Proto-Uralic language

Proto-Uralic is the hypothetical language ancestral to the Uralic language family, which includes Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic.

The language was originally spoken in a small area in about 4000 BCE, and expanded to give differentiated protolanguages. The exact location of the area or Urheimat is not known, but the Ural mountains are usually assumed. The available reconstruction may not be a representation of the language itself; instead, it may summarize features common to a dialect continuum spanning from the Eastern center later producing Samoyedic and Ugric, to the Western center producing Finno-Permic languages. According to the traditional binary tree model, Proto-Uralic diverged into Proto-Samoyedic and Proto-Finno-Ugric. However, reconstructed Proto-Finno-Ugric differs very little from Proto-Uralic, and many apparent differences follow from the methods used. Thus, Proto-Finno-Ugric may be seen as a geographical classification of more closely related dialects of Proto-Uralic, not as a true language separate from Proto-Uralic.

There are several reconstructions of the split of Proto-Uralic. The traditional idea is a binary split into Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic; another one has three branches (Finnic, Ugric and Samoyedic). Recently these tree-like models have been challenged by the hypothesis of larger number of protolanguages giving a "comb" rather than a tree. The protolanguages would be Sami, Baltic-Finnic, Mordva, Mari, Permic, Ugric and Samoyedic, in this order. This order is coincidentally both the order of geographical positions as well as linguistic similarity, with neighboring languages being more similar than distant ones.

Phonology

Similarly to the situation for Proto-Indo-European, reconstructions of Proto-Uralic are traditionally not written in IPA but in UPA. UPA is used here, followed by the IPA equivalents between slashes (because it is a phonemic reconstruction).

Proto-Uralic had vowel harmony and a rather large inventory of vowels in initial syllables, much like the modern Finnish or Estonian system:

Rounded vowels were restricted to initial syllables. Vocalic phonemes in non-initial syllables were restricted to two or three. One view is that there were only two archiphonemic non-initial vowels IPA|/a/ and IPA|/i/, realized as four allophones as per vowel harmony. Another view is that there were IPA|/a/, IPA|/i/ and IPA|/ə/. There were no diphthongs or long vowels.

The consonant system was rich with palatalized consonants, but only one series of stops (unvoiced unaspirated) existed:

The sounds marked with question marks are supported by only limited evidence, and are not assumed by all scholars. The consonant symbolized by "x" is reconstructed by certain scholars in word-stems where a contrastive long vowel later developed in Finnic languages. Because this hypothetical consonant has not been preserved in any language as such, its original phonetic nature is uncertain; IPA|/x/, IPA|/ɣ/ and IPA|/h/ have been suggested among others.

No initial or final consonant clusters were allowed, so words could begin and end with a maximum of one consonant only. Inside words only clusters of two consonants were permitted. There may have also been double (i.e. geminate) consonants. Voicing was not a phonemic feature.

The postalveolar sibilant /š/ is scarcely attested, but certain loans from Indo-European languages have reflexes traceable to a postalveolar fricative in Proto-Finnic. Palatalization, or palatal-laminal instead of apical articulation, was a phonemic feature, as it is in many modern Uralic languages.

Proto-Uralic did not have tones, which contrasts with Yeniseian and some Siberian languages. Neither was there contrastive stress as in Indo-European; in Proto-Uralic the first syllable was invariably stressed.

Grammar

Grammatically Proto-Uralic was an agglutinative language with at least six noun cases and verbs inflected for number, person, mood and tense. There were three numbers, singular, dual and plural. Proto-Uralic was a nominative-accusative language. Verbs may have had a separate subjective and objective conjugation, the latter of which was used in connection with a definite object.

Grammatical gender was not recognized and no Uralic language does so even today. Noun articles were unknown. The plural marker of nouns was *"-t" in final position and *"-j-" in non-final position, as seen in Finnish. The dual marker has been reconstructed as *"-k-", but the dual number has been lost in many of the contemporary Uralic languages. The nouns also had possessive suffixes; possessive pronouns were not found.

The cases had only one three-way locative contrast of entering, residing and exiting. This is the origin of the three-way systems as the three different ones in Karelian Finnish (illative/inessive/elative, allative/adessive/ablative, translative/essive/excessive). The partitive case, developed from the ablative, was a later innovation by Fennic languages.

The cases were:
*nominative (no suffix)
*accusative *-m
*genitive *-n
*locative *-na / *-nä
*ablative *-ta / *-tä
*lative *-ŋ

Verbs were conjugated at least according to number, person and tense. The reconstructions of mood markers are controversial. Some scholars argue that there were separate subjective and objective conjugations, but this is disputed; clear reflexes of the objective conjugation are only found in the easternmost branches, and hence it may also represent an areal innovation. Negation was expressed with the means of a negative verb *e-, found as such in e.g. Finnish "e+mme" "we don't".

Vocabulary

Only some 200 words can be reconstructed for Proto-Uralic, if it is required that every word reconstructed for the proto-language should be present in Samoyed languages. With a laxer criterion of reconstructing words which are attested in most branches of the language family, a number in the range of 300-400 words can be reached.

The following examples of reconstructed items are considered to fulfill the strictest criteria and are thus accepted as Proto-Uralic words by practically all scholars in the field:

* Body parts and bodily functions: *"ïpti" hair on the head, *"ojwa" head, *"śilmä" eye, *"poski" cheek, *"käxli" tongue, *"elä-" to live, *"kaxli-" to die, *"wajŋi" breath, *"kosi" cough, *"kunśi" urine, *"küńili" tear, *"sexji" pus.
* Kinship terms: *"emä" mother, *"čečä" uncle, *"koska" aunt, *"mińä" daughter-in-law, *"wäŋiw" son-in-law.
* Verbs for universally known actions: *"meni-" to go, *"toli-" to come, *"aśkili-" to step, *"imi-" to suck, *"soski-" to chew, *"pala-" to eat up, *"uji-" to swim, *"sala-" to steal, *"kupsa-" to extinguish.
* Basic objects and concepts of the natural world: *"juka" river, *"toxi" lake, *"weti" water, *"päjwä" sun, warmth, *"suŋi" summer, *"śala-" lightning, *"wanča" root, *"koxji" birch, *"kaxsi" spruce, *"sïksi" Siberian pine, *"δ'ïxmi" bird cherry
* Elementary technology: *"tuli" fire, *"äjmä" needle, *"pura" drill, *"jïŋsi" bow, *"jänti" bow string, *"ńïxli" arrow, *"δ'ümä" glue, *"lïpśi" cradle, *"piksi" rope, *"suksi" ski, *"woča" fence.
* Basic spatial concepts: *"ïla" below, *"üli" above, *"wasa" left, *"pälä" side.
* Pronouns: *"mun" I, *"tun" you, *"ke-" who, *"mi-" what.

A reconstruction of a word *"wäśkä", meaning 'metal', has also been proposed. However, this word shows irregularities in sound correspondence, and some scholars believe it to be a Wanderwort instead.

The reconstructed vocabulary is compatible with a Mesolithic culture (bow, arrow, needle, sinew, but also rope, fence, cradle, ski), a north Eurasian landscape (spruce, birch, Siberian pine), and contains interesting hints on kinship structure.

Examples of vocabulary correspondences between the modern Uralic languages are provided in the list of comparisons at the Finnish Wikipedia.

Possible relations with other families

Is the Uralic family genetically related to any other language families? The situation in this regard is somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, the predominant opinion among historical linguists is that no such relationship has been or perhaps can be shown. On the other hand, a very large number of leading linguists have perceived relations between Uralic and other language families, among them Rasmus Rask, Matthias Castrén, Vilhelm Thomsen, Henry Sweet, Holger Pedersen, Björn Collinder, Jochem Schindler, Michael Fortescue, Jens Elmegård Rasmussen, Frederik Kortlandt, Joseph Greenberg, Vladimir Dybo, and Sergei Starostin.

The language families Uralic has most often been associated with are:

*Indo-European. Supported by Thomsen, Sweet, Pedersen, Collinder, Schindler, Rasmussen, Kortlandt, Greenberg, Dybo, Starostin. "Comment:" Frederik Kortlandt and others have been attempting to connect Proto-Uralic with Proto-Indo-European. While a great many grammatical markers show similarities, and there are a handful of possible Uralo-Indo-European cognates, efforts to reconstruct the proto-language have not been fruitful.

*Eskimo-Aleut. Supported by Rask, Sweet, Pedersen, Collinder, Fortescue, Greenberg. Here, as in many things, Rask was a pioneer, advocating a relationship between Uralic and Greenlandic as early as 1818.

*Chukotko-Kamchatkan. Supported by Collinder, Fortescue, Greenberg.

*Yukaghir. Supported by Pedersen, Fortescue, Greenberg.

*Altaic. Supported by Rask, Castrén, Pedersen, Fortescue, Greenberg, Starostin.

The principal macrofamilies in which Uralic has been placed are Indo-Uralic, Ural-Altaic, Uralo-Siberian, Eurasiatic, and Nostratic. At the present time (2008), Indo-Uralic has a few supporters, Ural-Altaic has virtually none, Uralo-Siberian is not widely accepted but has the earmarks of a serious hypothesis, Eurasiatic and Nostratic are supported by some linguists but remain highly controversial. It is worth noting that these hypotheses overlap rather than conflict, since all the languages included in Indo-Uralic, Ural-Altaic, and Uralo-Siberian are included in Eurasiatic, and most of the languages included in Eurasiatic are included in Nostratic by their respective supporters. These proposals therefore differ mostly in scope or subgrouping.

There is thus a certain pattern to proposals of genetic relationship between Uralic and other language families: they concern two or more - in the case of Eurasiatic, all - of the language families of northern Eurasia, with the exception of Yeniseian, which all are agreed has no close genetic relation to any of the others.

External links

* [http://www.verbix.com/languages/ugric.asp Encyclopedia Britannica's take]
* [http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/kuzn.html Criticism of binary tree model]

References

* cite book
first = Juha | last = Janhunen
authorlink = Juha Janhunen
year = 1981a
chapter = On the Structure of Proto-Uralic.
pages = pp. 23-42
title = "Finnisch-ugrische Forschungen 44"
location= Helsinki | publisher=Société Finno-Ougrienne.

* cite book
first = Juha | last = Janhunen
authorlink = Juha Janhunen
year = 1981b
chapter = Uralilaisen kantakielen sanastosta ['On the vocabulary of the Uralic proto-language'] .
pages = pp. 219-274
title = "Journal de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 77"
location= Helsinki: | publisher=Société Finno-Ougrienne.

* cite book
first = Pekka | last = Sammallahti
authorlink = Pekka Sammallahti
year = 1988
chapter = Historical Phonology of the Uralic Languages, with Special Reference to Samoyed, Ugric, and Permic
editor = Denis Sinor (ed.)
title = The Uralic Languages. Description, History and Foreign Influences
pages = pp. 478–554
location= Leiden – New York – København –Köln