On Sun, 16 Mar 2003 03:20:45 +0100 (CET), José Andrés Alonso
<ocitartson@...> wrote:

>Secondly. I have studied Yukaghir language (two years)
>and I cannot accept a Uralo-Yukaghir relationship. But
>I am not anybody in order to assure it. Irina
>Nikolayeva, the most respectable specialist in the
>field (and a fluent speaker of Yukaghir and
>Hungarian), is STILL working about this realtionships,
>without any firm conclusion after 12 years (more or
>less) of intensive study. At any rate, specialists in
>Uralic linguistics do not accept it either.

Well, if I remember correctly, the possibility of a link between
Uralic and Yukaghir was first suggested by Collinder.

But this is an important point. It is easy to lump language families
together if you don't know anything about them. Once you learn more,
you become aware of the complexities, and things are not so easy
anymore. I've seen hypothetical family trees of relatively obscure
language families (say, Nilo-Saharan) with six or seven layers of
subbranching, while for the best-studied and best-known language
family (IE), just about the only subgroups universally recognized are
Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic.

Yukaghir is a case in point. I know practically nothing about
Yukaghir, so it's easy for me to bundle it together with Uralic.
After all, the 1/2 personal pronouns are met, tet, pl. mit, tit, the
animate interrogative pronoun is kin, and they have a genitive in -n
and a locative and ablative in -Ra(n) and -Rat (cf. Finnish minä, sinä
(*tinä), pl. me, te, ken-, Proto-Samoyed *-n, *-kana, *-kata). But if
it were that easy, Yukaghir would have long since been incorporated in
Uralic as a separate branch besides Finno-Ugric and Samoyed. To
mention one complication only: the Yukaghir plural seems to be -p(e)
or -pul (is -l the focus marker?). No trace of that in Uralic
(although I would argue that there are possible connections with the
plural markers PIE *-bhi- and PKartvelian *-ebi-).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...