Indo-Uralic languages
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Indo-Uralic is a hypothetical language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic (and maybe further related languages). It may be considered a subset of the larger Nostratic hypothesis. Most linguists still consider this theory speculative and its evidence insufficient to conclusively prove genetic affiliation.
Indo-European and Uralic languages look remarkably similar for neighbouring languages traditionally considered unrelated. The most common arguments in favour of such a relationship are based on seemingly common elements of morphology, such as the pronominal roots (*m- for first person; *t- for second person; *i- for third person), case markings (accusative *-m; ablative/partitive *-ta), interrogative/relative pronouns (*kw- 'who?, what?'; *y- 'which, who, that' to signal relative clauses) and a common SOV word order. There are other, less obvious correspondences being suggested, such as the Indo-European plural marker *-es (or *-s in the accusative plural *-m̥-s) and its Uralic counterpart *-t. This same word-final assibilation of *-t to *-s may also be present in IE second-person singular *-s(i) in comparison with Uralic second-person singular *-t.
One challenge to this research is that it is often assumed that similar words in Uralic and Indo-European languages are simply loans from IE to Uralic, even if this is not chronologically possible. Examples of this are Uralic *nimi versus IE *H₁nōmn̥, or Uralic *weti versus IE *wódr̥. In these examples, the lack of inflection in the Uralic counterparts makes the hypothesis that these are IE loans doubtful. At least not loans from IE itself, since we can't rule out pre-IE interaction with an earlier stage of Uralic. We know now that IE and Uralic, both dated to approximately 4000 BCE, were probably very distant from each other at the time. Uralic would have been northward up the Volga River while, if the Ukrainian thesis is correct, PIE would have been centered in the north-west Pontic region. Sometimes exchanges between Indo-Iranian and Finno-Ugric that occurred circa 2500 BCE in the region north of the Caspian Sea are mistaken for genuine IE-Uralic contacts (eg: IIr *ćm̥tóm > FU *sata '100').
Frederik Kortlandt supports a model of Indo-Uralic in which the original Indo-Uralic speakers lived north of the Caspian Sea, and the Proto-Indo-European speakers began as a group that branched off westward from there to come into geographic proximity with the Northwest Caucasian languages, absorbing a Northwest Caucasian lexical blending before moving farther westward to a region north of the Black Sea where their language settled into canonical Proto-Indo-European. Allan Bomhard suggests similar in Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1996). Alternatively the common protolanguage may have been north of the Black Sea, with Proto-Uralic moving northwards with the climatic improvement of post glacial times.
Possible cognates
| Meaning | Indo-European | Uralic
|
|---|---|---|
| I, me | *me 'me' [acc], *méne 'mine' [gen] | *mVnV 'I' 1
|
| who? [animate interrogative pronoun] | *ki- 'who?, what?' *kʷo- 'who?, what?' | *ken 'who?' *ku- 'who?'
|
| [negative] | *nei *ne | *ei- [negative verb]
|
| [1ps] | *-m [1ps non-ind] | *-m
|
| [2ps] | *-s [2ps non-ind] | *-t
|
| [demonstrative] | *so 'this (animate nom.)' | *ša [3ps]
|
| [nominative/accusative plural] | *-es [nom.pl], *--s [acc.pl] | *-t
|
| [oblique plural] | *-i [pronominal plural] (as in *we-i- 'we', *to-i- 'those') | *-i
|
| [definite accusative] | *-m | *-m
|
| [dual] | *- | *-k
|
| [ablative/partitive] | *-ód | *-ta
|
| [stative] | *-s- [aorist], *-es- [stative substantive], *-t [stative substantive] | *-ta
|
| who, that, which [relative pronoun] | *yo- | *-ja [nomen agentis]
|
| to assign, name | nem- 'to assign, to allot', *nōmn̥ 'name' | *nimi 'name'
|
| to give | *de- | *toi-
|
| to moisten, water | *wed- 'to moisten', *wód 'water' | *weti 'water'
|
| you (sg) | *tu [nom], *twe [obj], *téwe 'yours' [gen] | *tun
|
Footnotes
1 Finnish minä /minæ/, Nenets /mønjə/ [link]
See also
External links
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