disinformation on Uralic

[Johanna Laakso]

Dear fellow Uralists,


after discussing this question with a couple of colleagues, I felt encouraged to "come out" with an old idea of mine. To put it briefly: I would like to start collecting those blatant errors and demonstrably untrue or outdated statements about the Uralic languages - either the language family as a whole, reconstructed protoforms or individual present-day languages - that still keep circulating among the world's linguists, in international handbooks and the like, and display them on a WWW page. This might teach a lesson not only to those linguists who like to make general statements on "exotic" languages without the necessary expertise or source criticism - and those who trust them -, but also to those of us who feel inclined to automatically admire anything that comes from the direction of internationally acknowledged general linguists or famous publishing houses.

Certainly, most of us have encountered several examples of this kind of disinformation. To start with a couple of examples: Juan Carlos Moreno Cabrera, in his "Adverbial quantification in the languages of Europe" (in the book "Adverbial constructions in the languages of Europe", ed. by Johan van der Auwera), bluntly states that Finnish has no lexical numeral quantifiers (such as English "once, twice...", German "einmal, zweimal..." or Hungarian "egyszer, kétszer..."), thus producing a beautiful areal configuration of this phenomenon on the map but completely ignoring the indisputable existence of Fi. "kahdesti, kolmesti..." etc. Or - this example was pointed out by Petri Kallio - an internationally renowned scholar (I do not have the reference at hand now, but I will check it as soon as possible) in his handbook states that the words for 'two' and 'four' in Proto-Uralic were *kwet and *kwet-kwet, respectively - a morphosyntactically as well as phonotactically completely un-U!
ralic construction.

I would like to ask you to send in more contributions of this kind: if possible, complete quotations with reference to the source, provided with explanations (if necessary) and corrections. For obvious reasons, however, I would like to exclude the following:
- very minor errors, typos and the like, annoying as they may be (for example, Lyle Campbell in his otherwise excellent handbook "Historical linguistics. An introduction" gives some strange reconstructions and false glosses, but these do not affect the general quality of the book more than the traditional slip of the pen - also occurring there - of confusing Budapest with Bucharest);
- products of dilettantes without any academic linguistic affiliation, such as the proponents of the Sumero-Hungarian relationship or the Finnish authoress of the notorious books "Alkukotimme on Egypti" ('Our primeval home is Egypt') and "Etruskia nykysuomeksi" ('Etruscan in Modern Finnish') - unless taken seriously by some "real linguist";
- questions where opinions diverge within the academic Uralistic community (although, of course, this may be hard to define), such as whether one should reconstruct the PU word for 'tongue' as *käxli or
*keele;
- in connection with this, the so-called "revolutionary views" presented by some academically affiliated Uralists or other linguists, most notably Kalevi Wiik, Ago Künnap and János Pusztay (see, e.g., Juha Janhunen's paper in "Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen" 2001). In my view and many others' as well  - as those of you know who have followed the debate in, for instance, "Virittäjä" or "Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen" -, too many of their statements are either too weakly founded or blatantly incorrect, but this debate, arising from "inside" as it is, has very little to do with the real problem targeted here, viz. the interface of Uralistics and general linguistics, typology etc.

So, dear fellow Uralists: please send me references to blatantly and indisputably false statements concerning the Uralic languages in linguistic (and other "serious" scholarly) literature. If there will be enough material, I will start compiling the page and let you know as soon as the first version is ready.

Best,

Johanna
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Univ.-Prof. Dr. Johanna Laakso
Institut für Finno-Ugristik der Universität Wien
Spitalgasse 2-4 Hof 7, A-1090 Wien
johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at
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