Talk:Finno-Ugric languages

The new map
I've seen that map, it's error-compatible to one map I've seen. Encyclopedia Britannica? Well, anyway, here are some obvious problems. Finnish is the majority language in Northern Finnish Lapland. Here, it's shown as a purely Sami-speaking territory. It is not in majority in any country. --Vuo 22:46, 27 August 2005 (UTC)


 * In a linguistic map, indigenous languages take priority over other languages if their distribution overlap. Therefore the map is correct, even if Finnish is spoken as far as on the coast of the Arctic Ocean in Norway. --Hippophaë 15:47, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Right. I was going to ask, but then I realized this is going to be about the contemporary distribution of major languages. If not, where are the Ingrians? The areas around St. Petersburg should be interconnected with Estonia. Setu is also missing. --Vuo 21:48, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
 * The map lacks Finnish/Karelian for the area northwest of St. Petersburg too, and Karealian area should extend partly into Finland and out to the White Sea. --Trizt 23:36, 13 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The distribution of the Ingrian language is marked with "1" in the map, because the area is too small to be colored. --Hippophaë 17:37, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

The map is full of errors. As already pointed out, where have the Ingrians disappeared and how did the Sápmi territory get that big? Many parts that are marked as Sápmi in Finland is 100% Finnish speaking. On the other hand, some Swedish areas in Finland with a Swedish percentage exceeding 90% are still marked as Finnish. All in all a very random map. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Isber (talk • contribs) 18:20, 2 July 2006 (UTC)


 * One problem with both maps is that the text in the boxes is too small to be easily read. And does anyone else have a problem with the world map covering part of the text? Copey 2 (not logged on) 203.173.212.141 (talk) 13:07, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Including more critics
Seeing that the 'Critique' page is now a redirect, I think we should find some way to include reference to Dr. László Marácz and his stuff. Of course saying that it is a piece of non-peer-reviewed crankery. dab (&#5839;) 18:47, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * added external link to Merlijn de Smit's link collection. I don't know if 'entirely unsuccessful' is too strong a term, but the claims do seem rather hopeless. while, technically, we can now say that Maracz has been peer-reviewed. That is, if the following counts as a peer-review:


 * "Dutch-Hungarian linguist László Marácz here presents the usual tin-foil hatted conspiracy theories about Finno-Ugric language relationships being the result a conspiracuy between Austrians, communists and intelligent snails from the star system of Epsilon Eridani (OK, not the latter one, but you get the picture) to oppress the Magyar nationality and obscure their true origins and linguistic relationships (with, of course, the Sumerians, which as the builders of the first civilization happen to be a bit more prestigious). It contains a wonderful rant against László Honti - someone who, as opposed to Marácz, knows about historical linguistics. Anyway, the piece is morbidly fascinating in its pathology, in the same manner a train wreck is fascinating."
 * dab (&#5839;) 19:04, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Sweet. I believe this is the linguistic equivalent of what bloggers call a fisking. - Mustafaa 22:18, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Another case?
people watching this page may be interested in checking out Balto-Slavic languages, edited by somebody claiming "deepest research" proves Baltic and Slavic are unrelated... (diff)There are references, this time, and the edits do not seem completely unreasonable, but the article has certainly been unbalanced, as such claims are at best obscure. dab (&#5839;) 16:59, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Apparently, the Burushaski language is no longer a language isolate, as well. Linguistic hypotheses presented as facts.--Wiglaf 17:37, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

About László Marácz
Dbenbenn, in your last edit comment you write: "This section should be about linguists who criticize. We don't need to debunk László Marácz here, since he isn't a linguist anyway"

Actually this is not correct. Marácz is a linguist, although I'm not aware him publishing any journal papers on this subject.

He wrote a book: Hungarian Revival, 1998, ISBN 9075323115

Although I haven't read it myself, it is Károly Rédei criticises it in his book:
 * Rédei Károly: Őstörténetünk kérdései, A nyelvészeti dilettantizmus kritikája, Balassi Kiadó, Bp., 2003. ISBN 963-506-515-9 (Questions of Our Ancient History, Critique of Linguistic Dilettantism)

Much of Marácz's arguments are reflected in Antifinnugor's edits and other "alternative" theories in Hungary:
 * the original proponents of Finno-Ugric theory were not Hungarians
 * First not entirely true, Sajnovics was Hungarian. Second the nationality of the scholars doesn't matter, especially after 150 years. This reminds me of the urban legend that Darwin revoked his theories about evolution on his death bed.
 * the theory was pushed under Habsburg rule to supress the national pride of Hungarians
 * The real reason was that it the time of Habsburg opression coincided with progress in linguisics in general at the end of the 19th century.
 * The theory is pushed for political reasons. They claim that the (former) communists don't want the Hungarians to learn about their "true" origins. (For the same reasons as the Habsburgs.)
 * This is a cheap excuse for all the "alternative" theorists (most of whom don't have any linguistic background) who run out of linguistic arguments. Every one of them repeats this claim. People who think Hungarian is related to Celtic, Sumerian, Japanese, etc. Every single last one of them keeps repeating that the "true" reason that the Hungarian Academy of Sciences refuses to answer them or dismisses them as crackpots is because they want to "supress" the truth for political reasons.

Marácz also point out that neighboring countries created their own nationalistic myths like the daco-romanian theory and a lot of legend around Great Moravia which helps strengthening their national identities. This is actually true and helps us remember that when you see people arguing this strongly about such "boring" (sorry) a topic as linguistics, it is because they see it not as a scholarly debate but one attacking their "true" national identity.

One of the reasons for this is that many of the "alternative theorists" and 90% of the laypeople do not distinguish between ethnic and linguistic relatedness.

In his book Marácz doesn't claim that Hungarian is not related to Finno-Ugric languages, but he says that the relation between Hungarian and other language families like Turkic or Sumerian should not be discarded. He also used to publish in a Hungarian magazine called "Turán" (his "untenability" article was published there, too). This makes me wonder whether these his theories should be discussed under Turanian.

László Honti debunked most of Marácz's theories in Magyar Tudomány (sorry couldn't find it online). Rédei calls a lot of Marácz's linguistic claims "pseudoscience".

I think it is telling, that when you google for Marácz's articles most often you find them on the website http://www.kitalaltkozepkor.hu which is dedicated to Heribert Illig. It is also telling that in his "Untenability" article, Marácz references Bobula Ida and Francisco Jos Badiny (Badiny Jós Ferenc). They both think that Hungarian is related to Sumerian. Badiny also claims that Jesus was a Parthian prince. You can google for their works in English.

To sum up: most of what Marácz writes about is political and those parts which are about linguistics have been harshly criticized by people in the field.

Nyenyec 22:16, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * from what I gather, he wrote a reasonable book on politics, containing "layman's" linguistic conclusions. Just the fact that he speculates about linguistics does not make him a linguist, imho (otherwise, afu is a linguist, too). But we can include his stuff anyway, I don't care. We just have to say that real linguists laugh their asses off when they read his stuff (we don't have to quote Merlijn's "pathological interest" though, it's enough to say that he has no support in the linguistic community whatsoever) dab (&#5839;) 22:36, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for correcting me, Nyenyec. Actually, the main reason I removed the sentence:
 * Entirely outside the sphere of linguistics is the claim of "untenability" of the Finno-Ugric family by László Marácz, referenced by de Smit for its "morbid fascination"

is that it seemed non-neutral to me. If Marácz's criticisms are notable enough to go in, they should be stated first, with the linguistic response second. It isn't fair to demolish him from the get-go. Dbenbenn 23:36, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Actually Marácz does have a degree in linguisitcs from the University of Gröningen from 1984 and he got his PhD in 1989 at least that's what he writes in one of the articles AFU copied to the Hungarian Wikipedia. I don't know what's the best way or phrasing to mention him though. Nyenyec 00:29, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This should not be about this Marácz too much anyway. I agree with Dbenbenn about the removal of my sentence. This was an attempt of how we could include him at all. He is either non-notable, or notable as a curiosity, it appears. I am sure however, that there are respectable critics of FU. Everything is criticized in linguistics, so it must be possible to find something. Angela Marcantonio is a beginning: At least she seems to be recognized as a good-faith linguist, even though her reviews are devastating. Once we have Marcantonio, there is really no need for Marácz, linguist od no linguist, because his inclusion will only add to the ridicule of the critics. I am sure there are others, but, well, we are not obliged to hunt for them. We are obliged to allow fair mention if somebody brings them up, but this is as far as it goes. dab (&#5839;) 11:45, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * btw, the "breakthrough" bit I added to the "Criticism" section does not properly belong there. It belongs to the Conversely, there have been suggestions that the Germanic languages evolved from an Indo-European language such as Celtic imposed on a Finnic substrate passage in "History". It ended up where it is now purely to give some background to the Marácz mention, and could now be moved. dab (&#5839;) 11:59, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * &mdash; *lol* I had overlooked the reference to Heribert Illig. I know that theory, and it is a fine example of crackpottery if there ever was one. (I realize that Maracz does not himself cite Illig, but it seems very fitting to find them sharing the same webspace). It seems also strange that most literature critical of FU seems to be written in Hungarian, in spite if Soviet censorship (i.e. countries that were never censored by the Soviets never developed such FU criticism). If people insist on linking to Maracz (Gubbubu apparently is), how about mentioning Maracz together with Karoly's 'recension', Critique of Linguistic Dilettantism? Somebody would need to access that book, of course. dab (&#5839;) 15:57, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

History
well, I have been whipped into doing my own literature search now, and I came up with
 * Merritt Ruhlen, A Guide to the World's langages

it is a very good, scientific book, that does not just state its 'facts' but gives background of the history of classification, and presents different theories alongside each other. The section on 'Uralic-Yukaghir' is very enlightening (p.65ff.), and I will add some of it (with references!) to the history section. (note that the book does not claim genetic relationship of Uralic and Yukaghir. Ruhlen talks about apparent 'taxonomical coordination', and mentions various suggestions. dab (&#5839;) 12:37, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * Awesome! Great work, dab!  That sounds like exactly what's needed.  Dbenbenn 13:26, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

see the new 'history' section. I think the 'criticism' section looks quite out of place now. Ruhlen does not gloss over controversies, and he gives quite some detail on the various arrangements of Finnic that are suggested. As to uralic, he gives the arrangement: and says this is accepted by 'practically all scholars' (p.68f.). The disputes surround the classification inside the Finnic group, and the status of Yukaghir. A. Marcantonio seems to be the exception to 'practically all', and she could be included as a dissenting voice in the 'history' section. Ruhlen hints more strongly, and more assertively than I have done, to the nationalist situation in Hungary, and I think you should really write an article about that, so that it can be linked from here: I hope this will manage to take some heat from this linguistic article. dab (&#5839;) 13:56, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * Uralic
 * Samoyed
 * North
 * South
 * Finno-Ugric
 * Ugric
 * Hungarian
 * Ob-Ugric
 * Finnic

I have now even drawn a map, after Ruhlen, p.64, showing the distribution of Finnic, Uralic, Samoyed and Yukaghir. The areas were copied manually, though, and I hope I don not step on anyone's Ugric, Finnic, Samoyed or Yukaghir toes if they are not exactly accurate. dab (&#5839;) 14:33, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Great work Dab! I haven't been around Wikipedia much lately, and it's great to see articles I haven't looked at in a couple of weeks substantially improved. - Mustafaa 02:31, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Disputes
I reviewed the disputes, and merged them with 'criticism'. I am not sure about Volgaic: We are saying that the term is obsolete, but there seem to be real disputes about it. At least, as of 1987, Ruhlen gives a series of different suggestions. Maybe the 'obsolete' should be toned down. Anyway, 'disputes' is now a subsection of 'classification', intended to contain ongoing disputes (as opposed to historical ones, which go to the 'History' section. Marcantonio is also disputing FU classification, by contesting the family even exists, and appears also under 'disputes'. I am still open towards an inclusion of Maracz, somewhere. Maybe we should link him from the 'other superfamilies' sentence? Although I am not sure he positively suggests 'Ugro-Sumerian'. dab (&#5839;) 18:02, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Map
Thanks for making the map, Dbachmann. It's always nice to have an illustration. The problem is, I can't make heads or tails of it. Is it supposed to be southeast Asia? Is that Japan off the right side? I'm deeply confused. Dbenbenn 20:10, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Euroasia, with Western Europe quite marginalized &mdash; a perspective Russians often are quite used to, but that sometimes confuse people from the West who are used to putting Germany, Britain or USA in the center. :-) This projection is the best possible in this case. /Tuomas 16:05, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Or possibly the light is land, and that's northern Russia? Dbenbenn 20:13, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

um, yes, the brown bit is land, and the blue bit is ocean. and the coloured areas are the distribution of the languages, as by the legend. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dbachmann (talk • contribs) 21:05, 5 January 2005 (UTC)
 * I had been happy with "Finno-Permic" in the legend. Finnic is to my knowledge (mostly?) used in much more restricted meanings. /Tuomas 16:05, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It is true by the way that the Samoyedic disputes belong on Uralic languages. That should probably be sorted out. I just couldn't be bothered to draw more than one map, one for FU, one for Uralic, one for Uralo-Yukaghir etc., so I have to say somehow that more languages are marked on the map than are actually discussed in this article. Also, the 'History' section should of course explain how the different theories tie together. dab (&#5839;) 21:05, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Okay, I just got home, and now the blue bit indeed looks like water. At work, though, the water looked dark-brown, not blue, and the land looked light-brown.  I wasn't just hallucinating, I swear!  Did you consider modifying Image:Rs-map.png, which has labels and includes the modern context?  Would you mind if I tweaked the colors of your map?  Dbenbenn 00:55, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * well, I am afraid Rs-map.png does not extend to Hungary. Before you tweak the colours, let me make another update (I have the layered orignal here, it will by much more difficult to make edits to the png. What colours would you like? I went as far as to pick the dark green of the Hungarian flag for Ugric, and light blue from the Finnish flag for Finnic, to be sure not to offend anyone by the choice of colours!) dab (&#5839;) 10:45, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * I have added some labels (Finland, Hungary, Ural, Siberia) to make it easier to read. dab (&#5839;) 11:04, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * Alright, the labels help a lot. Thanks!  Dbenbenn 23:24, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Can you redo the map without Yukaghir? It's not a Finno-Ugric (or even Uralic) language group. Mk270 21:33, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * I know, nobody said it was. It's just a map I copied from Ruhlen, showing the distribution of FInnic, Ugric, Samoyedic and Yukaghir, and it is used on all these articles. If you can be bothered, you could create a Finnic, an Ugric, a Samoyedic, a Yukaghir, a Finno-Ugric, an Uralic and an Uralo-Yukahgir version of it (you'd still have to say that they are derived from Ruhlen's book, though), but I thought making one map was tedious enough. Or maybe the caption could be amended, drawing attention to Finnic and Ugric in poarticular, for this article? dab (&#5839;) 22:40, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Ah Ok I understand. What's the best software for fixing the map? I'd like to have a go myself.

(I think including Yukaghir along with the others is liable to confuse people). Mk270 01:25, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * try the GIMP. I can send you the layered original, if you like. Note, however, that if you drop Yukaghir, you'd want to choose a different area, and again different for Finno-Ugric (no need showing all of Siberia if you only want to map Finnic and Ugric). What you could do is just fiddle with the colours, so that related languages have similar colours (although I conciously avoided that, because I did not want the map to be accused of being suggestive of one 'theory'. although it still is, and maybe there is no way to win this). I don't know how widely accepted the Ural-Yukaghir theory is. Ruhlen presents it as disputed, but as majority opinion. If you remove Yukaghir, I fear you create a precedent, and since Uralic is also disputed, people will ask to remove Samoyedic too, which is strictly speaking inappropriate for this article. I honestly don't know which is the best presentation, but I do think it is helpful to see the distribution of these groups. dab (&#5839;) 09:05, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * "Finnic" should be replaced by "Finno-Permic". The Yukaghir languages do not belong to the Uralic languages, but if it were possible to show that the Uralic languages are a part of a bigger language family, the Yukaghir languages might be another branch of it. The Samoyedic languages belong evidently to the Uralic language family, although the relation is quite distant to the Finno-Ugric languages. --Hippophaë 03:16, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

ok, I want to make sure we are clear that we are in full factual agreement. This is a question of terminology, layout and presentation, and not of content. Yes, Uralo-Yukaghir is a shaky theory, nothing more. The book I took the map from just happened to treat them together, without making any claims beyond that. I would make another map, just for Finno-Ugric, but this map would have to be more detailed than just showing "Here is Finno-Permic. Here is Ugric", i.e. I need a source to do a decent FU map. As for Finnic vs. Finno-Permic, I know. Sometimes Finno-Permic and Finnic are used synonymously (cf. Finno-Ugric vs. *Ugro-Finno-Permic). I just copied the map's legend as it was, there is no claim in this that would conflict with the listing on this article. You may argue that since the map is not about FU specifically, we should remove it from this article. But I still think this map is better than no map, because it illustrates the geographical features discussed in the article. dab (&#5839;) 09:03, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * As a non-linguist (although student of a language :-) I could maybe add that I find it informative to include neighboring non-IE languages. The only important thing would be to stress in the legend which languages are considered Finno-Ugric and not. /Tuomas 09:13, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * I hope I have made the caption unambiguous now. I am afraid that people who want to know about FU will have no choice but to read the article, in spite of there being a map. dab (&#5839;) 09:51, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't think this point is worth arguing much further, though I'd be interested in trying my hand with the GIMP if you're still prepared to slip me layers. Mk270 11:42, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * try http://flaez.ch/scratch/uralic.xcf (released under GFDL). I will remove the file once you confirm you downloaded it. dab (&#5839;) 12:32, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * I've got it now - cheers! Mk270 01:01, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Here's a new map, drawn using several sources, which depicts the approximate geographical distribution of Finno-Ugric languages only. Please note that the "old" map (depicting also the Samoyedic and Yukaghir languages) can still be found in the article about Uralic languages (where, as far as Samoyedic languages are concerned, it fits more appropriately anyway). Cheers, --3 Löwi 14:52, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Map from Encyclopædia Britannica
The new map seems to be copied from Encyclopædia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9109786. --Hippophaë 14:59, 21 August 2005 (UTC)


 * the map is exceedingly cool -- and no, the Britannica one doesn't look identical at all; I suppose it just descends from a common source (what is IMIU?) dab (&#5839;) 22:07, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

User:Antifinnugor's RFAr
See Requests for arbitration/Antifinnugor.

Article editing ban

1.1) For significant disruption relating to the articles Finno-Ugric languages and Uralic languages, Antifinnugor is banned from editing these or related articles for one year. Antifinnugor may edit the related talk pages and is encouraged to work with other editors regarding article content. Other editors may add content and make changes suggested by Antifinnugor at their discretion.

''Passed 7-0. ''

Personal attack parole

4.1) Antifinnugor is placed on standard personal attack parole for one year: if Antifinnugor makes an edit which is judged by an administrator to be a personal attack, he may be temporarily banned for up to a week by that administrator and the parole timer shall be reset.

''Passed 6-2. '' Good behaviour

5) If Antifinnugor can demonstrate better editing habits free of personal attacks three months from now, he may apply to have the above restrictions reduced or removed.

Passed 8-0.

Enforcement

1) If Antifinnugor, under whatever username, attempts to edit Finno-Ugric languages or Uralic languages, he may be banned for up to twenty-four hours.

Passed 6-2.

dab (&#5839;) 12:54, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Possible origins
Those Hungarian enyém 'mine', tiéd 'yours' sound eerily familiar. Writing them in Finnish orthography, they become "änjääm", "tieed". In Finnish, "oma" means "my own", and "teidän" is "yours". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vuo (talk • contribs) 10:57, 2 February 2005 (UTC)


 * I would like to hear more on this subject. --Hippophaë 00:38, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Over (several) beers with Finnish friends we found over a dozen, e.g. water (Víz/Vissa), to go (menni/menni), hand (kéz/kessi) (pardon my mis-spellings) and other basic words, forgotten right before being drunk right under the table...:-) There are certainly many, perhaps others could add some more. Istvan 03:45, 1 September 2006 (UTC)


 * In Finnish water = "vesi", to go = "mennä", hand = "käsi". 83.146.214.134 (talk) 20:46, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Odd gloss
The part that says "Estonian mu koer 'my dog' (literally 'I-gen. dog')" looks really odd to a linguist, since it implies that 'my' isn't I-gen when it quite clearly is. "My" is a perfectly good translation of Estonian "mu" and both of them are the genetive first person singular pronoun. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.76.192.70 (talk) 00:01, 26 March 2005 (UTC)
 * "My" is a separate possessive pronoun, not a pronoun in the genitive. If it was, it'd be "I's". "My" is a good translation of "mu", but an insufficient representation. --Vuo 22:14, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * Pardon? Just because English has a rule for forming genitives from arbitrary nouns (adding 's) doesn't mean that something which is isn't formed with this rule  isn't a genitive.  The words "my" and "mine" can certainly be described as English genitives, just as "min" was the genitive form of the Old English first-person singular pronoun "ic", and "mein" is the genitive of the German first-person singular pronoun "ich". --Saforrest 23:46, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

The word my is a pronoun in the genitive case while mine is a possesive pronoun. Yes, confusing, but the functions are separate. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 21:10, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
 * That dog is mine.
 * That is my dog.


 * OK, looks like somebody needs a little Estonian lesson


 * My  dog    ran       away   : Mu   koer   jooksis   ära


 * This dog is    mine   : See  koer on    minu oma


 * So wherever you have gotten your conviction that 'mu' means 'mine' and not 'my', you are flatly wrong. 'Mine' in Estonian is 'minu oma', not 'mu'. So I also deleted absolutely wrong sentence in the article that mu koer is literally 'dog of mine'.

Warbola 04:00, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Linguist migration theory to recycle bin?
I added Kalevi Wiik's conclusions from his recent book. In my opinion with genetic studies data he bases on his assumptions, he devastates classical linguist theory. Unless he messed with the data or omited part of it in favour of his ideas I do not see how classical linguist theory can stand much longer. Still, the frasing of my addition is not certain. One could expect more data to come from the studies on the genetic material.--Bete 12:08, 5 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the recent note, Rob117. Wiik's more radical hypotheses about language-shifts aside, a couple of quick observations. Firstly, and nothing to do with linguistics, during the last ice age, the area in and around the Ural mountains was covered with, guess what..., ice, and could not have been an Urheimat for anybody. People had to come to the Urals area and to the whole northern Europe from somewhere else. Secondly, the migration of early Finnic-speakers from Urals (and/or central Russia) westward is only suggested in linguistics-based hypotheses. There is no archaeological evidence to indicate that the peoples of the Comb Ceramic (or any earlier) culture migrated from east to west to the Balto-Scandian region. Cheers, --3 Löwi 13:49, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Wiik's theory is totally unscientific. Firstly, linguists are not claiming that people came from Volga - only the language came from there. The concept of language shift is present in the traditional view as well as in Wiik's view. Secondly, archaeological or genetic continuity cannot prove anything about the linguistic continuity. Thirdly, Wiik ignores all the best-argumented linguistic results: nowadays we know a lot about the languages in pre-Indo-European Europe, and those languages have no similarity to Uralic languages in any level. Here is my article, translated from Finnish:. --Jaakko Häkkinen 23:34, 10 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Really? What do we know about the languages of pre-Indo-European Europe?  Apart from some placenames, Basque, and questionable proposals of linguistic substrates, I don't think much is really known on this subject. --Saforrest 23:49, 24 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I second Jaakko's opinion. Wiik is an amateur in this particular field (although a great expert on phonemes) and almost all experts have debunked his theory. I attended one such session, and it was outright embarrassing. I have also spoken to Wiik in person once, and asked him about his theory. He explained that genetical evidence points towards a certain people arriving from Ukraine after the Ice Age and that he thought there was a possibility this people could have been Proto-Finns. I asked him if it weren't possible, taking that kind of reasoning, that they could have been any people at all. He agreed that it was. So as Jaakko points out, there is no scientific evidence to support Wiik's theories, no matter how interesting they might sound. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Isber (talk • contribs) 18:20, 2 July 2006 (UTC)


 * I am a little curious about how Jaakko Häkkinen knows there are 'no similarities' between pre-Indo-European languages and Uralic ? Ungarian and Finnish are not very similar either, but at least we have dictionaries of both languages and surprise : some similarities are found. What tools do you have to say about any adjacent languages 10000 years ago that they are not related? Please note that 'There is no evidence Wiik is right' and 'There is enough evidence to say with certainty that everything Wiik has said is wrong' are very different statements! Warbola 05:02, 8 March 2007 (UTC)


 * First: substrate can most reliably be found in the level of lexicon, because we can never know whether the phonetic similarities really are caused by language contact or not. But if we can find similar words, then the case is stronger. It is widely known that the vocabulary which most often has been recognized as a substrate vocabulary has no Uralic connection. The very few words which have Uralic counterparts have marginal distribution also in Uralic side and are thus most probably substrate loans in Uralic, just like they are substrate loans in Germanic or other Indo-European branches, too. Between Finnish and Hungarian there are a plenty of common words, and though they are quite dissimilar, they have regular sound correspondences. Considering the linguistic evidence I would state that "there is enough evidence to say with certainty that everything Wiik has sad is wrong". The substrate language(s) in question really have nothing to do with Uralic languages. --Jaakko Häkkinen 17:06, 24 March 2007 (UTC)


 * OK, how about 20 non-Uralic substrate languages and one Uralic? And not as scientific fact, but remote possibility? Celtic sùil (eye) seems damn similar to  Proto-Uralic *śilmä to me. A false cognate?  Warbola 01:05, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
 * fi.'puu' de.'baum' en.'wood','boom' se.'bok' ru.'buk' looks like one possibility, too.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.153.62.71 (talk) 11:59, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
 * FYI, Irish Gaelic súil and Scottish Gaelic sùil, both meaning 'eye', are derived from Proto-Celtic *sūli- (a variant form of Proto-Celtic *sāwel-) meaning 'sun' (with a relatively recent Goidelic semantic change).
 * As for the proposed cognates of Finnish puu 'tree, wood' (from Uralic *puwe), they represent three different and unrelated roots: (1) German Baum, English beam and boom (the latter a borrowing from Middle Dutch) are all from Germanic *baumaz (and *bagmaz) 'tree'; (2) English wood is from Old English wudu, with an unclear etymology; (3) and the Indo-European names of the beech tree, e.g. Russian buk (бук), Swedish buk, German Buche, etc. all come from Indo-European *bhāgó-s. To relate any of these three to Finnish puu would be pure guesswork. Pasquale (talk) 21:39, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Suoczil
There appears to be a Finno-Ugric language or dialect that calls itself "Suoczil". What is its name in English? Is there a language code for it? &mdash;Stephen 15:55, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
 * False alarm, mystery solved. It’s just another conlang...number of speakers: 1. &mdash;Stephen 09:42, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Disputes/Marcantonio
I amended the dispute section as I felt the original criticism of Angela Markantonio's work was more personal than academic. Questioning similar to Marcantonio's of the existence of a 'primordial', base language from which other languages in the language family stem from, have taken place in regards to many other language families. Thus while new in regards to Finno-Ugric languages, Dr Marcantonio's work is not quite as "new" as it seems. In general, Marcantonio's book is interesting, well-written and has caused quite a stir in a field that has been quite stagnant, and as such it should be given the respect it deserves and not categorised as just a crazy, fringe theory just because you (or I) may disagree with her. Zoe12345 21:43, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Sad but true: Marcantonio has no clue about historical linguistics. She has misunderstood just about everything - see my short text with further references (uralists reviewing her book):. --Jaakko Häkkinen 23:37, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Title of article
Isn't Finno-Ugrian the proper term for this admittedly fascinating topic? 195.188.183.124 13:50, 30 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Both Finno-Ugric and Finno-Ugrian are used, and the former seems to be more common. Finno-Ugrian languages redirects here, and I don't see any reason to change this.--AAikio 14:35, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

If we look at International Librarian practices, your hunch is absolutely right. The US Library of Congress subscribes to the the label Finno-Ugrian. http://www.loc.gov/marc/languages/language_name.html#f Cheers! Rueter 128.214.20.122 (talk) 09:11, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Origins
I shortened the discussion on genetics and Kalevi Wiik's theory in the Origins section. Much of it was irrelevant, and there were also misleading parts. Genetics is not a method for studying prehistoric languages any more than linguistics is a method for studying genetics. Hence, the following kind of statements are just misleading because they confuse genetic and linguistic origins:


 * "Thus, the Finno-Ugric languages and their modern speakers do not originate in the area near the Ural mountains, but rather likely were one of the three indigenous European ethnic groups, which together provided about 80% of modern European genetic material."

Languages do not necessarily have the same origin as the genes of their speakers. Because this article is about Finno-Ugric languages and not about the genetics of the Finno-Ugric peoples, I think it should be primarily based on what linguistics has to say about the subject. One wouldn't want to insert linguistic speculations to articles about human genetics either. --AAikio 09:25, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Celtic substratum?
This article containts the text "Conversely, there have been suggestions that the Germanic languages evolved from an Indo-European language such as Celtic imposed on a Finnic substrate, but no satisfactory proof yet exists." Well, thanks for saying that no satisfactory proof exists, that is an understatement if there ever was one. I've never heard one single linguist propose this idea. Unless somebody objects, I'm removing that sentence. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Isber (talk • contribs) 21:45, 10 September 2006 (UTC)


 * See Germanic substrate hypothesis. -- Petri Krohn 00:31, 11 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I already deleted this. There are hundreds of fringe and crank theories of language origins, and in general they should not be referred to in linguistic articles if there is no special reason for this - especially if no reference is provided. Note that the Germanic substrate hypothesis does not claim that the "Germanic languages evolved from an Indo-European language such as Celtic [!] imposed on a Finnic [!] substrate". --AAikio 07:00, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
 * yes, the "such as Celtic" part is nonsense, and the whole 'substrate hypothesis' is little more than hand-waving in the first place. dab (&#5839;) 07:26, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Vepses not in use in English
If you're an expert, please look at Talk:Vepses. Thanks, Espoo 07:25, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Magyars, Khanty, and Mansi
What is the most commonly accepted date that of the Magyars breaking off from the Khanty and Mansi tribes? Obviously they were all one tribe at some point (the Ugric tribe). Before the Magyars arrived at the Carpathian Basin with Arpad in 896, it is believed they were wondering around for a few hundred years between the Volga River and Ural Mountains. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.59.7.126 (talk) 06:46, 25 November 2006 (UTC)


 * If I recall it is something like 3,000 years ago for Ugric and 5-6,000 for Uralic. Remember though we're talking about language descent, not people.  There is not a good scientific method currently that can tie current-day speakers of a language to the same people who spoke a "proto" version of the language.  So it would be a weak practice to say with absolutes that Arpad in 896 and the Proto-Ugric speakers 2,000 years earlier were all from one tribe. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 16:47, 25 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Considering the Khanty and Mansi are located in the middle of Russia and the Magyars are all the way in Hungary and the 3 of them being the only members of the Ugric family, I think it's safe to say the Magyars, and just the Magyars broke off from the Khanty-Mansi tribe. Is there or was there any other languages in the Ugric family besides Khanty, Mansi, and Magyar that are now extinct? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.59.1.151 (talk) 13:06, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Pronunciation?
A quick hint on pronunciation would be welcome in the intro. Is it Uh-gric? Oo-gric? Yoo-gric? --Reuben 04:38, 28 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "oog-reek". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.89.165.90 (talk) 21:01, 28 November 2006 (UTC)


 * According to m-w, it's Oo-gric (or alternatively Yoo-gric). If anybody knows how to write that up in IPA, it would be useful in the intro. --Reuben 00:35, 29 November 2006 (UTC)


 * The word comes from Yugra, but people may be used to the "Ugra" pronunciations prevalent in Romance languages. kwami (talk) 08:35, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

The Kalevala and Finno-Ugric people
Does anybody think the characters in the Kalevala (if it in fact is historically accurate) such as Väinämöinen could be the ancestors of all Finno-Ugric people before they split up and were one tribe? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 168.103.81.226 (talk) 15:01, 12 December 2006 (UTC).


 * I hope this was a joke... --AAikio 16:11, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I think that Kalavala is as accurate as bible when it comes to history. But the similarities of Ahti and Poseidon are quite intesting. And also the whole theme with tuoni river and similar in greek mythology. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.155.177.30 (talk) 00:45, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

There are a lot of similarities between Odin and Väinämöinen and Santa Claus. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmarkusp (talk • contribs) 11:26, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Reword Majority
"The majority of linguists believe that Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian, among other languages, should be included in the group." This should bw reworded, as something that has given a name, cant be "considered" to be included in it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.65.192.23 (talk) 00:28, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Origins
Last paragraph of origins chapter seems to be a little vague. Certainly there are no "Sami peoples of Asia". Furthermore, I think that Finno-Ugric theory was widely accepted by Finnish scientists even before the Finnish independence. 128.214.205.4 11:24, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Rubbish
"All this comparisons of languages have been made by methods developed for Indo- European languages, not suiting agglutinative languages."

Complete rubbish and POV statement, as if somehow indo-european languages do not exhibit agglutination either. Anon, you poorly understand agglutination. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 22:10, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

The Ugric Languages
Hello I can speak Hungarian and I honestly don't see how Hungarian is any more related to Khanty and Mansi than it is to Finnish or Estonian. I don't see any more similarities with the two other Ugric languages than with any Finnic languages. 67.40.37.41 (talk) 16:01, 5 January 2008 (UTC)


 * That's because speaking a language and understanding linguistic methods are two completely separate things. Like driving a car versus being able to fix one.  --Stacey Doljack Borsody (talk) 17:13, 5 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm asking to show me some more sources proving otherwise. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.40.37.41 (talk) 19:24, 5 January 2008 (UTC)


 * What this is really about is people want to take away any uniqueness the Hungarian people has by linking it to other languages and tracing most of its words to other languages instead of the other way around. 67.41.119.57 (talk) 18:31, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

The map
The current map in this article is simply subpar. I'm having huge problems with the way the areas where the languages are spoken have been colored (little dots, I don't see a point in that), the colors themselves (cyan blue should be banned, really), and the stretched and squeezed text...

So, in good faith, I have a few suggestions on how to improve the map/make a new one:


 * The colors should be even (like in every other map in this article), not little random dots.
 * The colors should also be soft, like in this map, (i.e. no cyan blue or bright green, please) or too dark (if you are going to use dark colors, use them sparingly, and only on little areas).
 * No warped/squeezed/stretched/otherwise raped text. Seriously, that doesn't work.

I'd do it myself, but sadly I don't have the time. So, yoroshiku onegaishimasu! -- ざくら 木 15:43, 8 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I've changed the map, what do you think? Martintg (talk) 23:27, 17 January 2008 (UTC)


 * It looks much better! -- ざくら 木 17:01, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Common sense
I am not linguist, first of all, but this theory is whack.
 * RIGHT HERE, the poster should have stopped. This is completely beyond your frame of expertise to give opinions. HammerFilmFan (talk) 20:32, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

The main contradiction is connecting Hungarian to Finnish-Permic; but why? Because they are both agglutinating language? Why don't we state that WE DO NOT KNOW, we only THINK it could be connected. Even after centuries of investigation, we still don't know, we have to admit it. This article is stating that Hungarian is Finno-Ugric, punctum, that's not true.

Some facts:
 * Finnish and Hungarian have some words common, but around 600 word roots, they are all related to tundra climate (like hal/kala=fish) and basic words (like kéz/kessi=hand). The number is very small. This is why Hungarians DO NOT understand Finnish AT ALL (and vice versa).
 * The distance is huge. Even for Estonia the distance is too large (see map). Nothing in between.
 * Too many words of unknown origin in Hungarian (even in "Magyar Értelmező Szótár"), interestingly all words relating to religion is of unknown origin (isten=god, böjt=fasting, húsvét=easter), and a lot of words are from Turkish and Slavic (at least this is official statement from Science of Academy). These words are animals (like kecske=goat), so they are still basic words.

So this is official explanation (with sarcastic comments):
 * Finno-Ugric nomadic tribes from Uralic Mountains speak very few words, as they are like half apes. They are waiting for other nations to develop words for goat and they know nothing about agriculture. They are living on both sides of Ural, which is very difficult to cross, but the language is quite united.
 * Some part of the tribe decide to travel 6000km to South-West. They do this knowing it is very difficult to travel (with women, kids, houses) and we need not to forget that there were no highways at that time and no refrigerators. People needed to reserve food for long winters. I would say population of some ten thousands of Hungarians (at least!), to travel 6000km, is barely nothing.
 * They travel for long and then they arrive to Carpathian basin, where they immediately start Magyarization of all Slavs there (although there are no archeological sites showing any Slav tribe, its only taken from Chronicles), they do it very quickly, in less than 100 years everybody speaks Hungarian there. They should do this very agressively, and kill a lot of people, though no archeological sites could be found for mass murder. They still are half apes, as the language is still poor (yet the Hungarian craftmanship is very developed - what a paradox!). So the Hungarians start to migrate a lot of words from Slav, but they still need to wait till 13-14 century for the Ottomans to start to attack Hungary and hand over words so they can call the goat now "kecske", at last!

See? If you look it this way, this is not corresponding to common sense!

Here is a recommended part to include in this article:
 * Hungarian is agglutinating like Scythian, Hun language, of which is probable relating to Hungarian (but we don't know!) The root words of Hungarian is very rich, some linguists say its roots are 60,000 root words (like "szer" where it is used in "szeret"=love and "szerződés"=contract, yes they have a lot in common as anciant contracts were made on love=trust, not on interest).
 * Relation with Finno-Ugric is still feasible, as Scythian and Finno-Ugric had a "lingua franca", as the two types of people were bordering each other. So the 600 words were used to understand each other on basic level (most probably!). During this period, the grammar was also shared (probably).
 * As Hungarian had sophisticated craftmanship, even before the "ingressus"(=entering, incoming) to Carpathian Basin, it is highly questionable that the "ancient" Hungarian language was a primitive one. Words taken from Slavic and Turkish could not happen (taken only from common sense, pls note there is no evidence!). In fact, we should start talking about a process of reverse order: Slavic languge taking words from Hungarian. It is well known that Romanian (or Wallachian) language took a lot of words like "city" and even "Erdély"(Ardeul)=Transylvania, so I am pointing that it is possible from Slavic, too. An example could be "král"="király"=king, which is supposed to come from Charlemagne, but maybe, "király" is referring to "kerül"=to border something? I could cite more examples.
 * Where are all the loads of words with unknown origin come from (like words of religion)? Why not from Hungary (Scythia)??

If I was offending, pls note it was not my intension. My intension was not to put a "theory" as it is a "fact", it is dangerous. Please don't let linguists play the role of historians, and do not let them be driven by politics. Abdulka (talk) 15:26, 15 January 2008 (UTC) PS. I need to include that these ideas are not mine, but taken from Gábor Pap, historian and professor of arts. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Abdulka (talk • contribs) 15:37, 15 January 2008 (UTC)


 * As written above, this page is for discussion about the article, not the subject in general. There are individual opponents to the classification, but the consensus in the linguistic community is that Finnish, Hungarian and other Finno-Ugric languages share a common protolanguage. (This does not require many common words, areal or cultural proximity, mutual intelligibility or having the same external influences. It is very simple: they share an ancestor and that's what's required for two languages to be "related".) --Vuo (talk) 15:23, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi!

My english knowladge is not best if I have to explain something precise. Albeit I hope you will understand my point. I am not a linguistic, but I think a should answer some of these questions only with a (or mine?!?) common sense. First: I have to mention that in linguistic you can not get any proof! All what you can get are some similarity between the languages. On this similarities you can bulid up a theory. If you want evidence, you will never get answeres. This is a well known problem, but somebody are always tending to forget it.
 * How does hand and fish relate to the tundra climate? The poofs (examples???) for the first point is much more than doubtful.
 * The distance of our days doesn't play any role if we speak about the origin. It makes no sense. (Of course it does mean that the two language had a different surronding, which had a big influence on the nowadays language)
 * There are in any language tons of words, whose origins are not clarified.

Until now you have not mention any doubt, which could not be answered easily with the "popular" theory.

I don't want to comment your next three "sarcastic" means. I don't know why have you put it here. It's obvious that they are more than sarcastic and no one believe that. That's why "is it not corresponding to common sense".

For the recommended part:
 * I just wonder, if are there any written text in the hun language. I heard that its absence questions all hun-hungarian theory. But it does not belong to here.
 * If these words were only used to understand each other, they would be not part of both language! Only maximum one.
 * An approved theory says that the slavic or turkish words describe some activity or object, which were better, more appropriate, then the hungarian ones. The hungarians learn these mothods and started to use the foreign words, because their words had decscribed a bit different method. It an explanation too. Or maybe it was only a fashon. (Like nowadays the english words)

"Please don't let linguists play the role of historians, and do not let them be driven by politics"

What do you want to say with this? The linguists should not investigate the languages?!? And anyway You should not cite here opinions of an arts professor, even he has a linguistical hobby, even he is a wise man.

Tzg6sa (talk) 11:42, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

We've been through this with back in 2004. If you can cite academic literature criticising the hypothesis, you are most welcome to do that. Either way, WP:NOR says Wikipedia isn't interested in your personal opinions or musings on the matter. Get them published academically if they are worth anything, and then we'll be able to quote them. dab (𒁳) 17:56, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

I agree to the first poster that the uralic migration is quite vierd theory. It would make more sence if you would put the starting point of the migration to ukraine. Then colour the places where sami and samoyedi people are and declare them the first people there. Then colour the space between ukrain and finland, ukrain and ural, ukrain and hungary. Then colour the huns, sarmatians and russians there with different colours. You get what is pretty much the map of liguistics at the moment.

I'm however open to the idea that all the finnish tribes mixed with the other tribes of the area. Honewer finnish seem to have hold on on hunting and gathering. "fenni" can actually be translated to "wanderer" "gatherer" and "seeker".

And offcource finnish cant understand hungarian. We reformed/standardiced our language totally. We cant even understand the karelians we are related to in straight line. (My grand parents speak 2 karelian languages I cant understand.) I also spend a lot of time with estonian guy who speaks only estonian and russian. The communication is really hard when you go above basic trade or stuff that happens everyday. But I have to say that when I bothered to leave out the suffixes he understood me quite well. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.155.177.30 (talk) 00:28, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Tappara-Tabar-Topor
I think that tappara is probably from Slavic word topor that means axe/hatchet. This word can be of the Iranian descent though. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.234.68.206 (talk) 14:55, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

In finnish it means large two bladed axe. It is indeed iranian/turkish word for axe but I cant remember the spelling. (Was it Tabayyra or something?) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.155.177.30 (talk) 23:10, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Finno Ugrian loans to Great Russian language
Not analyzed at all. The common principal structure to make a language is the same in Hungarian and Finnish languages. Take just an example. There is a place in former Upper Hungary, also called now Karpathian Ruthenia named in Hungarian language Kiraly-Haza. Kuninkaan talo. Can be transliterated either House of King or House of Royal in English language. There are hundred of similar examples which follows the same rule in both Hungarian and Finnish (also Estonian) languages. Big Russian language as it is today is very young language compared to Ancient Old Slavonic Proto Language. There are several examples where Finno Ugrian principle was adopted in Big Russian place names. Just to point out the use to name places along on that time "roads" and "highways" e.g. rivers. In the areas which were inhabited by the Finno Ugrians originally lived in plateau between Veixeli (Vistula) and Uirali (Ural) and in coniferous forest zone from Rava bend (Great Volga bend) to Ice Sea (Arctic Sea) one may found thousands of place names still in 1:200.000 Russian topographic maps named (copied from) originally named by Finno Ugrians as; Ala-, Keski-, Ylä-, and Pien-, Suur- or Iso-, which were transliterated in Big Russian language quite late in historical times as; Nizhnij-,(-jaja, - jeje, - ije). Srednij-, (-jaja, - jeje, - ije). Verhnij- (jaja, - jeje, - ije), Malyi-, (- jaja, - jeje, -ije). Bolshoj-, (- jaja, - jeje, - ije). But when one goes out of this area the naming following this principle end to the wall. I am not a linguistic, but I have eyes, can read and write to observe matters such as these, already noted by scholars in St.Petersburg Academy of Science more than a hundred years ago. Also the naming lakes, rivers, and other water sources followed ancient Finnish style to Black- or White-. One can quess for which reasons. All Finns, whose grand mothers lived long enough (those born in late 1800´s) know the principle, because she told them why such a naming had been created for over hundreds of generations and still used in Finno Ugrian world. The first Russian villages which have still original Baltic names appear according to 1:200.000 map just west of River Zhizdra around town named Kozelsk (Koziel or Kozel) in Kaluga Province and still named Griva (Mouth). All around them are villages named after the old Finno Ugrian system. Nearby is also Djatkovo, an ancient center of Comb Ceramic Culture, which usually is linked direct to Finno Ugrians.

Peharps also this source should be mentioned linked with Finno Ugrians:
 * Tapani Lehtinen: "Kielen vuosituhannet" Publisher SKS. Printed Gummerus Kirjapaino Oy Jyväskylä 2007. ISBN 978-951-746-969-1 Worth of reading for those who can. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.115.122.217 (talk) 07:16, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Denial
See http://www.acronet.net/~magyar/english/1997-3/JRNL97B.htm —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.194.34.71 (talk) 14:16, 19 May 2009 (UTC) Dr. Laszlo Maracz seems to be a native speaker of one of the allegedly related languages. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.137.170.8 (talk) 08:48, 20 May 2009 (UTC) Wikipedia editor Antifinnugor seems to be a native speaker of the same. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.141.122.96 (talk) 08:42, 23 May 2009 (UTC) Maracz and Antifinnugor seem to speak Hungarian. They both seem to have studied Finnish minutely.
 * There is quite a lot of denialism of Hungarian being a Finno-Ugric language that needs to be addressed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.96.238.72 (talk) 00:46, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Perhaps in the Hungarian article, and under Ural-Altaic languages. However, minority viewpoints do not need to be repeated in articles that address a mainstream viewpoint in detail. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 14:39, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
 * It's somewhat amusing that fringe-theorists have taken to places like YouTube with a vengeance to spread their agenda. HammerFilmFan (talk) 20:23, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Dr. Laszlo Maracz was born in a Hungarian family in Holland. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.79.29.112 (talk) 12:45, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
 * The current Hungarian government of autocrat PM Viktor Orban is supressing finno-ugric-uralic scientific lingusitics due to political scheming (e.g. to be cozy with Erdogan and the Turkmenbashi) and so they favour turkic / inner steppe asian origin ideas of the hungarian genetical and vernacular identity. Even schoolbooks have been rewritten to reflect the new ideology. More or less the magyar equivalent of young earth creationism... 84.236.41.32 (talk) 13:19, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
 * This summarization of your is incorrect. Not any scientific linguistics are supressed, on the other hand other research are allowed and carried out in those directions which have been anyway suppressed since ever. Nothing to do with any cozyness with some Turkics, Steppe or inner-Asian roots are anyway not necessarily Turkic...(KIENGIR (talk) 19:19, 14 August 2020 (UTC))

Structural features (failure due translation)
Quote from the text: "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."

It is true that they lack grammatical gender and futhermore they lack gender in speech as well. But the translation for "he" and "she" is bit more complex. While the translation in finnish is indeed "hän". The votic "tämä" and estonian "temä" translates to finnish "tämä" or "minä". This would be in english "this one" and "I".

So you need to remember that: Minä, Sinä, Hän, Me, Te, He & Se = I, You, Him/Her, Us (two or more), You (two or more), Them (two or more) & It Nämä, Tämä, Tuo, Noi = These (ones), This (one), That (one), Those (ones) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.155.177.30 (talk) 22:54, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Estonian and Votic en (the cognate of Finnish _hän_) means "self", not "him/her". You cannot directly transfer Finnish meanings to related words in other languages (see false friends). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tropylium (talk • contribs) 12:40, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Quate from text: "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')."

This one seems good but the english translation is vierd again. The northern sami one actually translates to "my dog". It's quite clear Mu=My and Beana=Dog. All those words "Mu" "Mun" "Mu" are same ones and they have dimension of owning. The translation for word "Me" is Minä (fin), Mine (est) and I think sami people say "mie" when they talk about "Me" or "I".

I think someone should rewrite that part but I cant do it because I dont have a clue about those english words and grammatical terms there. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.155.177.30 (talk) 22:54, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
 * No problem here either. Mu etc. is not given in the translation as "me", but, correctly, as "of me". -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 12:40, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

This article vs. Uralic languages
These two articles duplicate much content. I've started to transfer some of it (eg. the subclassification discussion) under that one. Please consider aiming further contributions on the topic there, too.

-- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 14:47, 23 November 2009 (UTC)


 * …The vocabulary and featural sections seem particularly misleading: much of what is described here in fact applies to Uralic as a whole. Agglutination, possessiv suffixes, seven original cases, and words like *sëxni, *meni-, *kala, *śilmä are solidly PU features. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 18:02, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Larin Paraske
Was Larin Paraske an Ingrian Finn or an Izhorian = Ingrian Karelian ?

In "Näin lauloi Larin Paraske" SKS 1980, p.149 it's said, that both of her parents were Ingrians not Finns and she grew up in Ingria, near to Finnish border.

 Molemmat olivat inkeroisia, joilla tarkoitetaan Inkerin ja Kannaksen karjalaisperäisiä asukkaita 

62.65.214.190 (talk) 20:24, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
 * She was Izhorian. That is what inkeroisia (a plural form, btw) means. Monegasque (talk) 12:08, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Tshudic?
I recently ran across the term "Tshudic" in reference to the Finno-Ugric languages and their speakers in some late 19th and early 20th century works. Is this still a valid descriptor? Even if outdated, it probably warrants a mention in the article, with perhaps a redirect in case anyone else decides to search for it. Thanks, -- Aryaman (talk) 17:23, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * See Chud. Appropriate redirects might be needed, though. -- Sander Säde 18:06, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Done. Cheers, -- Aryaman (talk) 07:54, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Mutually intelligible
Currently the article includes: According to Estonian philologist Mall Hellam, the only entire sentence that is mutually intelligible is, "The living fish swims in water" (although it is not in fact mutually intelligible)[7].

What? Is it mutually intelligible or not? Ordinary Person (talk) 12:53, 3 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Not. Between Estonian and Finnish it is, of course (quite similar languages), but Hungarians don't understand the others, and the others don't understand the Hungarian version. Qorilla (talk) 14:47, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Weak argument

 * Proponents of the traditional binary division note, however, that the invocation of extensive contact influence on vocabulary is at odds with the grammatical conservatism of Samoyedic.

That's an extremely unconvincing argument. There are all kinds of minority languages which have experienced strong contact influence on lexicon, going as far as to replace part of the native (including some basic) lexicon (partial relexification), while retaining all or most of the native grammar (more technically speaking: morphosyntax; possibly including the borrowing but not replacement of weakly bounded morphemes, as well as both lexical and grammatical calques, that is, structural influences), i. e., exactly what is postulated for Samoyedic. This is the "language maintenance" scenario in the typological scheme of Thomason and Kaufman (1988). Think Latin influence on early Brythonic or Albanian (Basque is another example), or Iranian influence on Armenian. Only when the contact influence becomes overwhelming, the native morphosyntax tends to erode as well in addition to the replacement of a strong majority of the native lexicon; this can result in a largely relexified and partly "regrammarified" language, as in the case of "mixed" languages, and this is also what we see in cases of language attrition (it could be argued that "mixed languages" are frozen in a state of attrition, and have avoided the road to complete assimilation and extinction even more narrowly than Brythonic, Albanian or Armenian have). Samoyedic has never gone that far because it retains the Uralic morphosyntax to an overwhelming degree. Lexical influence always precedes grammatical influence, at least in a language maintenance situation; that's a basic result of language contact research.

I'm not even sure about the grammatical conservatism of Samoyedic, for that matter. It does not seem either particularly conservative nor particularly innovative compared to the other Uralic languages (the objective conjugation or the dual might equally be innovations rather than retentions). The only Uralic languages which can be said to be truly innovative grammatically, namely Hungarian and the Finnic languages, are also marked by remarkably high amounts of lexical borrowings from Indo-European languages, which is consistent with the conclusion mentioned above.

It is, of course, quite possible that many of the divergent lexemes in Samoyedic are actually inherited and were replaced (either by borrowing or native lexemes or formations) in the western branches, but that would have no bearing on the validity of Finno-Ugric. The development can still be an areal one. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 15:16, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
 * You make some good arguments. They just need to get into some Uralicist paper somewhere specifically. I get the impression a FU/Smy bifurcation is currently low on explicit supporters (a lot more may adhere to it merely out of tradition), but as it has yet to be officially rejected by most of the field either, we're stuck calling the situation "disputed" as long as a couple people like Janhunen still hang onto the primaryness of Samoyedic in literature & manage to get off without critique.


 * (FWIW a future aim of mine is to merge this and a couple similar articles around here into a single Classification of the Uralic languages discussion.) -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 00:06, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

North American Indians has Ob-Ugric loanwords
Since linguists found traces of Ob-Ugrian loanwords in the language of the North-American Indians, Finno-Ugric theory needs revision. Ob-Ugric loanwords in North-Amercia can only be explained as North-Amercian Indians brought them with themselves at the time they migrated there (around 10.000BC) from Siberia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.183.245.214 (talk) 12:23, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
 * I assume you're referring to the "Cal-Ugric" proposal involving the Penutian languages. This is very much a fringe viewpoint supported by maybe two or three linguists and seems unlikely to be anything more than a coincidence.
 * Also, the proposal does not suggest the historical scenario you suggest here: rather, they assume some Ugric shoot-off hiking off to the Americas around the 1st millennium BCE and eventually becoming or contributing to the formation of Penutian. (Still, a couple look-alikes in the vocabulary, scattered among the dozens of different languages considered Penutian, doesn't support that kind of a conclusion either.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tropylium (talk • contribs) 19:18, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

This also determines the fact that Ugrian languages are more ancient than Finnic languages (ca. 6000 BC). Ugrian is the root and Finno-Ugric languages formed later. So we can say Finno-Ugric and Hungarian are related, but not the way we thought they would be. Based on that the common words in Finno-Ugrian and Hungarian languages probably come from that ancient Ugrian language. 81.183.245.214 (talk) 12:23, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
 * It's hard to understand what this would even mean. Languages are not "ancient" in any other sense than the date when they were spoken (i.e. ancient Greek is ancient because it was spoken in antiquity), and renaming Proto-Uralic "ancient Ugric" wouldn't change anything. Some kind of a scenario where the family formed by Finno-Permic "converging" towards Ugric, then? Not workable. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 19:18, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Eastern and Central Europe
Hey guys, just wanted to give the heads up, I am going to make a minor edit in this page. The "Geographic distribution" section says "Eastern and northern Europe, North Asia". This section should include Central Europe, as the largest Finno-Ugric ethnic group, Hungarians live in Central Europe. I'll make the change. --StarOfFlames (talk) 21:29, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Finno-Ugric as name
Can somebody explain why it is Finno-Ugric (ie. 'Finno' is first in the name) when there are c. twice as many 'Ugric' (ie. large part Hungarian) speakers of this language group as the second-most (Finnish-speakers), and who make up the majority of speakers? On what basis is Finnic given priority? Explanation of the origin of the name might be useful in the article. Dare I suggest that Ugro-Finnic sounds possibly equally as contrived...? Hunor-Koppany (talk) 14:03, 11 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Interesting question. The term "Ugro-Finnic" gets about 5000 Ghits, so it's indeed out there, if much rarer than the opposite. I suspect this has to do with the fact that the concept of a Ugric group was crystallized relatively early on, while it took a while to determine how should one define a 'Finnic' group centered on Finnish. I.e. the term would mean "Finnish, Ugric and everything in between", not "Finnic + Ugric".
 * This is, however, all a guess. I have not seen a discussion of the term's development in any overview of the field's history.
 * …and we could even ask: if we're naming groups after their geographically farthest removed members, perhaps "Sami-Ugric" vel sim. would be more appropriate yet? ;) Trɔpʏliʊm  • blah 00:27, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

'Uralic' would be the best and the most neutral name. It is strange to call, for example, Maris and Mordvinians "Finno-Ugric" because they definitely are not Finnish nor Ugric. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmarkusp (talk • contribs) 11:36, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Many linguists believe that Maris and Mordvinians are closer to Finns (Finno-Permic) than to Ugrics, and that "Uralic" is a different thing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.249.44.69 (talk) 08:53, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

No list of Finno-Ugric languages?
I was surprised not to see a list (or tree) of Finno-Ugric languages in this article. In fact, I suspect looking for such a list might be the single most common reason people visit this article. The list of ethnicities who speak Finno-Ugric languages doesn't correspond to the languages themselves. Given that it doesn't seem to have been discussed in the Talk page before, is there a reason no such list is included? If not, I'll add one as a new section, but I don't want to research and write one just to have it deleted. There may be debate on the inclusion of some particular languages, to the extent that the Finno-Ugric designation is debated, but I still think a list would be useful to most readers, just as the corresponding lists appear prominently in the articles on Romance and Slavic languages. 153.31.112.24 (talk) 18:16, 27 January 2015 (UTC)


 * It would be to some extent arbitrary (are varieties that don't occur in the list not languages?), and I don't see much point. It's not the kind of info we normally include in lang-family articles.  You can always navigate the subarticles or just view the category.  — kwami (talk) 19:26, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
 * We have a list over at Uralic languages, though. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 01:32, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

A new map?
Hello everyone,

I have made a new map that looks better than the current map on this article. The link to the image is https://i.imgur.com/CK4i8tU.png Before immediately changing the old map to this new one, can someone check if this map is accurate and good? Thanks in advance. GalaxMaps (talk) 13:47, 1 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Lots of questions come to mind easily:
 * typo: "Komi-Peryak"
 * why is there a second Permyak group to the west of Udmurt?
 * why are Finnic and Volga groups divided by language, but Sami just as Western / Eastern? (Same, for that matter, re Mansi and Khanty, though that comes up in a lot of maps.)
 * why no Ludian?
 * why Mari diaspora but no Mordvin or Udmurt diaspora?
 * way too big of a distribution for Ingrian, even if it's supposed to be historical and not modern
 * and of course, maps preferrably should have sources, not just be winged by copying previous unsourced maps.
 * Current best-quality maps of Uralic languages are probably those by the URHIA project — would be nice if some of these could be adopted or adapted for WP (I do not think they're currently licensed for directly being used here).
 * -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 15:39, 15 February 2023 (UTC)