LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.07 (10) [E]

Tue Nov 8 08:03:01 UTC 2005

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   L O W L A N D S - L * 10 November 2005 * Volume 10
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From: Jacqueline Bungenberg de Jong <Dutchmatters at comcast.net>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.07 (06) [E]

For Isaac Davis Re: Finno Ugric speaking peoples,
As far as I know, the speakers of Saami and Lapfinnish are not Germanic
peoples. There origin lies in the North of Russia and further East. There
faces often have a definitely Mongol cast to them, and they are much darker
haired than the picture that we have of a Germanic person. It is the way
some of my Swedish friends distinguished between the Lappish and the Swedish
population of Finland. There are also people in Estonia who speak a related
language. The Hungarian language as it is spoken today is also somewhat
related. It was brought into Hungary by the Magyars in about the tenth
century. Other lowlanders maybe able to set us straight. Jacqueline

----------

From: Theo Homan <theohoman at yahoo.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.07 (08) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Language varieties
>
> There used to be Sami settlements as far as in
> southern Scandinavia.  I have
> always assumed that many Norwegians and Swedes,
> especially those of the
> north are descendants of a mixture of Germanic and
> Uralic (Sami and Finnic)
> peoples and that also today's "real" Sami are partly
> descended from people
> of Germanic origin.
>
> While Sami is a group of Uralic language varieties,
.> Reinhard/Ron

================

Hello,

It is common use to place the language[s] of the Sami
in the Finno-ugric group. But it is a defendable
viewpoint that they took over the language as there is
a considerable distance between their language and the
languages of the other members of the group.
And they have loans from the oldgermanic.
[e.g. 'dordi' -a little thing on the spinning wheel
{dutch: toorteltje}, whereas the swedish has
'tottaträ].

vr.gr.
Theo Homan

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Songs

Bearing in mind all the comings and goings and goings-on and mixing that 
went on during all of Eurasia's great migrations, I am sure we are well 
advised not to unduly mix linguistic genealogy with human genetics.  This 
goes for all Finnic-speaking communities of Europe.

Sure.  You might want to say that the Sami are, basically, a "Uralic 
nation," what with their language *and* their traditional way of life, both 
of which we associate with Siberia.  It is true that there is a greater 
concentration and more diversity of Uralic languages between the western 
parts of the Urals and the Yenissei area.  But is this proof that the 
ancestors of the Balto-Finnic peoples migrated westward?  Why could 
Scandinavia not have been the western end of a contiguous "Uralic" area that 
later came to be disrupted, broken up by Indo-Europeans, namely Germanic, 
Slavonic and Baltic peoples and/or cultures (assuming that the "Uralic" 
peoples of those regions got absorbed)?  Remember that nomadic herders need 
lots and lots of land and tend to spead out over vast regions.  As far as I 
know, reindeer are native to the area from the northeastern tip of Siberia 
to the Norwegian coast.  Why should that entire area not have been a 
contiguous region of reindeer herders, "Uralic" (i.e., Finnic, Ugric and 
Samoyedic) in the west and various Paleo-Asiatic peoples east of them, 
interspersed with Nenets, Enets, Khanti, Nganasan, etc., also with Tungusic 
speakers (Evenki, Even, Oroqi, Negidal, Nanai, Ulchi ("reindeer people"), 
Orochi, Udihe, etc.), with Yakuts, Khakas, etc., being later Turkic-speaking 
arrivals that adapted to the indigenous cultures of the far north (which was 
the only way to survive in those climes).

OK.  So I'm playing the devil's advocate, challenging the "inside-the-box" 
thinking.  But does this traditional view not seem like a presumption, and 
does it not presume that the ancestors of the European Finnic speakers went 
from Siberia to Scandinavia?  It may be true, but I need to see proof and 
until then believe that this is merely a Eurocentric presumption.  Why? 
"The Siberian types belong over there, and our types belong over here. And 
this is Europe (not a nomad's paradise)."  (It's the old "Europe versus 
Asia" thing, in which the Uralic languages and peoples are considered 
marginal, namely as sitting on the imagined border between two supposed 
continents.)

The case of the Magyars (Hungarians) might need to be seen as separate (and 
they are also so mixed with Celts, Slavs and German that you can't call them 
genetically Uralic, though their language may be).

Can we say for sure that the ancestors of Sami (Sámi, Saami, sáme-) migrated 
into Scandinavia?  Can we say for sure that Scandinavia did not once belonge 
to a larger "Uralic" area?  Bear in mind that nomadic herders tend to leave 
few archeological traces.  Bear in mind also that what is now northeastern 
Sweden, Finland, Karelia, Estonia, the Livonian coast of Latvia and most of 
Western Russia (including St. Petersburg) used to be and in part still is 
"Uralic"-speaking.  Could it have been the Germanic tribes that invaded 
their area and partly absorbed them while making their power felt by way of 
language domination?  Some Germanic loans in Finnic are extremely old, so 
old, in fact, that they predate Germanic writing by centuries and help us 
reconstruct or corroborate Ancient Germanic.  Do ancient Germanic loans in 
Finnic tell us anything more than that we are dealing with ancient contacts? 
Who was the indigenous and who the Johnny-come-lately?  If the Finnic 
ancestors were immigrants into Germanic lands, they may have picked up 
Germanic loans for new concepts.  If the Germanic ancestors were immigrants 
into Finnic lands they are likely to have introduced new concepts and with 
them the Germanic words.  Same difference.  It hardly indicates who was the 
"indi" and who was the "immi."  It would be Finnicized ancient Germanic 
place names that would convince me that Germanic speakers were there first.

Although there are or used to be those that doubt(ed) and try to discredit 
this, there are signs that the following names are related: Sámi (< *Sápmi < 
*Suopma), Suomi (Finland, Sami _Suopma_), Häme (Tavastia of Southern 
Finland) and Samoyed, as well as the following words: Samoyed _samo_, 
Latvian _zem_ (< Livonian?) and Russian  _zemlja_, all meaning 'earth', 
'ground'.  I am tempted to venture the guess that proto-Sami *_Suopma_ is a 
compound with _maa_ 'land' (Finnish, Estonian, Votic _maa_, Karelia _mua_, 
Veps _ma_; Lule Sami _-me_ ~ _-mi_ and Northern Sami _-ma_ 'land' in place 
names?),  perhaps "bog land" (cf. Estonian _soo_+_maa_, Finnish 
_suo_+_maa_)???

By the way, even now the southernmost Sami areas (Åarjel or Southern Sami) 
aren't situated all that far north of Oslo, being somewhat south of 
Trondheim but inland.

So what if the devil's advocate were right, then what about the Germanic 
people that spread southward?  Could their early homeland have been simply 
in what are now Denmark and Schleswig Holstein, northward spread having 
begun from the very south of what are now Sweden (Scania) and Norway 
(southern tip, Oslo Fjord, Mjøsa Lake, Bergen area, etc.), then continued on 
along the coasts?

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
(putting his horns back into the drawer)

P.S.: You can watch the Sami TV program "Ođđasat" (News) of Finland (with 
Finnish subtitles) and listen to the language here:
http://www.yle.fi/yle24/videosali/index.php?a=8&t=2&q=1
Although our Finnish and Estonian friends may not agree, I find the sound of 
Sami to bear a fair bit of resemblance to that of Finnish and Estonian.

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