaksi, kahte-
gen. kahden, part. kahta		 kaks, kaht-
gen. kahe, part. kaht(e)		 guokte kyeh´ti kokət kyk kät kettő/két *kakta/*käktä
three kolme kolm golbma kulma kumət kujim koləm három *kolme/*kulme
ice jää jää jiekŋa, jieŋa jiena ij ji jöŋk jég *jäŋe
louse täi täi dihkki tikke tij toj tögtəm tetű *täje

(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].)

Numbers

The numbers from 1 to 10 in Finnish, Estonian, Võro, Livonian, North Sami, Erzya, Meadow Mari, Moksha, Mansi, Hungarian, and Proto-Finno-Ugric.

Number Finnish Estonian Võro Livonian North Sami Inari Sami Erzya Meadow Mari Moksha Mansi Hungarian Proto-F-U
1 yksi üks ütś ikš okta ohta vejke ikte fkä akva egy *ykte
2 kaksi kaks katś kakš guokte kyeh´ti kavto kokət kaftə kityg kettő *kakte
3 kolme kolm kolm kuolm golbma kulma kolmo kumət kolmə hurum három, harm- *kolme
4 neljä neli nelli nēļa njeallje nelji ńiľe nələt nilä nila négy *neljä
5 viisi viis viiś vīž vihtta vitta veƭe wizət vetä at öt *vitte
6 kuusi kuus kuuś kūž guhtta kutta koto kuδət kotə hot hat *kutte
7 seitsemän seitse säidse seis čieža čiččam śiśem šəmət sisäm sat hét N/A
8 kahdeksan kaheksa katõsa kōdõks gávcci käävci kavkso kandaš(e) kafksə ńololov nyolc N/A
9 yhdeksän üheksa ütesä īdõks ovcci oovce vejkse indeš(e) veJksə ontolov kilenc N/A
10 kymmenen kümme kümme kim logi love kemeń lu keməń lov tíz N/A

One reconstruction for numbers 8 and 9 is *kak+teksa '10–2' and *yk+teksa '10–1', where *teksa cf. deka is an Indo-European loan; notice that the difference between /t/ and /d/ is not phonemic, unlike in Indo-European.

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

References

Further reading

External links

Finno-Ugric languages
Baltic-Finnic
Estonian · Finnish (Ingrian Finnish · Kven · Meänkieli) · Ingrian · Karelian (Ludic · Olonets Karelian) · Livonian · South Estonian (Seto · Võro) · Veps · Votic
Volga-Finnic
Mari · Erzya · Moksha · Merya · Meshcherian · Muromian
Permic
Komi · Komi-Permyak · Udmurt
Sami
Akkla · Inari · Kemi · Kildin · Lule · Northern · Pite · Skolt · Southern · Ter · Ume
Ugric
Hungarian · Khanty · Mansi
Italics indicate extinct languages