#indo uralic

[possessivesuffix]

Sure, maybe it's time I reiterate thoughts on this. Indo-Uralic definitely "has promise": it's got 100+ years of research and everyone on it agrees on a couple handfuls of basic data, the likes of PIE *wódr̥ ~ PU *wetə 'water'; no one has given coherent alternate explanations, "they're loans" doesn't work in several ways; and "they're just accidental" could be right for any individual comparandum, but versions of this generally fail to consider the entire base of data (already because it's scatterd in literature, see below).

If some individual has a point is much more variable. Most people who assert a more detailed theory seem to be able to find a bunch more data for it, but often this can be easily criticized by others pointing out that they're e.g. confused about some well-known loanwords, or have been over-applying one family's morphology or morphophonology to the other (usually Indo-European stuff for Uralic), or have been using unreliable data from one side or the other. For example no, we probably should not think that Uralic *uwa 'flow' segments as *u-wa and contains the zero grade of a root *we- from which 'water' has been derived (or was it that *uwa- is a full grade and *we- is some kind of a zero grade from it?), as long as we don't have reason to think that anything at all is "in zero grade" in Uralic; or that there exist nominal suffixes *-d-, *-tə or *-wa.

Since this has not been a topic particularly in the mainstream since uhh the 1920s, the research is also fairly scattered and most people since then don't seem to know each other's work in good detail (and note that this includes a requirement to trawl thru work on Nostratic for relevant stuff). If I was working on this, I'd start from the side of bibliography to see what "already is" known. Kortlandt has put together some decent arguments that focus on the long-known material, but I'm unsure if this either achieves much further accumulation or later results yet, or how many of the promising-looking bits are his own contribution. And then there's the issue where most work seems to have been from Indo-Europeanists who don't know comparative Uralic very well (K is definitely in this camp) or occasionally also, from Uralicists who don't know comparative Indo-European very well.

There remain in any case also many open questions because (P)IE and (P)U have a large bunch of typological divergences despite being neighboring families. Though it seems to me that this is shrinking the more we learn about Anatolian, which e.g. has basically no prefixes and does have possessive suffixes; or for another intriguing point, Anatolian was recently argued to have evidence for *mel- 'to think', which now compares better with Uralic *mälə 'mind' than classical PIE *men- does. I wouldn't know if there's a connection between these two PIE roots (is *men- maybe from pre-PIE *menl- which is by n-infixation from *mel-?)

I will refrain from starting a mini-bibliography of recent things happening around the hypothesis, but the JIES 43 special issue from 2015 is a good place to start reading for anyone who wants some handle on details.

say what u will but i think kortlandt has a point with indo-uralic

I hear conflicting things about Indo-Uralic. My general impression is that it has promise, but I really know very little.

@possessivesuffix, do you have thoughts on Indo-Uralic?

[suppenzeit]

not germanic, romance nor slavic, but a secret fourth thing (finno-ugric)

[salvadorbonaparte]

I never learned a slavic language before but I'm learning Yiddish (many slavic influences) and have had neighbours and friends who speak slavic languages (mostly Polish and Russian though) so I'm pretty optimistic about it

[kutyozh]

lbffr, english is an outlier on this site adn should not be counted. so.

Do not vote if your first language is English!!!

If you have multiple first languages, please choose to vote for the one that is not English OR the one that you think will have the least votes!

I am aware that Indo-European is still going to win but I do hope the results will be a little less skewed!

And no, I will not give you a "see results" button <3

[tumbler-polls]

Submitted by @ytilaremehpe-sselhtaed

[mapsontheweb]

The word for 'fox' in European languages.

by @Oysteib

Quite an enormous difference in the present words that (may?) come from the same Indo-European root - from 'aghves' to 'rubah' to 'volpe'. And, apparently, this may be a word that the Nordic languages got from Uralic languages...

[allthingslinguistic]

Summer 2024 travel plans and Language Guinea Pig Diaries

In August and September, I'm doing a bunch of travel to various European countries. In order, they are:

Glasgow, Scotland for World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon), where I'll be on a panel about Languages as World-Building and doing assorted meetups

Helsinki, Finland for the Societas Linguistica Europea annual meeting

Tartu, Estonia for a colloquium talk on Applying Linguistic Methods to Linguistic Communication at the University of Tartu and a two-part workshop on lingcomm for participants of Methodological Excellence in Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics (MEDAL)

Nijmegen, Netherlands for some meetings with linguists

Florence, Italy to visit friends

Madrid, Spain for the publication of the Spanish translation of Because Internet by Pie de Página

I hope to run into lots of interesting people at these events! If you're already in one of these places and I know you, including from the interent, feel free to reach out and see if we can fit something in!

This whirlwind list of events and places has also gotten me thinking: this trip is going to be a fun chance to learn some more about some languages! I'm already fairly familiar with Spanish and Scottish English (I doubt people will speak much Broad Scots to me with my Canadian accent), and I'm confident on my ability to brush up on them by a bit of exposure and possibly watching a relevant movie on the way there, but the other four languages are going to take a bit more doing. Here's my initial situation, in order of familiarity:

Italian - I studied it for two years in undergrad and spent about a week in Italy shortly thereafter, and by the end of the week I was finally beginning to feel like it was starting to "click" but then I haven't really touched it since then. So I feel like it would come back with exposure but I wonder if there's something I could do in advance to help it come back sooner/faster rather than taking the whole week of being there again

Dutch - I went through the whole Duolingo tree on rapid-speed back when you could skip through lessons for new material only and not practice drills over about a year in 2019-ish just for fun and as an excuse to look up lots of Germanic roots (I studied German before I knew any linguistics so it was fun to triangulate there). Never actually been anywhere Dutch was being spoken but I did find I could get the gist of youtube videos about linguistics in Dutch so it probably needs "activation" similar to Italian

Finnish - No background except for a few linguistics factoids (case! vowel harmony!), and that it's a Uralic language (related to Hungarian but not to any of the Indo-European languages, so this is a fun chance to learn some things about a language family that's unfamiliar to me)

Estonian - Also no background, also Uralic, clearly the fun thing to do would be to learn enough bits of Estonian and Finnish that I could compare them with each other (also since I'm meeting with linguists in both countries, this would be a fun topic for small talk conversation)

At the same time, there are a lot of language learning strategies floating around out there, and I have two nearly matched pairs of languages on this list: Italian and Dutch, both of which I am pretty good at cognate languages for and have studied some a while back, so I could test two activation strategies, and Finnish and Estonian, both of which I have essentially zero familiarity with, so I could test two strategies for getting somewhere near a basic functional ability.

I have about a month until I start this cycle with a flight to Helsinki. One month, four languages. What could possibly go wrong?

Here's my tentative plan so far:

Activation, Italian and Dutch - I'm pretty sure what I need for these languages is largely as much audio imput as possible (given what's feasible around like, all the other things going on in my life). I've decided to aim to watch one or two youtube videos in Italian per day, focusing on relatively concrete, daily life topics (such as gelato making) and to listen to one episode of a podcast in Dutch per day, aiming to get through the back catalogue of Kletsheads, a podcast about multilingual children.

Why these strategies? Well, I'm meeting up with linguists in the Netherlands but not in Italy, so it makes sense to try to learn more linguistics vocab there. Also, I'm curious about the effect of medium between video and podcast: will being able to see people talking and what they're talking about have much of an effect on how much I can understand? Will I find it easier to integrate one or the other of watching videos vs listening to podcasts into my life at a practical level? Plus, will concentrating on a single, more academic topic vs watching a scattered, unsystematic list of videos have effects on my vocabulary?

Basic function, Finnish and Estonian - I'm probably looking for some phrases to say to people in shops and restaurants and the ability to pronounce things written on menus adequately and match heard words/placenames to written versions on signs. I started doing a very minimal one lesson a day on Duolingo for Finnish in January, when planning for this trip started, for the very simple reason that I was already familiar with Duolingo and it doesn't have Estonian, so I decided to just start by doing a thing I was familiar with until I got around to doing more research. I've been casting around trying to figure out a source of basic Estonian phrases online when a friend mentioned learning French on tiktok, so I searched for "learn estonian" and voila! I think I'll also aim for a video or two of Estonian phrases per day but I want to do more rewatching than with Italian or Dutch, since I'm aiming to remember specific common phrases. So maybe one rewatched video and one new video, per day? They're shorter on tiktok than on youtube.

Why these strategies? This is a comparison of Duolingo's more systematic approach with lots of repetition and gamification and word-by-word translation in a relatively sterile environment versus a more organic and free-styling approach with more grounding in real people and faces and full phrases where I'm not really trying to understand the individual words. There are lots of factors to compare and it's not a completely fair comparison since I started Duolingo in January and I only thought to start the TikTok idea this week, but hey, learning anything still counts as progress.

Summary: I have four languages, each focused on a different app: YouTube, my podcast app, Duolingo, and TikTok. Hopefully for the video apps, this will help their algorithms kick in and start recommending me further useful videos. The difference between the two video strategies is that for Italian, I'm watching monolingual videos that are aimed at people who already speak Italian and just want to learn something about the topic, whereas for Estonian, I'm watching bilingual videos aimed at English speakers who want to learn some words or phrases in Estonian.

Am I going to get these four languages mixed up? Probably! I'm hoping that choosing a different app/strategy for each is a little bit helpful on that front.

Do I think these strategies are optimal? Probably not! But I'm aiming to choose things that feel relatively clear to implement consistently, rather than getting bogged down in researching language learning methods instead of actually getting exposure to the languages. I'll probably do a basic "look up some key phrases and try to learn them" a day or two before entering each place too. And maybe shift other aspects depending on how things are going, stay tuned!

At any rate, I figured it would be more fun to blog about my attempts to use myself as a guinea pig for a few different language learning strategies here than to just do it in my own head (and hopefully help me with staying motivated). And maybe people will have tips of either language learning strategies that have worked for you in general or specific ideas for these particular languages, so this is the beginning of a series that I'm calling #Language Guinea Pig Diaries and future posts will also be posted under that tag!

[transgenderer]

Pan-Turkism has been characterized by pseudoscientific theories known as Pseudo-Turkology.[64][65] Though dismissed in serious scholarship, scholars promoting such theories, often known as Pseudo-Turkologists,[64] have in recent times emerged among every Turkic nationality.[66][67] A leading light among them is Murad Adzhi, who insists that two hundred thousand years ago, "an advanced people of Turkic blood" were living in the Altai Mountains. These tall and blonde Turks are supposed to have founded the world's first state, Idel-Ural, 35,000 years ago, and to have migrated as far as the Americas.[66]

According to theories like the Turkish History Thesis, promoted by pseudo-scholars, the Turkic peoples are supposed to have migrated from Central Asia to the Middle East in the Neolithic. The Hittites, Sumerians, Babylonians, and ancient Egyptians are here classified as being of Turkic origin.[65][66][67][68] The Kurgan cultures of the early Bronze Age up to more recent times are also typically ascribed to Turkic peoples by pan-Turkic pseudoscholars, such as Ismail Miziev.[69] Non-Turkic peoples typically classified as Turkic, Turkish, Proto-Turkish or Turanian include Huns, Scythians, Sakas, Cimmerians, Medes, Parthians, Pannonian Avars, Caucasian Albanians, and various ethnic minorities in Turkic countries, such as Kurds.[69][70][71][67][68] Adzhi also considers Alans, Goths, Burgundians, Saxons, Alemanni, Angles, Lombards, and many Russians as Turks.[66] Only a few prominent peoples in history, such as Jews, Chinese people, Armenians, Greeks, Persians, and Scandinavians are considered non-Turkic by Adzhi.[66]

Philologist Mirfatyh Zakiev, former Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Tatar ASSR, has published hundreds of "scientific" works on the subject, suggesting Turkic origins of the Sumerian, Greek, Icelandic, Etruscan and Minoan languages. Zakiev contends that "proto-Turkish is the starting point of the Indo-European languages".[66] Not only peoples and cultures, but also prominent individuals, such as Saint George, Peter the Great, Mikhail Kutuzov and Fyodor Dostoevsky, are proclaimed to have been "of Turkic origin".[66] As such the Turkic peoples are supposed to have once been the "benevolent conquerors" of the peoples of most of Eurasia, who thus owe them "a huge cultural debt".[66][72]

The pseudoscientific Sun Language Theory states that all human languages are descendants of a proto-Turkic language and was developed by the Turkish president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk during the 1930s.[73] Kairat Zakiryanov considers the Japanese and Kazakhgene pools to be identical.[74] Several Turkish academics (Şevket Koçsoy, Özkan İzgi, Emel Esin) claim that Zhou dynasty were of Turkic origins.[75][76][77][78]

what is going on with the turkish

[max1461]

Somebody tell me a fucked up language family you believe. I want some real shit, not fake shit. Indo Uralic is bullshit my brothers. The conjectured urheimats dont even line up anymore. None of that. Dene Yeniseian is dead in a ditch. What's left to us my brothers? What's left to us of plausible macrofamily proposals. Macro Jê? Macro fucking Jê? Who give a shit. I don't know maybe I should give a shit. But amazon = papua = we don't know shit cause nothing's documented. I'm talking, you know. @japhugmafia says maybe wtf is it Eskaleut Uralic? Because of... some synonyms? Remind me of that shit. I need something to believe today my friends I need to believe today. In my suffering the only thing that will cure me is a credible macrofamily proposal.

[dramatic-dolphin]

Oh yes! The whole animal names taboo is super interesting. Giving a nickname to the predators/otherwise important totem animals (especially bears and wolves) was a thing in large parts of Europe, but not all of it. A lot of the study of it is about the word for bears in Indo-European languages, but, fun fact, I've read a proposal (that I just can't find right now) that was basically "hey, these replacement words are MUCH more common in Finno-Ugric languages, I think the other Europeans might have just taken it from them"

which, honestly? sounds entirely believable. It's the Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic languages that have these taboos.... all of them people who historically had interactions with Finno-Ugrics.

Szarvas and farkas are sort of description words that mean animal with horns (deer) and animal with tail (wolf) respectively. Farkas has probably no relation to being fast, but szarvas DOES mean deer and elk in Hungarian! :D That is really cool, I wonder if that means it's an older word than I thought.

hungarian words are so funny sometimes. calculator? that's the counting machine. airplane? you mean the flying machine. rain? the thing that falls. river? oh yeah, that's the thing that flows. deer? the animal with horns.

[best-non-english-word-torunament]

Final round: Haikea vs многоꙮчитїй, mnogoočitii

(poll at the end)

Haikea (Finnish)

[ˈhɑi̯keɑ]

Translation: A feeling of quiet, melancholic, sometimes even mournful longing. "Wistful" comes fairly close as a translation, though it's not exactly the same.

Finnish is an Uralic language belonging to the Finnic branch spoken by 5 300 000 people in Finland, where it is one of two national languages (the other is Swedish though it is less used, Finnish is the main language).

Motivation: It's one of the most beautiful words to say in Finnish, IMO; it has a beautiful flow to the vowels, and it almost sounds like a sigh. It's also an emotion often associated with a lot of Finnish art, literature, music and culture in general, and thus it's a strong part of Finnish identity.

многоꙮчитїй, mnogoočitii (Old Church Slavonic)

IPA not found

Translation: many-eyed

Old Church Slavonic is an extinct language that belonged to the Slavic branch of Indo-European languages. It’s closest related to today’s Macedonian and Bulgarian, but was standardised based on the dialect of Slavs living near 9th century Thessaloniki in today’s Greece by missionaries, who translated Christian literature so they could convert people easier. Old Church Slavonic was then used as the liturgical language of various Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Churches. A later version of the language called Church Slavonic is still in use in churches today.

Motivation: This particular instance of the word appears once in a manuscript from around 1429. It is the book of psalms, and the word is used in the phrase "серафими многоꙮчитїй," to mean "many-eyed seraphim," as in an angel. the "ꙮ", or multiocular o, is one of my favorite Unicode symbols and also symbols in general. In the next version of Unicode it's going to be updated, because it doesn't even have enough eyes as the original manuscript gave it! Looking past the ꙮ fixation, though, I'm a fan of angels and angelic imagery, as well as eye imagery. A single word for "many-eyed" is really cool to me, since I don't recall there being one in English. It's a useful phrase for more than just angels, like spiders, molluscs...

[splatoonpolls]

FIRST OFF! I DO NOT HAVE A DEGREE IN LINGUISTICS. I AM PLANNING ON TAKING IT AGAIN NEXT YEAR AND MAKING MY THESIS ON IT! SO BE AWARE I MIGHT NOT BE SUPER ACCURATE AND GET INFORMATION FROM PEOPLE WHO HAVE STUDIED THE FIELD FOR A LONG TIME.

imagine, a party. And these parties. The languages way of making a sentence would all have different dancing styles. Pronouns being breakdance, nouns being popping, adjectives being ballet, verbs being swing. And all the little fixes are salsa.

Analytical - most commonly found in Chinese, Vietnamese, afrikaans, and English (to a minor degree). If these languages were to dance. All of the words would stand on its own doing its little thing. In Chinese, when you are saying “I would like an apple juice” it’s 我想喝一个苹果汁 wǒ xiǎng hē yī gè píngguǒ zhī. (Note. This is a rough translation from the internet I do not speak Chinese, if you speak the language feel free to correct me) Every word is isolated and doing their own little style

fusional - most commonly found in most indo European languages. Especially in romance and germanic. If these languages were to dance. The popping (nouns) crew would be most likely together. Plus the suffixes would join to make a sort of popping salsa fusion. In Swedish, the sentence “the girls are drinking orange juice” is “flickorna dricker apelsinjuice”. A noun can easily add on another noun and a verb can add a suffix. Plus these languages are also know to conjugate a lot more. Spanish is great example of this too. Where Spanish have 3 different ways to tell about the past.

agglutinative languages - most commonly found in Turkic (Turkish and Kazakh) and Uralic languages (Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian) and Korean is also an agglutinative language. If these languages were dancing, it would be a conga line, In Finnish, the phrase “on my table” is pöydälläni. They can add more words to change the meaning (I am not good at understanding agglutinative languages, if you speak one please feel free to chime in)

Polysynthetic - most commonly found in Inuit languages like Greenlandic. These languages are doing acro dance. I found this example from the learn Greenlandic blog! The sentence “they are going to our church” is Oqaluffitsinnukarpoq. The blog goes more into detail about this

And that’s it of my linguistics info dumping!

[tissitpoispaita]

Which language family does your native language belong to?

I like the idea of this poll by @akozuheiwa, but Indo-European skews the results way too much with its massive online prevalence and number of speakers. So, I'm wondering if the poll could be improved by breaking IE into its extant branches. Probably not much, since English speakers will just make this a Germanic sweep, but it could be a step in the right direction.

Out of all the non-IE families, I added Uralic as a separate option because it was by far the most often listed family in the previous poll's tags*, and "other, list in tags" so far has more answers than all the biggest non-IE families combined. Plus, the majority of its speakers are Europeans and thus more likely to be on English-speaking Tumblr.

*(Many people also listed Finno-Ugric, which is a Uralic group)

IE branches containing a single extant language (Albanian, Armenian, and Hellenic/Greek) were combined to make room for two more poll options out of the four biggest families besides IE: Afro-Asiatic & Niger-Congo and Austronesian & Sino-Tibetan. Please tell me if these groupings don't make sense.

People with more than one native language, please choose "other" if multiple categories apply.

As always, please reblog for a bigger sample size.

[mehilaiselokuva]

Some etymologies of Finnish foodstuffs

Peruna - Potato From late old Swedish pærun (pear). Potatoes were first called “maaperuna” (land pear). Today, “pear” is “päärynä” from the same root. Voi - Butter From proto-finno-ugric *waje. Some relatives include Hungarian vaj and Northern Sami vuodja. Hunaja - Honey From old proto-germanic *hunagą (Same root as English “honey”) Porkkana - Carrot From Russian борка́н (borkán). It is also present in many Baltic languages and the ultimate source is unknown. Kala - Fish From proto-uralic *kala. Some relatives include Hungarian hal and Northern Sami guolli. Sipuli - Onion From late old Swedish sipul, ultimately from late Latin cepulla. Related to the obsolete English onion name cibol/chibol. Vesi - Water From proto-Uralic *wete. (May be further related to Proto-Indo-European *wódr̥). Some relatives include Hungarian víz. Suola - Salt From proto-Finnic *soola, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *séh₂ls. Related to English Salt. Sokeri - Sugar From Swedish socker, ultimately from Sanskrit शर्करा • (śárkarā) and probably others

[gwendolynlerman]

Most commonly spoken language in each country

I had to separate the legend from the map because it would not have been legible otherwise. I am aware that the color distinctions are not always very clear, but there are only so many colors in the palette.

The legend is arranged in alphabetical order and languages are grouped by family (bullet points), with branches represented by numbers and followed by the color palette languages within them are colored in, as follows:

Afroasiatic

Chadic (Hausa) — ocher

Cushitic (Oromo and Somali) — light yellow-green

Semitic (from Arabic to Tigrinya) — yellow

Albanian — olive green

Armenian — mauve

Atlantic-Congo

Benue-Congo (from Chewa to Zulu) — blue-green

Senegambian (Fula and Wolof) — faded blue-green

Volta-Congo (Ewe and Mooré) — bright blue-green

Austroasiatic (Khmer and Vietnamese) — dark blue-purple

Austronesian

Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (from Fijian to Wallisian) — dark brown

Malayo-Polynesian (Palauan) — bright brown

Western Malayo-Polynesian (from Malagasy to Tagalog) — light brown

Eastern Sudanic (Dinka) — foral white

Hellenic (Greek) — black

Indo-European

Germanic (from Danish to Swedish) — light blue (creoles in medium/dark blue)

English-based creoles (from Antiguan and Barbudan to Vincentian Creole)

Indo-Aryan (from Bengali to Sinhala) — purple

Iranian (Persian) — gray

Romance (from Catalan to Spanish) — red (creoles in dark red)

French-based creoles (from Haitian Creole to Seychellois Creole)

Portuguese-based creoles (from Cape Verdean Creole to Papiamento)

Slavic — light green (from Bulgarian to Ukrainian)

Inuit (Greenlandic) — white

Japonic (Japanese) — blanched almond

Kartvelian (Georgian) — faded blue

Koreanic (Korean) — yellow-orange

Kra-Dai (Lao and Thai) — dark orange

Mande (from Bambara to Mandinka) — magenta/violet

Mongolic (Mongolian) — red-brown

Sino-Tibetan (Burmese, Chinese*, and Dzongkha) — pink

Turkic (from Azerbaijani to Uzbek) — dark green

Uralic

Balto-Finnic (Estonian and Finnish) — light orange

Ugric (Hungarian) — salmon

* Chinese refers to Cantonese and Mandarin. Hindi and Urdu are grouped under Hindustani, and Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are grouped under Serbo-Croatian.