Finno-Ugric Languages - Origins

Origins

Attempts at reconstructing a Proto-Finno-Ugric protolanguage—that is, a common ancestor of all Uralic languages except for the Samoyedic languages—are largely indistinguishable from Proto-Uralic, suggesting that Finno-Ugric may not be a historical grouping but a geographical one, with Samoyedic being distinct due to lexical borrowing rather than actually being historically divergent. It has been suggested that the area where Proto-Finno-Ugric was spoken reached between the Baltic Sea and the Ural mountains.

Traditionally, the main set of evidence for the genetic proposal of Proto-Finno-Ugric has come from vocabulary. A large amount of vocabulary (e.g., the numerals "one", "three", "four" and "six"; the body-part terms "hand", "head") is only reconstructed up to the level of Proto-Finno-Ugric level, while only words with a Samoyedic equivalent have been reconstructed for Proto-Uralic. This methodology has been criticised, as no coherent explanation other than inheritance has been presented for the origin of most of the Finno-Ugric vocabulary (though it does include a number of old loanwords from Proto-Indo-European or its immediate successors). The Samoyedic group has undergone a longer period of independant development, and its divergent vocabulary could be due to mechanisms of replacement such as language contact. (The Finno-Ugric group is usually dated to approximately 4000 years of age, the Samoyedic a little over 2000.) 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.

The consonant *š (voiceless postalveolar fricative, ) has not been conclusively shown to occur in the traditional Proto-Uralic lexicon, but it is attested in some of the Proto-Finno-Ugric material. Another feature attested in the Finno-Ugric vocabulary is that *i now behaves as a neutral vowel with respect to front-back vowel harmony, and thus there are roots such as *niwa- "to remove the hair from hides".

Regular sound changes proposed for this stage are few and remain open to interpretation. Sammallahti (1988) proposes five, following Janhunen's (1981) reconstruction of Proto-Finno-Permic:

• Compensatory lengthening: development of long vowels from the cluster of vowel plus a particular syllable-final element, of unknown quality, symbolized by *x
  • Long open *aa and *ää are then raised to mid *oo and *ee respectively.
    • E.g. *ńäxli- → *ńääli- → *ńeeli- "to swallow" (→ Finnish niele-, Hungarian nyel etc.)
• Raising of short *o to *u in open syllables before a subsequent *i
  • E.g. *lomi → *lumi "snow" (→ Finnish lumi, Hungarian archaic lom "frost", etc.)
• Shortening of long vowels in closed syllables and before a subsequent open vowel *a, *ä, predating the raising of *ää and *ee
  • E.g. *ńäxl+mä → *ńäälmä → *ńälmä "tongue" (→ Northern Sami njalbmi, Hungarian nyelv, etc.)

Sammallahti (1988) further reconstructs sound changes *oo, *ee → *a, *ä (merging with original *a, *ä) for the development from Proto-Finno-Ugric to Proto-Ugric. Similar sound laws are required for other languages as well. Thus, the origin and raising of long vowels may actually belong at a later stage, and the development of these words from Proto-Uralic to Proto-Ugric can be summarized as simple loss of *x (if it existed in the first place at all; vowel length only surfaces consistently in the Baltic-Finnic languages.) The proposed raising of *o has been alternately interpreted instead as a lowering *u → *o in Samoyedic (PU *lumi → *lomə → Proto-Samoyedic *jom).

Janhunen (2007, 2009) notes a number of derivational innovations in Finno-Ugric, including *ńoma "hare" → *ńoma-la, (vs. Samoyedic *ńomå), *pexli "side" → *peel-ka → *pelka "thumb", though involving Proto-Uralic derivational elements.