Age of various language families

[Ante Aikio]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------


Dear discussants:

Questions concerning the Uralic family have come up in this discussion.
Without commenting on the main subject, I would merely like to make a
brief remark on the taxonomy of the Uralic languages.

Alexander Vovin wrote:
"both Turkic and Uralic have two primary branches..."

In standard references it is maintained that Uralic has two primary
branches, Samoyedic and Finno-Ugric. However, this interpretation is now
widely questioned inside the field. While the traditional taxonomy still
has many supporters, it seems to be based on questionable linguistic
criteria - as well as outdated extralinguistic considerations.

The main argument in favor of the dichotomy has been lexical: some
"Finno-Ugric" lexical items lack a cognate in Samoyedic (most of the
numerals and words for 'hand, arm', 'autumn', 'marrow', 'ice', etc.).
However, it is difficult to see these lexical isoglosses as conclusive,
especially as no clear support outside the lexicon has been presented for
the binary family tree. For instance, in phonology only two quite marginal
vowel changes corresponding to the "Finno-Ugric" node have been suggested.

Similar problems are involved in defining most of the lower level
subgroups assumed in the traditional taxonomy, i.e. "Ugric",
"Finnic-Permic", "Finnic-Volgaic" and "Finnic-Samic". In fact, the case of
Uralic shows much resemblance to that of Indo-European: there are many
easily definable low-level branches (Saamic, Finnic, Permic, Samoyedic,
etc.), but their mutual relationships are notoriously difficult to
establish.


Ante Aikio
Department of Finnish, Saami and Logopedics
University of Oulu, Finland
ante.aikio at oulu.fi