User:Tropylium/Shtuff

Uralic isoglosses
Soundchanges to main branches and proposed suborganization

Potentially sorcable material ex Finno-Ugric languages
The birthplace of the Finno-Ugric languages cannot be located with certainty. Central and northern Russia west of the Ural mountains is generally assumed to be the most likely spot, perhaps around the 3rd millennium BC. This is suggested by the high intralinguistic family diversity around the middle Volga River where three highly distinct branches of the Uralic family, Mordvinic, Mari, and Permic are located. Also reconstructed plant and animal names (including spruce, Siberian pine, Siberian Fir, Siberian larch, brittle willow, elm, and hedgehog) are consistent with this localization. Reconstructed Proto-Finno-Ugric contains Iranic loanwords, notably the words for "honeybee", "honey" and "hatchet" (tappara in Finnish, tabar in Iranic), probably from the time when Iranic tribes (such as Scythians and Sarmatians) inhabited the Eurasian steppes.

There is evidence that before the arrival of the Slavic speaking tribes to the area of modern-day Russia, speakers of Finno-Ugric languages may have been scattered across the whole area between the Urals and the Baltic Sea. This was the distribution of the Comb Ceramic Culture, a stone age culture which appears to have corresponded to the Finno-Ugric speaking populations, c. 4200 BC–c. 2000 BC.

There have been attempts to relate the Finno-Ugric languages to the Indo-European languages, in the so called Indo-Uralic theories, but there are not enough similarities to link them with any certainty. Similar inflectional endings exist, but whether or not they are genetically related is not resolvable. A common lexicon not attributable to borrowing is thin, and no sound laws are established.

The theory that the Finno-Ugric birthplace originally covered a very large area in Northern Europe has been supported more by archaeological and genetic data than by linguistic evidence. Notably, the controversial Finnish academic Kalevi Wiik has argued that Proto-Finno-Ugric was the original language in most of Northern and Central Europe, and that the earliest Finno-Ugric speakers and their languages originated in the territory of modern Ukraine (the so-called "Ukrainian refuge") during the last glacial period, when the whole of northern Europe was covered with ice. This hypothesis, however, has been rejected by nearly all experts in Finno-Ugric comparative linguistics; Wiik's model has been criticized for confusing genetic, archaeological and linguistic concepts, and some see the theory as unscientific.

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