Indouralica

 

----- Original Message -----

From: simona_klemencic@...

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 1999 10:28 PM

Subject: [cybalist] Indouralica

Hello everybody, I'm an Indo-European Studies last year student from Ljubljana (Slovenia). Our late professor Bojan Cop wrote a series of articles on the "Indo-Uralic" theory. My professors say it seems to be very convincing. I find it temptive myself and I'm thinking of studying the articles through. But before I start I'd like to know what others think about it. Does anybody know this particular theory? Above all I want to read about the facts that speak against it. I mean specific things, not general. Is there anybody in this group who is particularly interested in this field? I'd appreciate any suggestions or thoughts. Thanks, Simona Klemencic Dear Simona, The Indo-Uralic hypothesis is one of a number of schemata assuming various language families of the Old World to be genetically related to one another: one could mention the Indo-Semitic hypothesis (Indo-European + Afroasiatic), the Uralo-Altaic hypothesis (Uralic + Altaic), and the famous Nostratic hypothesis (Indo-European + [Uralic + Yukaghir] + [Altaic + Korean + Japanese] + Kartvelian + Afroasiatic + [Dravidian + Elamite]). The term "Indo-Uralic" was coined, or at least popularised, I believe, by the famous Uralicist Björn Collinder, himself a supporter of an "Indo-European + Uralic" macrofamily.   The proposal rests on a number of apparently solid lexical equations -- Proto-Uralic *nimi : Proto-Indo-European *nom-(e)n- 'name', PU *weti : PIE *wed-o:r 'water', Proto-Finno-Permic (PU?) *kälü (or *kälV-wV) : PIE g(e)lou- 'sister-in-law' (Slovene zolva), Proto-Finno-Ugric *meti 'honey': PIE *medhu 'mead' -- and also on several matching pronouns and grammatical morphemes in both reconstructed protolanguages. I suppose you're familiar with arguments in favour of the hypothesis if you feel tempted to accept it. Since you ask for "facts that speak against it", here are a few:   The Uralic languages have for thousands of years been influenced by the languages of the neighbouring Indo-European communities. It is well known (and hardly surprising) that there are Germanic and Baltic loanwords especially in the Baltic Finnic and Saamic branches of Uralic. However, Finnish scholars (e.g. Jorma Koivulehto) have recently discovered whole layers of more ancient loans (mostly, but not exclusively in Finno-Ugric) which are demonstrably of Proto-Iranian and Proto-Aryan (= Indo-Iranian) origin. There are diagnostic features (such as the behaviour of *k, *g, *gh in the satem languages, the development of vowels, and the palatalisation of velars before front vowels) that make it possible to establish the relative chronology of those borrowings and also to prove that they ARE borrowings rather than true cognates of the corresponding IE words. Some loans are old enough to be considered "dialectal" Proto-Indo-European. They are preserved like insects in amber thanks to the phonological conservativeness of the Uralic languages. Koivulehto even claims that PIE "laryngeals" have distinct reflexes in words borrowed into Uralic!   Real cognates, if any, would therefore be buried under heaps of loans. The oldest loans would have undergone all the Uralic sound changes just like the native lexical stock of Proto-Uralic. This makes each individual equation suspect; and their cumulative weight is not considerable (there aren't too many plausible-looking potential cognates).   It has been argued that *weti (probably the most celebrated case) is not a Proto-Uralic word at all, since it has no cognates in Saami or Ostyak, and that the PU "water" word was in fact *śäčä (I hope you can read the diacritics; they are encoded using Central European ISO 8859-2 = Latin-2), *weti being a synonymous loan from PIE. One would not normally expect a word for "water" to be borrowed, but such things do happen from time to time. After all, the Finnish words for "daughter", "sister" and "mother" were borrowed from Germanic! The occurrence of words similar to *medhu 'mead' not only in the "Nostratic" set but also in Chinese and Etruscan is quite certainly the consequence of its being an important culture word, easily borrowed just like "wine", "oil", "chocolate" or "vodka".   The similarity of pronouns and inflections (such as the accusative ending *-m or interrogative pronouns in PU *k- : PIE *kw-) is at first glance impressive, but one must bear in mind that similar grammatical morphemes recur in unrelated languages for the simple reason that they are usually short and composed of commonly occurring sounds, do not involve consonant clusters, complex articulations, etc. This strongly increases the likelihood of coincidental similarity. Furthermore, there may be cross-linguistic preferences favouring the occurrence of specific sounds in certain grammatical functions (e.g. [m] in first-person pronouns and inflections) for reasons that have to do with universal sound-symbolism. Grammatical morphemes should therefore be used with utmost caution in proving genetic relatedness.   What would convince the sceptics? The same things that make any IE language unmistakably one of the family. Shared patterns of lexical derivation, similar word-forming suffixes (preferably made up of a characteristic combination of sounds), morphophonological processes unique to the languages in question, regular sound correspondences between words belonging to the basic semantic fields -- body parts, elements of nature, kinship terms (rather than words of civilisation)... The question is, can we reasonably expect such a degree of affinity between distantly related languages? If not, the worse for hypotheses postulating distant relationship, for they will never be proved "beyond reasonable doubt".   If you want my personal opinion on "Indo-Uralic", I'd much sooner accept this particular grouping than any other fashionable macrofamily (Nostratic, Amerind, Dene-Caucasian, Eurasiatic, Austric, or indeed one uniting all the languages of the human race). To be sure, I regard the evidence in favour of it as PROMISING rather than "very convincing", but given the lively progress of Uralic studies in recent years one may reasonably hope that the question of possible Indo-Uralic connections will yet be seriously discussed, re-evaluated and perhaps resolved.   Best regards, Piotr Gąsiorowski