Talk:Proto-Uralic language

"One view is that there were only two archiphonemic non-initial vowels /a/ and /i/, realized as four allophones as per vowel harmony"

This is technicly wrong, for a, ä, i and ï were phonems.
 * But not noninitially, that's the point in the theory. --Vuo 19:21, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Any particular reason why the lative is called allative? And why its ending is claimed to be -η? Some suffixes and words also look different than the ones I have mostly encountered.


 * The lative ending *-ŋ is found in Samoyed and Mordvin, and this also probably gave the Saami lative *-k and Finnic *-k ~ *-n through sound change in word-final position. And you're right, lative is the traditional term; I'll fix this. The reconstructions derive from J. Janhunen, Uralilaisen kantakielen sanastosta (1981) and P. Sammallahti, Historical Phonology of the Uralic Languages (1988); these are generally considered the most up-to-date references on Proto-Uralic word-root reconstructions. --AAikio 18:02, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Correspondences
Hi! Could you, please, add a table of regular phonological correspondences? Or if you send me the data (in any format), I can put it into a wiki-form ;-) Petusek

IPA
I just added the IPA. Please tell me if I made any mistakes – no, don't tell me, just correct them. :-)

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 12:45 CEST | 2006/9/15

Hm, I think a should be swiched to ɑ?


 * I'm not sure if it is entirely appropriate to give the IPA equivalents in this article. IPA is a transcription used primarily by phoneticians for phonetic reasons. Since we have a reconstructed proto-language, we can't know the exact sound valuys of the reconstructed phonemes anyway, and using IPA might perhaps give a misleading impression of a phonetically exact reconstruction. In general, there's a lot of controversy surrounding the phonetic values of some of the reconstructed Proto-Uralic sounds - such as the vowel *ï and the "spirants".--AAikio 06:44, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Edits to "Possible relations with other families" section
Høst,

I welcome the new names you add.

I have normalized the order in which these names are cited. I thought of citing them by date of birth or floruit, but it would probably make more sense to cite them in the order of the principal works in which their authors defended a relation between Uralic and some other language family. However, I only have information on this for some: Rask 1818, Castrén 1844, Sweet 1900, Pedersen 1924, Collinder 1965, Fortescue 1998, Greenberg 2000, not for S. Starostin or the names you add.

I tend to agree with you that Indo-Uralic has not just "a few" but a "steadily growing number" of supporters, but I have removed the addition on two grounds: (1) those opposed to a genetic relationship between Indo-European and Uralic will view the statement as subjective and (2) as set forth in the Wikipedia article Indo-Uralic languages, there is an important difference between viewing Indo-European and Uralic as genetically related and viewing Indo-European and Uralic as forming a genetic node. Indo-Uralic, in its strictest sense, should be confined to the latter, i.e. to the thesis that Indo-European and Uralic are more closely related than either is to any other language family, such as Chukotko-Kamchatkan or Eskimo-Aleut. See also the article Uralo-Siberian languages, which presents a competing (though overlapping) theory to the Indo-Uralic one. Now, of the "steadily growing number of supporters" that we both agree are being won to the cause of IE - Uralic genetic relationship, it is not clear to me that most are also espousing an IE - Uralic genetic node. They may, but I don't have any clear sense of this. The only contemporary linguists I am sure support an Indo-Uralic node are Frederik Kortlandt and Allan Bomhard.

Regards, VikSol 07:38, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

I have changed "Ural-Altaic has virtually none" (i.e. virtually no supporters) to "Ural-Altaic has none" because I do not know of any linguist who currently supports the Ural-Altaic grouping. If someone brings forward one or more linguists who do the language should be changed, but in the meantime this seems more accurate (see Altaic languages).

Note that I am not saying that a relation between Uralic and Altaic has no support. In fact, such a relation is supported by all of the following linguists (quoted from article): "Rask, Castrén, Pedersen, Fortescue, Greenberg, Starostin" &mdash; and by many others besides, past and present. Rather, the question at issue is whether Uralic and Altaic have an especially close relation, closer for instance than Uralic and Indo-European or Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut or than Altaic (if defined as Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic) and Korean. To reject the Ural-Altaic grouping is not to reject a relation between Uralic and Altaic, but simply to maintain that the relation between Uralic and Altaic is no closer than that between each of them and one or more other language families.

VikSol 03:35, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Alright, I have found one linguist who does support Ural-Altaic, Angela Marcantonio (cf. ). So Høst was right to put in the "virtually" here, which I have restored. VikSol 07:33, 31 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Just a small note: Angela Marcantonio quite obviously does not support Ural-Altaic; in fact, she does not even support Uralic, but instead claims that these languages are genetically unrelated, or at least not demonstrably related. This becomes evident from reading her book "The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics". Quite another thing is that her arguments are completely untenable, and have been rejecte dby virtually all Uralic specialist - but in any case it is a misrepresentation to characterize her as an adherent of the Ural-Altaic theory. --AAikio (talk) 08:58, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Dr Aikio,

We certainly do not want to “misrepresent” anyone. You have the advantage of having read Angela Marcantonio’s book. I made the statement concerning Marcantonio's views on the basis of Johanna Laasko’s review of her book, where we find such statements as:


 * AM criticises Uralists for rejecting Budenz's original ideas of Uralo-Altaic relatedness.


 * Rehabilitating the Uralo-Altaic hypothesis? [section heading]


 * AM wipes this argumentation off the table with one simple explanation: as these elements do not always appear in all Uralic languages but are often attested in Altaic and other Eurasiatic languages, they cannot constitute compelling evidence!


 * In Finland, as well, the relatedness with the "Altaic" peoples was rejected - AM claims – for ideological reasons above all!

These statements create the impression that Marcantonio believes that:


 * The Altaic language family is valid (obviously a controversial view today).

This is – at least on the face of it – pretty close to Castrén’s original proposal of Altaic, which was nearly equivalent to Ural-Altaic, since he associated Finno-Ugric and Samoyed with Turkic, Mongolic, and Manchu, if my information is correct. As far as I know, Castrén did not group Finno-Ugric and Samoyed more closely than, say, Samoyed and Turkic. (In fact, I would be grateful if you could inform us of exactly which families Castrén included in “Altaic”.)
 * The Uralic subfamilies are related to Altaic, but are not related to each other more closely than they are to Altaic.

That is why I identified Marcantonio as a supporter of Ural-Altaic. Admittedly, the identification is only approximate, as she does not accept a unitary Uralic. It seems to me that her thesis, as characterized by Laasko, is so close to Ural-Altaic that one might consider it to be something closely akin to supporting it. If you can show me otherwise, I will happily take out the “virtually”.

Respectfully, VikSol 22:07, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Language code
Does this protolanguage have a ISO language code? As Proto-Indo-European is ine-pro? Jackwolfroven (talk) 03:25, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Sound laws
I might be starting a new article Uralic sound laws at some point (to which material from the slightly messily framed page Regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and other Uralic languages could also be moved), but for now I will be adding some details on this article. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 23:58, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

To do

 * Main initial-syllable vowel correspondences. Still in many respects a debated issue, but we'll see what can be done. At least correspondences between Samic, Finnic, Mordvinic, Samoyedic, possibly also Mari should be doable.
 * There are about eight different models of Permic vowel history, with relatively little agreement between them. Permic languages or Proto-Permic language might be the best place to go into detail on these.
 * Correspondences between Ugric and the rest of Uralic are by contrast underresearched and more than a rough overview may not be achievable.
 * Initial consonant correspondences
 * Medial consonant correspondences
 * Notes on research history

Subjective and objective conjugations
In the section "grammar", under the paragraph "verbs", the text claims that "Some scholars argue that there were separate subjective and objective conjugations, but this is disputed; clear reflexes of the objective conjugation are found in only the easternmost branches, and hence it may also represent an areal innovation." As far as I know, Hungarian is a western Uralic language featuring subjective and objective verb conjugations as well. Could this be an error? What do you all think? Does the author of the text dismiss Hungarian as a non-Uralic language? Etelai (talk) 10:05, 12 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Hungarian is an eastern branch, with its closest relatives Khanty and Mansi. Rua (mew) 10:54, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer! Pretty fascinating how due to migrations the Hungarian language came to be spoken in the heart of Europe. Etelai (talk) 22:24, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

Example vocabulary
The earlier list deleted by User:Sagotreespirit was from Janhunen (1981b), who also discusses the evidential value of these words for the dating and location of Proto-Uralic. A slightly newer version of the same approach is found in Häkkinen (2007), if anyone feels like working on this. The reconstructions should be probably cited separately though, Häkkinen simply follows UEW instead of updating them in any way. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 17:58, 5 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the citation. Now that I know it's from a reliable source, you can restore the list if you'd like. — Sago tree spirit  (talk) 15:11, 7 January 2021 (UTC)