Uralic–Yukaghir languages
Uralic–Yukaghir, also known as Uralo-Yukaghir, is a proposed language family composed of Uralic and Yukaghir.
Uralic is a large and diverse family of languages spoken in northern and eastern Europe and northwestern Siberia. Among the better-known Uralic languages are Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian.
Yukaghir is a small family of languages spoken in eastern Siberia. It formerly extended over a much wider area. It consists of two languages, Tundra Yukaghir and Kolyma Yukaghir.
History
Similarities between Uralic and Yukaghir were first pointed out by Paasonen and Lewy, although they did not consider these to be sufficient evidence for a genetic relationship between the two. Holger Pedersen included Uralic and Yukaghir in his proposed Nostratic language family, and also noted some similarities between them. A genetic relationship between Uralic and Yukaghir was first argued for in detail in 1940, independently by Karl Bouda and Björn Collinder. The hypothesis was further elaborated by Collinder in subsequent publications, and also by other scholars including Harms, Nikolaeva and Piispanen.Uralic–Yukaghir is listed as a language family in A Guide to the World's Languages by Merritt Ruhlen, and is accepted as a unit in controversial long-range proposals such as "Eurasiatic" by Joseph Greenberg and "Nostratic" by Allan Bomhard, both based on evidence collected by earlier scholars like Collinder.
Proposed evidence
Collinder based his case for a genetic relationship between Uralic and Yukaghir on lexical and grammatical evidence; the latter included according to him similarities between pronouns, nominal case suffixes, and verb inflection.The following list of lexical correspondences is taken from Nikolaeva.
| Proto-Yukaghir | Proto-Uralic / Proto-Finno-Ugric | Meaning |
| *čupo- | *ćuppa | 'sharp' / 'narrow, thin' |
| *eme | *emä | 'mother' |
| *iw- | *ime- | 'suck' |
| *köj | *koje | 'young man' / 'man' |
| *leɣ | *sewe-/*seɣe- | 'eat' |
| *mon- | *monV- | 'say' |
| *ńu: | *nime | 'name' |
| *olo- | *sala- | 'steal' |
| *ör- | *or- | 'shout' |
| *pe: | *pije | 'mountain, rock' / 'stone' |
| *pöɣ- | *pukta- | 'run, jump' |
| *qa:r/*qajr | *kore/*ko:re | 'skin' |
| *qol- | *kule- | 'hear' |
| *wonč- | *wacV/*wančV | 'root' |
Criticism
The Uralic–Yukaghir hypothesis is rejected by many researchers as unsupported. While most agree that there is a core of common vocabulary that cannot be simply dismissed as chance resemblances, it has been argued that these are not the result of common inheritance, but rather due to contact between Yukaghir and Uralic speakers, which resulted in borrowing of vocabulary from Uralic languages into Yukaghir. Rédei assembled a large corpus of what he considered as loans from Uralic into Yukaghir. Häkkinen argues that the grammatical systems show too few convincing resemblances, especially the morphology, and proposes that putative Uralic–Yukaghir cognates are in fact borrowings from an early stage of Uralic into an early stage of Yukaghir, while Uralic was spoken near the Sayan region and Yukaghir near the Upper Lena River and near Lake Baikal. Aikio agrees with Rédei and Häkkinen that Uralic–Yukaghir is unsupported and implausible, and that common vocabulary shared by the two families is best explained as the result of borrowing from Uralic into Yukaghir, although he rejects many of their examples as spurious or accidental resemblances and puts the date of borrowing much later, arguing that the loanwords he accepts as valid were borrowed from an early stage of Samoyedic into Yukaghir, in the same general region between the Yenisei River and Lake Baikal.Loaning theory
Usualy when words are borrowed, the amount of nouns borrowed is much higher than the amount of verbs, while Yukaghir-Uralic correspondences words can be found in large numbers in all word classes. Most Uralic-Yukaghir correspondences are also found in the core vocabulary and do not appear to clearly constitute a particular cultural subgroup of borrowed vocabulary of any given chronological perioid or culture. But, Uralic correspondences are found very extensively in function words and the most used vocabulary which, it is well-known, is very rarely borrowed like,demonstrative pronouns, tentatively, in personal pronouns, numbers, and kinship terms and many verbs, these kinds of words are very rarely borrowed from other languages and are very resistant to loaning.Works cited
- Bomhard, Allan R. 2008. Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary, 2 volumes. Leiden: Brill.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 2000. Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1: Grammar. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 2002. Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 2: Lexicon. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 2005. Genetic Linguistics: Essays on Theory and Method, edited by William Croft. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Pedersen, Holger. 1933. "Zur Frage nach der Urverwandtschaft des Indoeuropäischen mit dem Ugrofinnischen." Mémoires de la Société finno-ougrienne 67:308–325.
- Ruhlen, Merritt. 1987. A Guide to the World's Languages, Volume 1: Classification. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.