34.742, Review: General Linguistics, Language Documentation: Bakró-Nagy, Laakso, Skribnik (2022)

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Subject: 34.742, Review: General Linguistics, Language Documentation: Bakró-Nagy, Laakso, Skribnik (2022)

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Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2023 18:47:34
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36872177


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-3428.html

EDITOR: Marianne  Bakró-Nagy
EDITOR: Johanna  Laakso
EDITOR: Elena  Skribnik
TITLE: The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Guides to the World's Languages
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of Sussex

SUMMARY

The Uralic languages are a language-family spoken in the north of Eurasia,
from Norway in the west (Saami branch, alias Lappish) to about 110° east on
the Taymyr Peninsula (Nganasan, alias Tawgi, Samoyedic branch), and mainly at
latitudes higher than 60°, or in the Volga area 55°.  (Language-names in the
book under review are often different from the names traditionally used, for
instance “Lapp” has been replaced by “Saami” because the former is thought
derogatory.  I shall include traditional names in brackets, since these will
be more familiar to some readers.)  Counting Uralic languages involves the
usual language/dialect issues, but this book recognizes 44 languages falling
into nine clearly separate branches.  A geographic outlier far to the
south-west of other Uralic languages is the one-language branch Hungarian,
currently the Uralic language with the largest number of speakers; the
Hungarians arrived at their present homeland in the ninth century, and are
believed to have originated in the area to the west of the southern Urals,
with Hungarian having formed a Sprachbund with the Mansi (alias Vogul) and
Khanty (alias Ostyak) branches.  The time-depth of this language-family is
comparable to that of Indo-European; the editors write that “The relatedness
between Hungarian, Finnish, and Selkup [alias Ostyak Samoyed] can be compared
with that between English, Armenian, and Hindi.”
 The name “Finno-Ugric” has been used for the language-family, but others use
this term to cover all the Uralic languages other than the Samoyedic branch,
which is seen (though perhaps mistakenly) as having been the first to split
off from Proto-Uralic.
 Three Uralic languages, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, are languages of
modern nation-states (though they became official languages only in 1844,
1863, and 1918 respectively), and a few others within what is now Russia have
hundreds of thousands of speakers.  But many Uralic languages, some of whose
speakers still practise hunter–fisher–gatherer or nomadic reindeer-herding
ways of life, seem close to extinction – we read that “there are no more than
twenty speakers [of Ingrian] as of 2018, and their average age is around
eighty”, and “there are only a couple of speakers [of Votic] left” (both are
Finnic languages); “East Mansi … is more or less extinct, but in the beginning
of the twenty-first century there are still several elderly rememberers”; the
last speaker of Kamas (Samoyedic) died in 1989.  For most branches it seems
that the core area from which the branch expanded into its later territory was
near the southern edge of that territory.  Janne Saarikivi suggests in Chapter
2 that this was a consequence of a global warming episode in the ninth century
A.D. making Arctic living conditions easier – but I suppose there may have
been cases where more powerful groups pushed Uralic speakers off the best
land.  Certainly in recent times the interests of Uralic speakers have
sometimes counted for little with the outside world.  We read that
“Practically the whole Mari intelligentsia was executed in 1937” (the Mari
branch, alias Cheremis, currently has almost 400,000 speakers), and that in
the 1950s the population of Novaya Zemlya (speakers of Tundra Nenets, alias
Yurak, Samoyedic branch) was “evicted when the island was turned into a
nuclear test site”.
 Not all the languages have standard written forms; when they have, these were
often created fairly recently.  The earliest known document written in any
Uralic language is a Hungarian funeral sermon dating only as far back as about
1200.  On the other hand, Old Komi (alias Old Zyryan, Old Permic) was equipped
in the fourteenth century with an alphabet whose letter-shapes are not
obviously related to those of well-known alphabets.  (Wisely, for those
languages without a standard orthography based on the Roman alphabet, the
contributors avoid the diverse scholarly transcription traditions of the
individual languages in favour of an IPA-based system, accompanied where
applicable by standard Cyrillic spellings.) 
 The book reviewed here sets out to document the history and present-day
profiles of the Uralic languages, with its main emphasis being on linguistic
structures (though there is also substantial discussion of current and past
sociolinguistic realities).  After extensive prelims, the book contains 54
chapters by a total of 43 contributors.  (Considering that three-quarters of
the Uralic languages are spoken in Russian territory, it is perhaps surprising
that only two contributors list a Russian institution as primary affiliation –
though there are also two from the University of Tartu who mention membership
of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  Also unusual for 21st-century
linguistics, there is no input from the New World; all contributors work in
Europe or, in one case, Siberia.)  The editors tell us that theirs is the
first work to assemble descriptions of all Uralic languages, rather than just
one or two sample languages per branch, and that previous
language-descriptions have covered a narrower range of topics.  Some languages
are described in English for the first time here.
 The chapters are grouped into three parts.  Part I (six chapters) is
historical, beginning with a chapter by Ante Aikio on reconstruction of
Proto-Uralic.  Part II (33 chapters) has separate chapters on each branch and
each individual language (some chapters cover several closely-related
languages).  Each chapter in this Part appears to have been written to a
common template, making comparison between languages easy.  The fourteen
chapters of Part III consider specific areas of grammar, particularly areas
where Uralic contrasts with what we find in “Standard Average European”, and
survey how these areas are treated across the Uralic family – for instance
there are chapters on case, on negation, and on TAM and evidentials.
 Proto-Uralic (whose speakers are seen by Saarikivi as possibly having lived
in the area to the east of the southern Urals) seems to have been an
agglutinative language with vowel harmony, postpositions, and SOV word-order. 
Every lexical (as opposed to grammatical) root had at least two syllables; few
consonant clusters were allowed; and while initial syllables contained
contrasts between eight vowel phonemes (a large inventory on a world scale),
non-initial syllables were limited to a two-way contrast between close and
open vowels.  Rather than using a negative particle, negation was expressed by
a special-purpose inflected verb accompanied by a non-finite verb form for the
action negated, as if in English we said “he nots come, he notted come”. 
Uralic languages have strikingly large numbers of noun cases, because, apart
from “grammatical cases” such as genitive, many place-relationships which in
Standard Average European languages are expressed by prepositions such as in,
onto, out of, are in Uralic languages expressed by “local cases” (e.g. Finnish
talossa “in the house”, taloon “into the house”, talosta “out of the house”,
etc.) – the case-endings might descend from separate postpositions in
Proto-Uralic, but if so they were cliticized early.  The grammatical cases of
many Uralic languages distinguish between “total” and “partial” objects, with
a partitive case for objects that are only partly consumed (“he was eating
porridge” – the world will still contain porridge when he has finished), or
that are little affected by the verbal action (negative clauses – there was no
action, or e.g. “I love her” – she is the same woman whether I love her or
not), or for complements denoting classes (“black and blue are dark colours” –
there are other dark colours).  Uralic word-formation mechanisms include an
unusual type of co-ordinate compounding; e.g “nose-mouth” (or “mouth-nose”)
for “face”, “straight-good” for “true, real”, “dance-sing” for “have fun”.
 Reconstruction of Proto-Uralic vocabulary suggests interesting insights into
an ancient society.  Roots for e.g. “quarrel”, “warfare”, can be
reconstructed, but “No vocabulary pertaining to any kind of social
organization is known.”  There was a belief that individuals possessed two
souls, a “breath-soul” which leaves the body only at death, and a
“shadow-soul” which can leave the body temporarily, during dreams or a
shaman’s spirit-journey; in the western Uralic languages the word for
“shadow-soul” has evolved into a reflexive pronoun, e.g. Finnish ‘itse’.
 Some Uralic languages have verb-inflexion systems expressing evidentiality. 
In Tundra Nenets, for instance, different forms of a verb imply that the
speaker knows the fact from perception other than sight, infers it from the
current state of affairs, assumes it based on general knowledge, etc. etc.
 Not all features ascribed to Proto-Uralic are retained in all modern Uralic
languages (e.g. Finnish has SVO order, Hungarian uses an uninflected negative
particle, the Permic branch lacks vowel harmony), but they remain widespread
in the language-family as a whole.  Vowel harmony is characteristic not only
of the Uralic family but also of the neighbouring Altaic family; it is clear
that there were plenty of mutual influences among what are believed to be
originally unrelated Eurasian language-families, though for the most part
these authors do not take a view on which way a given feature spread from one
family to another.  Apart from Altaic, the Indo-Iranian branch of
Indo-European impacted on Uralic in ancient times (and of course the modern
Uralic languages have been heavily influenced by Russian, Swedish, or German
in different areas of the Uralic range).  There have also been relationships
with Yukaghir, in the far East of Siberia, and, less remarked on but,
according to Ante Aikio, just as noticeable, with Eskimo-Aleut.
 A point which particularly interests me is that many Uralic languages have
limited mechanisms for linking clauses into complex propositions.  For
instance, “Clause combining in Nganasan is normally asyndetic.  Sometimes the
borrowed Russian coordinator i ‘and’ is used.”  Often the languages have no
finite subordinate clauses at all, and the subordinating conjunctions of
non-finite clauses are Russian loans, suggesting that the structures are
recent innovations.  In North Khanty, finite subordinate clauses “have been
documented from as early as the 1930s …  The conjunctions in the subordinate
clauses are either formed from native pronominal or demonstrative stems or
borrowed from Russian.”  Elena Skribnik remarks that “the presence of literacy
and codification of written languages probably stimulate the overt marking of
coordination and the grammaticalization of conjunctions”; she refers to Mithun
(1988: 357), another very relevant reference is the work of Fred Karlsson
(e.g. 2009).  Some theoretical linguists are so committed to the axiom that
all human languages express the same genetically-controlled range of semantic
structures that e.g. Jan Terje Faarlund (2010) resisted Guy Deutscher’s
careful documentation (Deutscher 2000) of the emergence of complement clauses
under the pressure of new communicative needs in early Akkadian, at the dawn
of human history.  So it is fascinating to encounter strong hints that similar
processes have been occurring elsewhere in the world much closer to our own
time.

EVALUATION

This book is a thoroughly admirable compilation.  We can be very glad that it
has been produced while at least a few speakers of most of these languages
survive:  a decade or two later it might have become very difficult to achieve
such comprehensive coverage of one of the world’s major language-families. 
The book is well written and clear, despite the fact that scarcely any
contributor has English as his or her mother tongue.
 It is one of a reviewer’s tasks to identify faults, and one cannot expect any
book of over a thousand pages to be flawless.  One occasional problem is
almost inevitable with a book of this kind:  because the authors are experts
in the topics of their respective chapters, they do not always appreciate how
much needs to be explained to readers who are knowledgeable about linguistics
but not about the author’s special subject.  For instance, a passage in
Johanna Laakso’s chapter on Finnish says that “The adjective suffix ‘-eA’ is
no longer fully productive but occurs [in examples ending in -eä and -ea, and]
in expressive adjectives such as (colloquial) “pähee” ‘cool’.”  The symbol A
here stands for either ä or a as required by vowel harmony, so ‘pähee’ appears
not to contain the suffix -eA.  I suspected a misprint, before a Finnish
acquaintance explained that colloquial Finnish has a rule /eä/ > /ee/; in
standard Finnish the word would be ‘päheä’, but this word only occurs
colloquially (it means “cool” in the teen-speak sense of general approval), so
‘pähee’ is the only form that is heard in practice.  But nothing in the
chapter mentions /eä/ > /ee/; either that should have been explained, or
Laakso should have limited herself to quoting forms of standard Finnish.
 Several contributors state, as an uncontroversial fact, that ‘ja’, Finnish
for “and”, is a Germanic loan.  If true, this matters:  it relates to the
issue about Uralic languages being deficient in mechanisms for linking clauses
into complex sentences.  But it seems surprising.  Most Germanic words for
“and” do not resemble ‘ja’:  and, und, en, … ; og, och, … .  The only
plausible Germanic source I am aware of would be Gothic ‘jah’.  I know there
is (weak) evidence that the Goths originated in the southern Baltic area, and
this book tells us that Proto-Finnic was spoken on the southern side of the
Gulf of Finland, so there could have been mutual contacts, but I wonder what
the evidence is that Finnish ‘ja’ and Gothic ‘jah’ are more than a chance
coincidence.  It is a pity that none of the authors who call ‘ja’ a loanword
give any detail.
 A number of these contributors seem to have non-standard ideas about
phonetics.  It is a minor irritation that almost all of them use the words
“labial” and “illabial” to describe the vowel feature which every phonetician
I have ever read calls “rounded” versus “spread” or “unrounded”.  On p. 1003
Elena Skribnik, quoting a North Khanty example from a Russian-language
publication, says “transcription changed to IPA”, but one of the symbols she
uses is ß – this is not in the IPA alphabet, and I cannot guess what sound it
stands for here.  And, more seriously, several contributors seem to display
confusion about the terms “palatal” and “palatalized”.  When the primary
articulators of a consonant are other than those which produce a palatal, a
[j]-like secondary articulation is properly called “palatalization”:  the
symbol [pʲ] stands for a “palatalized bilabial stop”.  But when the primary
articulators are those of a palatal consonant, the forward part of the tongue
against the hard palate, so far as I can see there is no physical difference
between a palatalized [nʲ], say, and the corresponding palatal [ɲ].  One might
prefer the “-ized” word and the superscripted symbol for phonological reasons,
if the sound is a positional variant of an underlying plain [n], but that is
not a physical difference.  These writers, though, explicitly believe that [ɲ]
and [nʲ] are different sounds, only they are often unsure which occurs in a
particular word from some Uralic language.  There is even a whole chapter on
the topic in Part III.  This looks to me like a mighty muddle.  And my
suspicion hardened into certainty when I found that this chapter ended by
summarizing its findings in ten assertions, the first two of which were:

(i) There are no languages without at least one palatal consonant (/j/).
(ii) The number of languages with palatal consonants is lower than the number
of languages with palatalized consonants.

Taken together, these propositions imply that there are more languages with
palatalized consonants than there are languages.
 It might have been good to include in the prelims a brief glossary of
unfamiliar linguistic terminology.  The term “converb” is explained in detail
on p. 1001, but was used at many earlier points without explanation.
 A problematic issue of a different kind is that a few chapters mingle
discussion of the moribund state of various Uralic languages, and of efforts
being made in some cases to revive them, with political advocacy of a kind
that is out of place in a scientific work.  The authors seem to treat it as
axiomatic that speakers of a minority language have a duty to maintain it. 
For those of us lucky enough to speak our national language as our mother
tongue, it may be difficult to appreciate the conflict that can arise for a
parent between love of his ancestral language, and desire to help his children
make their way in a competitive world where that language ranks as a quaint
survival, perhaps emblematic of disaffection from mainstream society.  The
point was made eloquently by the late Peter Ladefoged (1992), but the
linguistic community has never taken it to heart.  Annika Pasanen and
co-authors refer on p. 75 to the principle that scientific linguistics is
descriptive, not prescriptive, yet two pages later they write that “Language
revitalization … must be continued”; on p. 84 Konstantin Zamyatin writes that
“grassroot initiatives … should have taken an active role in propagating
language use in the private sphere”.  Such remarks are openly prescriptive.
 Oxford’s copy-editors and typesetters have made a magnificent job of printing
a fiendishly complicated MS.  The only shortcoming in that respect relates to
some of the maps.  There are many maps, illustrating dialect boundaries and
the like; some are printed in colour, and others use patterning to create
clear visual contrasts between neighbouring areas on black-and-white maps. 
But there are also monochrome maps which seem to have been produced by simply
converting coloured maps to greyscale without any attempt to adjust contrast
levels.  On some of these maps it is quite difficult even to distinguish land
from sea.
 It takes few words to say that a book is good, but many more to describe an
imperfection.  The fact that most of the lines in my Evaluation section
discuss things that could be improved should not detract from the fact that,
overall, this book is a triumph.

REFERENCES

Deutscher, G.  2000.  Syntactic Change in Akkadian: the evolution of
sentential complementation.  Oxford University Press.

Faarlund, J.T.  2010.  Letter to “Language”.  Language 86.757.

Karlsson, F.  2009.  Origins and maintenance of clausal embedding complexity. 
Chapter 13 in Sampson et al. 2009.

Ladefoged, P.  1992.  Another view of endangered languages.  Language
68.809–11.

Mithun, Marianne.  1988.  The grammaticalization of coordination.  In J.
Haiman and Sandra A. Thompson, eds, Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse.
 John Benjamins (Amsterdam).

Sampson, G.R., D. Gil, and P. Trudgill, eds.  2009.  Language Complexity as an
Evolving Variable.  Oxford University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University in
1965, and studied Linguistics and Computer Science as a graduate student at
Yale University before teaching at the universities of Oxford, LSE, Lancaster,
Leeds, and Sussex. After retiring from his Computing chair at Sussex he spent
several years as a research fellow in Linguistics at the University of South
Africa. Sampson has published in most areas of Linguistics and on a number of
other subjects. His recent books include ''The Linguistics Delusion'' (2017),
''Voices from Early China'' (2020), and ''God Proofs'' (2022).





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