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111-673: The Finnic or Baltic Finnic languages constitute a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by the Baltic Finnic peoples . There are around 7 million speakers, who live mainly in Finland and Estonia . Traditionally, eight Finnic languages have been recognized. The major modern representatives of the family are Finnish and Estonian , the official languages of their respective nation states. The other Finnic languages in

222-511: A close central unrounded /ɨ/ in Livonian), as well as loss of *n before *s with compensatory lengthening . (North) Estonian-Votic has been suggested to possibly constitute an actual genetic subgroup (called varyingly Maa by Viitso (1998, 2000) or Central Finnic by Kallio (2014)), though the evidence is weak: almost all innovations shared by Estonian and Votic have also spread to South Estonian and/or Livonian. A possible defining innovation

333-522: A nasal and a stop . Examples of Nganasan consonant gradation can be seen in the following table (the first form given is always the nominative singular, the latter the genitive singular): The original conditions of the Nganasan gradation can be shown to be identical to gradation in Finnic and Samic; that is, radical/syllabic gradation according to syllable closure, and suffixal/rhythmic gradation according to

444-665: A Finno-Permic grouping. Extending this approach to cover the Samoyedic languages suggests affinity with Ugric, resulting in the aforementioned East Uralic grouping, as it also shares the same sibilant developments. A further non-trivial Ugric-Samoyedic isogloss is the reduction *k, *x, *w > ɣ when before *i, and after a vowel (cf. *k > ɣ above), or adjacent to *t, *s, *š, or *ś. Finno-Ugric consonant developments after Viitso (2000); Samoyedic changes after Sammallahti (1988) The inverse relationship between consonant gradation and medial lenition of stops (the pattern also continuing within

555-502: A century's worth of editing work for later generations of Finnish Uralicists. The Uralic family comprises nine undisputed groups with no consensus classification between them. (Some of the proposals are listed in the next section.) An agnostic approach treats them as separate branches. Obsolete or native names are displayed in italics. There is also historical evidence of a number of extinct languages of uncertain affiliation: Traces of Finno-Ugric substrata, especially in toponymy, in

666-458: A competing hypothesis to Ob-Ugric. Lexicostatistics has been used in defense of the traditional family tree. A recent re-evaluation of the evidence however fails to find support for Finno-Ugric and Ugric, suggesting four lexically distinct branches (Finno-Permic, Hungarian, Ob-Ugric and Samoyedic). One alternative proposal for a family tree, with emphasis on the development of numerals, is as follows: Another proposed tree, more divergent from

777-520: A connection between Uralic and other Paleo-Siberian languages. Theories proposing a close relationship with the Altaic languages were formerly popular, based on similarities in vocabulary as well as in grammatical and phonological features, in particular the similarities in the Uralic and Altaic pronouns and the presence of agglutination in both sets of languages, as well as vowel harmony in some. For example,

888-470: A coronal obstruent /s š t/ : muistua 'to remember' → muissan 'I remember', matka → matan 'trip' (nom. → gen.). This development may be by analogy of the corresponding liquid clusters. On the other hand, some Karelian dialects (such as Livvi or Olonets ) do not allow for gradation in clusters beginning on nasals. Thus, the Olonets Karelian equivalent of Finnish vanhemmat (cf. vanhempi 'older')

999-492: A gradation pattern /s/  : /z/ here ( pezäd ). Veps and Livonian have largely leveled the original gradation system, and reflect both weak and strong grades of single stops as /b d ɡ/ ; this may be an archaism or a substitution of voiced stops for fricatives due to foreign influence (Russian for Veps, Latvian for Livonian). Except for northernmost Veps dialects, both grades of geminate stops are also reflected as /p t k/ . Finnish consonant gradation generally preserves

1110-466: A less predictable system of consonant mutation , of morphophonological or even purely morphological nature. This is a consequence of later changes in the structure of syllables, which made closed syllables open or vice versa, without adjusting the gradation. For example, in Northern Sami, the only difference between giella and giela ("language", nominative and genitive singular respectively)

1221-458: A lesser extent, Baltic languages . Innovations are also shared between Finnic and the Mordvinic languages , and in recent times Finnic, Sámi and Moksha are sometimes grouped together. There is no grammatical gender in any of the Finnic languages, nor are there articles or definite or indefinite forms. The morphophonology (the way the grammatical function of a morpheme affects its production)

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1332-565: A nasal. This change may have occurred already in Proto-Finnic , but is not found in Livonian and Veps . The fricatives later underwent further changes, and the dental and velar fricatives have been lost altogether in most Finnic varieties. The weakened grades of geminate consonants did not merge with the strong grades of the singleton consonants in Proto-Finnic, and still counted as geminates for

1443-455: A number of alternations between continuants which are short in the 'weak' grade, and geminates in the 'strong' grade ( kassā 'to sprinkle/water' vs. kasan 'I sprinkle/water'), as well as more voicing alternations between palatalized stops, and the alternations between nasal+consonant~nasal+chroneme found in Finnish. Votic also includes alternations in which the 'strong' grade is represented by

1554-425: A number of developments towards the situation in Finnish and Karelian have occurred, such as the change of unlengthened *t to /ð/ . Northern Sami has a system of three phonological lengths for consonants, and thus has extensive sets of alternations. Quantity 3 is represented as lengthening of the coda part of a geminate or cluster, which is absent in quantity 2. Quantity 1 consists of only an onset consonant, with

1665-608: A set of fully voiced stops, which Paul Ariste ( A Grammar of the Votic Language ) describes as being the same as in Russian. Thus, in addition to quantitative alternations between /pː tː kː/ and /p t k/ , Votic also has a system of qualitative alternations in which the distinguishing feature is voicing , and so the voiceless stops /p t k/ are known to alternate with /b d ɡ/ . As in Estonian, Karelian, and Eastern dialects of Finnish,

1776-585: A short consonant, while the 'weak' grade is represented by a geminate: ritõlõn vs. riďďõlla . For comparison, the Finnish equivalents of these is riitelen 'I quarrel' vs. riidellä 'to quarrel'. Though otherwise closely related to Votic, consonant gradation in Estonian is quite different from the other Finnic languages. One extremely important difference is the existence of three grades of consonants (alternations like strong grade pada 'pot (nom.)', weak grade paja 'pot (gen.)', overlong grade patta 'pot (ill.)'). This can be said to generally correlate with

1887-433: A stressed syllable. In the case of verbs like tulla 'to come', the earlier form was * tul-ðak , but the *ð was assimilated to the /l/ according to the patterns described above. The original strong grade was preserved in verbs like hais-ta 'to stink' since gradation did not take place when a consonant followed /s/. The situation appears differently in the many verbs ending in -ata/ätä . These verbs seem to have preserved

1998-484: A word-medial alternation of consonants between fortis and lenis realisations. The fortis strong grade appears in historically open syllables (ending in a vowel), while the lenis weak grade appears in historically closed syllables (ending in a consonant). The exact realisation of the fortis–lenis distinction differs between the branches. In the Samic languages it was realised through fortition , specifically lengthening, in

2109-473: Is porsas ("pig"), loaned from Proto-Indo-European *porḱos or pre- Proto-Indo-Iranian *porśos , unchanged since loaning save for loss of palatalization , *ś > s.) The Estonian philologist Mall Hellam proposed cognate sentences that she asserted to be mutually intelligible among the three most widely spoken Uralic languages: Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian: However, linguist Geoffrey Pullum reports that neither Finns nor Hungarians could understand

2220-400: Is vahne mb at . The Karelian phoneme inventory also includes the affricate /tʃ/ (represented in the orthography as č ), which may be found geminated and is such subject to quantitative gradation: meččä 'forest' → mečäššä 'in (the) forest'. Votic has two quantities for consonants and vowels, which basically match up with the Finnish counterparts. The Votic phoneme inventory includes

2331-506: Is a part of the Estonian literary language and is an essential feature in Võro , as well as Veps , Karelian , and other eastern Finnic languages. It is also found in East Finnish dialects, and is only missing from West Finnish dialects and Standard Finnish. A special characteristic of the languages is the large number of diphthongs . There are 16 diphthongs in Finnish and 25 in Estonian; at

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2442-462: Is a type of consonant mutation (mostly lenition but also assimilation ) found in some Uralic languages , more specifically in the Finnic , Samic and Samoyedic branches. It originally arose as an allophonic alternation between open and closed syllables , but has become grammaticalised due to changes in the syllable structure of the languages affected. The term "consonant gradation" refers to

2553-426: Is also found after a stressed syllable, however, in the exceptional monosyllabic root *mees  : *meehe- "man"; and in a fossilized form, in the postpositions lähellä "near" vs. läsnä "present", reflecting the adessive and the essive of a root *läse- "vicinity". In cases of root-internal *s , this pattern is not normally found (e.g. Finnish pesä 'nest' : plural pesät ), though Votic later reintroduced

2664-441: Is apparent from the list, Finnish is the most conservative of the Uralic languages presented here, with nearly half the words on the list above identical to their Proto-Uralic reconstructions and most of the remainder only having minor changes, such as the conflation of *ś into /s/, or widespread changes such as the loss of *x and alteration of *ï. Finnish has also preserved old Indo-European borrowings relatively unchanged. (An example

2775-600: Is at the base of today's wide acceptance of the inclusion of Samoyedic as a part of the Uralic family. Meanwhile, in the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland , a chair for Finnish language and linguistics at the University of Helsinki was created in 1850, first held by Castrén. In 1883, the Finno-Ugrian Society was founded in Helsinki on the proposal of Otto Donner , which would lead to Helsinki overtaking St. Petersburg as

2886-420: Is complex. Morphological elements found in the Finnic languages include grammatical case suffixes, verb tempus, mood and person markers (singular and plural, the Finnic languages do not have dual ) as well as participles and several infinitive forms, possessive suffixes, clitics and more. The number of grammatical cases tends to be high while the number of verb infinitive forms varies more by language. One of

2997-632: Is different from the gradation found in the Finnic languages in some important aspects: Similar to the cases of Veps and Livonian within Finnic, the Southern Sami language at the westernmost end of the Sami language continuum has lost all gradation. In the remaining Sami languages, the strong grade of the singletons merged with the weak grade of geminates, creating a three-quantity distinction between short, long and overlong consonants. In Kildin and Ter Sami , this merger did not affect stops and affricates, due to

3108-593: Is now European Russia, and the Budini , described by Herodotus as notably red-haired (a characteristic feature of the Udmurts ) and living in northeast Ukraine and/or adjacent parts of Russia. In the late 15th century, European scholars noted the resemblance of the names Hungaria and Yugria , the names of settlements east of the Ural. They assumed a connection but did not seek linguistic evidence. The affinity of Hungarian and Finnish

3219-505: Is now wide agreement that Proto-Finnic was probably spoken at the coasts of the Gulf of Finland. The Finnic languages are located at the western end of the Uralic language family. A close affinity to their northern neighbors, the Sámi languages , has long been assumed, though many of the similarities (particularly lexical ones) can be shown to result from common influence from Germanic languages and, to

3330-499: Is quite similar to Finnish: *β *ð *ɣ have been lost in a fashion essentially identical to Eastern Finnish (and may have occurred in the common ancestor of the two), with the exception that assimilation rather than loss has occurred also for *lɣ and *rɣ. E.g. the plural of jalka 'foot' is jallat , contrasting with jalat in Finnish and jalad in Estonian. Karelian still includes some gradation pairs which Finnish does not. The consonants /t k/ undergo consonant gradation when following

3441-458: Is still the case for similar clusters such as /sp/ , /st/ , /tk/ ). However, gradation pairs ht : *hð and hk : *hɣ were at one point introduced. The first of these patterns remains common in modern Finnish, e.g. vahti : vahdit 'guard(s)'. The second is only found in a limited number of words, e.g. pohje : pohkeet 'calf : calves', but rahka : rahkat ' quark (s)'. Usage varies for some words with /hk/ , e.g. for

Finnic languages - Misplaced Pages Continue

3552-415: Is the grade; the consonant that originally closed the syllable in the genitive form has disappeared. Even in Finnish, which is relatively conservative with respect to consonants, there are many cases of strong grades in closed syllables and weak grades in open syllables, e.g. sade and sateen ("rain", nominative and genitive singular). These, again, are the result of changes in syllable structure, with

3663-695: Is the loss of *h after sonorants ( *n, *l, *r ). The Northern Finnic group has more evidence for being an actual historical/genetic subgroup. Phonetical innovations would include two changes in unstressed syllables: *ej > *ij, and *o > ö after front-harmonic vowels. The lack of õ in these languages as an innovation rather than a retention has been proposed, and recently resurrected. Germanic loanwords found throughout Northern Finnic but absent in Southern are also abundant, and even several Baltic examples of this are known. Northern Finnic in turn divides into two main groups. The most Eastern Finnic group consists of

3774-639: Is to any other language family. The hypothesis that the Dravidian languages display similarities with the Uralic language group, suggesting a prolonged period of contact in the past, is popular amongst Dravidian linguists and has been supported by a number of scholars, including Robert Caldwell , Thomas Burrow , Kamil Zvelebil , and Mikhail Andronov. This hypothesis has, however, been rejected by some specialists in Uralic languages, and has in recent times also been criticised by other Dravidian linguists, such as Bhadriraju Krishnamurti . Stefan Georg describes

3885-603: The -da infinitive has the opposite grade from the present ( hakata 'to begin', lugeda 'to read'). The system of gradation has also expanded to include gradation of all consonant clusters and geminate consonants (generally quantitative), when occurring after short vowels, and vowel gradation between long and overlong vowels, although these are not written except for the distinction between voiceless stops and geminate voiceless stops (e.g. overlong strong grade tt with weak grade t ). E.g. linn [linːː] , 'city (nom.)' vs. linna [linːɑ] 'city (gen.)'. In consonant clusters, in

3996-687: The East Finnish dialects as well as Ingrian, Karelian and Veps; the proto-language of these was likely spoken in the vicinity of Lake Ladoga . The Western Finnic group consists of the West Finnish dialects, originally spoken on the western coast of Finland, and within which the oldest division is that into Southwestern, Tavastian and Southern Ostrobothnian dialects. Among these, at least the Southwestern dialects have later come under Estonian influence. Numerous new dialects have also arisen through contacts of

4107-533: The Eskimo–Aleut languages . This is an old thesis whose antecedents go back to the 18th century. An important restatement of it was made by Bergsland (1959). Uralo-Siberian is an expanded form of the Eskimo–Uralic hypothesis. It associates Uralic with Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan , and Eskimo–Aleut. It was propounded by Michael Fortescue in 1998. Michael Fortescue (2017) presented new evidence in favor for

4218-662: The Indo-European family. In 1717, the Swedish professor Olof Rudbeck proposed about 100 etymologies connecting Finnish and Hungarian, of which about 40 are still considered valid. Several early reports comparing Finnish or Hungarian with Mordvin, Mari or Khanty were additionally collected by Gottfried Leibniz and edited by his assistant Johann Georg von Eckhart . In 1730, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published his book Das Nord- und Ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia ( The Northern and Eastern Parts of Europe and Asia ), surveying

4329-648: The Proto-Uralic language include: The first plausible mention of a people speaking a Uralic language is in Tacitus 's Germania ( c.  98 AD ), mentioning the Fenni (usually interpreted as referring to the Sámi ) and two other possibly Uralic tribes living in the farthest reaches of Scandinavia. There are many possible earlier mentions, including the Iyrcae (perhaps related to Yugra) described by Herodotus living in what

4440-642: The Vepsians to general knowledge and elucidated in detail the relatedness of Finnish and Komi. Still more extensive were the field research expeditions made in the 1840s by Matthias Castrén (1813–1852) and Antal Reguly (1819–1858), who focused especially on the Samoyedic and the Ob-Ugric languages , respectively. Reguly's materials were worked on by the Hungarian linguist Pál Hunfalvy  [ hu ] (1810–1891) and German Josef Budenz (1836–1892), who both supported

4551-529: The 1960s. Eurasiatic resembles Nostratic in including Uralic, Indo-European, and Altaic, but differs from it in excluding the South Caucasian languages, Dravidian, and Afroasiatic and including Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Nivkh , Ainu , and Eskimo–Aleut. It was propounded by Joseph Greenberg in 2000–2002. Similar ideas had earlier been expressed by Heinrich Koppelmann in 1933 and by Björn Collinder in 1965. The linguist Angela Marcantonio has argued against

Finnic languages - Misplaced Pages Continue

4662-594: The Baltic Sea region are Ingrian and Votic , spoken in Ingria by the Gulf of Finland , and Livonian , once spoken around the Gulf of Riga . Spoken farther northeast are Karelian , Ludic , and Veps , in the region of Lakes Onega and Ladoga . In addition, since the 1990s, several Finnic-speaking minority groups have emerged to seek recognition for their languages as distinct from the ones they have been considered dialects of in

4773-458: The Central Finnic group that must be attributed to later contact, due to the influence of literary North Estonian. Thus, contemporary "Southern Finnic" is a sprachbund that includes these languages, while diachronically they are not closely related. The genetic classification of the Finnic dialects that can be extracted from Viitso (1998) is: Viitso (2000) surveys 59 isoglosses separating

4884-555: The Coastal Estonian dialect group), Livonian and Votic (except the highly Ingrian-influenced Kukkuzi Votic). These languages are not closely related genetically, as noted above; it is a paraphyletic grouping, consisting of all Finnic languages except the Northern Finnic languages. The languages nevertheless share a number of features, such as the presence of a ninth vowel phoneme õ , usually a close-mid back unrounded /ɤ/ (but

4995-607: The Finnic and Samic peoples on one hand, and the Nganasans on the other, leads Helimski to reject the second option of these. The original effect of gradation in the Finnic languages can be reconstructed as a lenition of the consonant at the beginning of a closed syllable. Lenition resulted in geminate (long) stops and affricates being shortened, and in short voiceless obstruents /*p *t *k/ becoming voiced, while short voiced obstruents /*b *d *g/ became fricatives: Only stops and affricates were affected, not other consonants. Moreover, only

5106-577: The Finnic varieties recognizes the Southern Finnic and Northern Finnic groups (though the position of some varieties within this division is uncertain): † = extinct variety; ( † ) = moribund variety. A more-or-less genetic subdivision can be also determined, based on the relative chronology of sound changes within varieties, which provides a rather different view. The following grouping follows among others Sammallahti (1977), Viitso (1998), and Kallio (2014): The division between South Estonian and

5217-536: The Karelian language was not officially recognised as its own language in Finland until 2009, despite there being no linguistic confusion about its status. The smaller languages are endangered . The last native speaker of Livonian died in 2013, and only about a dozen native speakers of Votic remain. Regardless, even for these languages, the shaping of a standard language and education in it continues. The geographic centre of

5328-656: The Proto-Finnic pattern fairly well. The conditioning of syllable structure is still visible in most cases, but it is no longer productive: gradation has become a grammatical feature. These changes have made qualitative gradation become more complex, especially in the case of k . In standard Finnish, k is the phoneme with the most possible changes. It can disappear as in jalka 'foot' → jalan 'foot-Gen', or: /j/ has been lost in this position in Southeastern Tavastian, Northern Bothnian and Eastern dialects, resulting in kurki (crane) : kuren (crane's) instead of

5439-527: The Uralic affinity of Hungarian. Budenz was the first scholar to bring this result to popular consciousness in Hungary and to attempt a reconstruction of the Proto-Finno-Ugric grammar and lexicon. Another late-19th-century Hungarian contribution is that of Ignácz Halász  [ hu ] (1855–1901), who published extensive comparative material of Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic in the 1890s, and whose work

5550-409: The acute denotes a secondary palatal articulation ( ⟨ś⟩ [sʲ ~ ɕ] , ⟨ć⟩ [tsʲ ~ tɕ] , ⟨l⟩ [lʲ] ) or, in Hungarian, vowel length. The Finnish letter ⟨y⟩ and the letter ⟨ü⟩ in other languages represent the high rounded vowel [y] ; the letters ⟨ä⟩ and ⟨ö⟩ are the front vowels [æ] and [ø] . As

5661-524: The additional preaspiration found on original geminates. In the others, the merger affected stops and affricates as well, with the strong grade of singletons receiving secondary preaspiration. In the Western Samic languages, geminate nasals became pre-stopped, which affected the strong grade of singletons as well (outside Southern Sami) due to the historical merger of these grades. In the languages in closest contact to Finnic ( Northern , Inari and Skolt ),

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5772-521: The arrangement of its subgroups is a matter of some dispute. Mordvinic is commonly seen as particularly closely related to or part of Finno-Samic. The term Volgaic (or Volga-Finnic ) was used to denote a branch previously believed to include Mari, Mordvinic and a number of the extinct languages, but it is now obsolete and considered a geographic classification rather than a linguistic one. Within Ugric, uniting Mansi with Hungarian rather than Khanty has been

5883-750: The chief northern center of research of the Uralic languages. During the late 19th and early 20th century (until the separation of Finland from Russia following the Russian Revolution ), the Society hired many scholars to survey the still less-known Uralic languages. Major researchers of this period included Heikki Paasonen (studying especially the Mordvinic languages ), Yrjö Wichmann (studying Permic ), Artturi Kannisto  [ fi ] ( Mansi ), Kustaa Fredrik Karjalainen ( Khanty ), Toivo Lehtisalo ( Nenets ), and Kai Donner ( Kamass ). The vast amounts of data collected on these expeditions would provide over

5994-549: The clusters /ht/ and /hk/ with a voicing-neutral first member, but also further clusters, even several ones introduced only in Russian loans. The alternations involving the voiced affricate dž are only found in the Eastern dialects. In the Western dialects, there are several possible weak grade counterparts of tš : Further minor variation in these gradation patterns was found down to the level of individual villages. Votic also has

6105-501: The consonant from a geminate * -tt- to a single * -t- , and later loss of -k resulted in the final form -ata/ätä . However, even though this is now a single consonant, it was originally a geminate and therefore triggers the weak grade on the syllable before it. So whereas the infinitive may be for example hypätä 'to jump', its original stem was * hyppät- , as can be seen in the first-person singular form hyppään 'I jump', from earlier * hyppäðen with loss of *-ð- . An opposite effect

6216-499: The early 20th century, they were found to be quite divergent, and they were assumed to have separated already early on. The terminology adopted for this was "Uralic" for the entire family, " Finno-Ugric " for the non-Samoyedic languages (though "Finno-Ugric" has, to this day, remained in use also as a synonym for the whole family). Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic are listed in ISO 639-5 as primary branches of Uralic. The following table lists nodes of

6327-564: The epoch". Still, in spite of this hostile climate, the Hungarian Jesuit János Sajnovics traveled with Maximilian Hell to survey the alleged relationship between Hungarian and Sámi, while they were also on a mission to observe the 1769 Venus transit . Sajnovics published his results in 1770, arguing for a relationship based on several grammatical features. In 1799, the Hungarian Sámuel Gyarmathi published

6438-479: The existence of three degrees of consonant length (e.g. d , t , and tt ), but since the alternation d ~ t occurs only after heavy syllables, and the alternations d ~ tt and t ~ tt occur only after light syllables, there is no single paradigm that has this simple alternation. However, weak grades like v , j , or ∅ that alternate with stops like b , d , or g originate from the weak grade of these stops, and these may still synchronically alternate with

6549-475: The family into 58 dialect areas (finer division is possible), finding that an unambiguous perimeter can be set up only for South Estonian, Livonian, Votic, and Veps. In particular, no isogloss exactly coincides with the geographical division into 'Estonian' south of the Gulf of Finland and 'Finnish' north of it. Despite this, standard Finnish and Estonian are not mutually intelligible . The Southern Finnic languages consist of North and South Estonian (excluding

6660-443: The following apostrophe marking the over-long grade is not used in the official orthography, although it is generally found in dictionaries. Some gradation triads include the following: Nganasan , alone of the Samoyedic languages (or indeed any Uralic languages east of Finnic), shows systematic qualitative gradation of stops and fricatives . Gradation occurs in intervocalic position as well as in consonant clusters consisting of

6771-413: The genitive and the partitive singular are formed by adding -e , but the genitive takes the weak form ( leh-e ), while the partitive takes the strong form ( leht-e ). In the end, the types of generalizations that can be made are that some inflectional categories always take the strong form (e.g. partitive plural, -ma infinitive), some always take the weak form (e.g. -tud participle), some forms may take

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6882-402: The geography, peoples and languages of Russia. All the main groups of the Uralic languages were already identified here. Nonetheless, these relationships were not widely accepted. Hungarian intellectuals especially were not interested in the theory and preferred to assume connections with Turkic tribes, an attitude characterized by Merritt Ruhlen as due to "the wild unfettered Romanticism of

6993-399: The home' (from earlier * kotihin , from koti ). This explains why kotiin retains a strong grade even though a closed syllable follows it. The Pohjanmaa dialect of Finnish retains the -h- , however. Words that now end in -e are in fact very similar to those ending in -s . These originally ended with -k or -h so that the nominative ended in a consonant just as kuningas and therefore

7104-410: The last member of a consonant cluster was subject to gradation, and single stops and affricates were only affected if they were not adjacent to another obstruent. Thus, two-obstruent combinations like kt , st and tk did not undergo lenition, nor did obstruent-sonorant combinations like kl and tr . The voiced stops *b *d *g generally lenited to fricatives /β ð ɣ/ unless they were preceded by

7215-460: The loss of -h- then resulted in the modern form kuninkaan . The intermediate steps are seen in mies 'man'. Here, following a stressed syllable, the -h- was not lost, so that its genitive is miehen . Similar changes affected the illative ending, which was -hVn where V was the same as the vowel preceding the ending. The h is preserved after stressed syllables, as in maahan 'into the land' (from maa ), but lost otherwise as in kotiin 'into

7326-504: The maximum divergence between the languages is located east of the Gulf of Finland around Saint Petersburg . A glottochronological study estimates the age of the common ancestor of existing languages to a little more than 1000 years. However, Mikko Heikkilä dates the beginning of the diversification (with South Estonian as the first split) rather precisely to about 150 AD, based on loanword evidence (and previous estimates tend to be even older, like Pekka Sammallahti's of 1000–600 BC). There

7437-425: The modern Finnish infinitive ending, which was historically * -tak/täk . The final * -k triggered gradation, so that the ending normally became * -dak/däk . In turn, following the loss of d between unstressed vowels, and the loss of final * -k only * -aˣ/äˣ remained. Thus, hakea (originally * hakedak ) has only -a as the d was lost. But in verbs like juo-da 'to drink' the /d/ remained since it followed

7548-516: The more important processes is the characteristic consonant gradation . Two kinds of gradation occur: radical gradation and suffix gradation. They both affect the plosives /k/ , /t/ and /p/ , and involve the process known as lenition , in which the consonant is changed into a "weaker" form. This occurs in some (but not all) of the oblique case forms. For geminates , the process is simple to describe: they become simple stops, e.g. ku pp i + -n → ku p in (Finnish: "cup"). For simple consonants,

7659-466: The most complete work on Finno-Ugric to that date. Up to the beginning of the 19th century, knowledge of the Uralic languages spoken in Russia had remained restricted to scanty observations by travelers. Already the Finnish historian Henrik Gabriel Porthan had stressed that further progress would require dedicated field missions. One of the first of these was undertaken by Anders Johan Sjögren , who brought

7770-520: The nine undisputed families) are becoming more common. A traditional classification of the Uralic languages has existed since the late 19th century. It has enjoyed frequent adaptation in whole or in part in encyclopedias, handbooks, and overviews of the Uralic family. Otto Donner's model from 1879 is as follows: At Donner's time, the Samoyedic languages were still poorly known, and he was not able to address their position. As they became better known in

7881-444: The northern part of European Russia have been proposed as evidence for even more extinct Uralic languages. [REDACTED] All Uralic languages are thought to have descended, through independent processes of language change , from Proto-Uralic . The internal structure of the Uralic family has been debated since the family was first proposed. Doubts about the validity of most or all of the proposed higher-order branchings (grouping

7992-535: The number of common words. The following is a very brief selection of cognates in basic vocabulary across the Uralic family, which may serve to give an idea of the sound changes involved. This is not a list of translations: cognates have a common origin, but their meaning may be shifted and loanwords may have replaced them. Orthographical notes: The hacek denotes postalveolar articulation ( ⟨ž⟩ [ʒ] , ⟨š⟩ [ʃ] , ⟨č⟩ [t͡ʃ] ) (In Northern Sámi, ( ⟨ž⟩ [dʒ] ), while

8103-472: The old dialects: these include e.g. the more northern Finnish dialects (a mixture of West and East Finnish), and the Livvi and Ludic varieties (probably originally Veps dialects but heavily influenced by Karelian). Salminen (2003) present the following list of Finnic languages and their respective number of speakers. These features distinguish Finnic languages from other Uralic families: Sound changes shared by

8214-455: The original Proto-Finnic *sadek and *sategen following the rules more obviously. In addition, not all Finnish words have gradation, so that the occurrence of gradation is not even morphologically predictable anymore, it is a property of each individual word. There is no consensus view on the ultimate origin of consonant gradation in the Uralic languages. Three broad positions may be distinguished: In all three groups, consonant gradation has

8325-441: The original syllable closure can be seen in sandhi effects: these classes of words can still be analyzed to contain the assimilative word-final 'consonant' ˣ, realized as lengthening of the next word's initial consonant. Therefore, hae side varastosta 'get a bandage from storage!' is pronounced [hɑe‿sːide‿ʋːɑrɑstostɑ] , where the weak grades indeed occur in closed syllables. The loss of -k combined with loss of d gave rise to

8436-443: The other language's version of the sentence. No Uralic language has exactly the idealized typological profile of the family. Typological features with varying presence among the modern Uralic language groups include: Notes: Many relationships between Uralic and other language families have been suggested, but none of these is generally accepted by linguists at the present time: All of the following hypotheses are minority views at

8547-458: The over-long grades ( pp , tt , kk ) within the same paradigm, giving paradigms with three underlying grades. Another extremely important feature of Estonian gradation is that, due to the greater loss of word-final segments (both consonants and vowels), the Estonian gradation is an almost entirely opaque process, where the consonant grade (short, long, or overlong) must be listed for each class of wordform. So, for example, embus 'embrace' has

8658-541: The overlong form (some partitive singulars, short illative singular), while other inflectional categories are underdetermined for whether they occur with weak or strong grade. In this last case, within a paradigm some forms are constrained to have the same grade and others are constrained to have the opposite grade; thus all present tense forms for the same verb have the same grade, though some verbs have strong ( hakkan 'I begin', hakkad 'you begin', etc.) and others have weak ( loen 'I read', loed , 'you read', etc.), and

8769-567: The past. Some of these groups have established their own orthographies and standardised languages. Võro and Seto , which are spoken in southeastern Estonia and in some parts of Russia, are considered dialects of Estonian by some linguists, while other linguists consider them separate languages. Meänkieli and Kven are spoken in northern Sweden and Norway respectively and have the legal status of independent minority languages separate from Finnish. They were earlier considered dialects of Finnish and are mutually intelligible with it. Additionally,

8880-469: The phonological variation in the stem (variation caused by the now historical morphological elements), which results in three phonemic lengths in these languages. Vowel harmony is also characteristic of the Finnic languages, despite having been lost in Livonian, Estonian and Veps. The original Uralic palatalization was lost in proto-Finnic, but most of the diverging dialects reacquired it. Palatalization

8991-413: The plural of nahka 'leather, hide', both nahat and nahkat are acceptable. Quantitative consonant gradation has expanded to include in addition to the pairs kk : k , pp : p , tt : t , also gg : g and bb : b (but not dd : d ) in a number of recent loanwords, such as blogata : bloggaan 'to blog'; lobata : lobbaan 'to lobby'. One important change

9102-536: The preceding syllable having no coda. In addition, most dialects of Northern Sami feature coda maximisation , which geminates the last member of a cluster in various environments (most commonly in two-consonant clusters of quantity 2, in which the first member is voiced). Most sonorants and fricatives are only subject to quantitative gradation, but nasals, stops, affricates and the glide /j/ are subject to both quantitative and qualitative changes. Some words alternate between three grades, though not all words do. Note that

9213-511: The preceding syllable was in the weak grade. But after an ending was added, the weak grade g appeared, which eventually disappeared just as h did. While syllabic gradation remains generally productive, the distortions of its original phonetic conditions have left it essentially a morphologically conditioned process. This is particularly visible in forms that display a strong grade where a weak would be historically expected, or vice versa. Possessive suffixes , in particular, are always preceded by

9324-446: The present time in Uralic studies. The Uralic–Yukaghir hypothesis identifies Uralic and Yukaghir as independent members of a single language family. It is currently widely accepted that the similarities between Uralic and Yukaghir languages are due to ancient contacts. Regardless, the hypothesis is accepted by a few linguists and viewed as attractive by a somewhat larger number. The Eskimo–Uralic hypothesis associates Uralic with

9435-417: The process complicates immensely and the results vary by the environment. For example, ha k a + -n → haan , ky k y + -n → ky v yn , jär k i + -n → jär j en (Finnish: "pasture", "ability", "intellect"). The specifics of consonants gradation vary by language (see the separate article for more details). Apocope (strongest in Livonian, Võro and Estonian) has, in some cases, left a phonemic status to

9546-414: The purposes of syllabification. There remained for a period an intermediate quantity, half-long * -t̆t- , which still closed the preceding syllable. Consequently, a syllable ending with a geminate in the weak grade still triggered a weak grade on the preceding syllable as well. In Finnish, the half-long consonants eventually merged with the strong-grade singleton consonants, but in most other Finnic languages,

9657-551: The remaining Finnic varieties has isoglosses that must be very old. For the most part, these features have been known for long. Their position as very early in the relative chronology of Finnic, in part representing archaisms in South Estonian, has been shown by Kallio (2007, 2014). However, due to the strong areal nature of many later innovations, this tree structure has been distorted and sprachbunds have formed. In particular, South Estonian and Livonian show many similarities with

9768-442: The same conditioning, the distinction between open and closed syllables. In this light, and in the absence of any evidence of the same system having existed in any unrelated language in the world, Helimski (1995) has argued that the latter two options should be rejected as implausible. If a connection exists, it is also disputed what its nature may be, again allowing for three broad positions: The great geographical distance between

9879-422: The same form for all cases (e.g. genitive embuse ), while hammas 'tooth' has weak grade mm in the nominative hammas and partitive hammast , but strong form mb in the genitive hamba and all other cases of the singular. There is a large number of cases in which inflectional endings are identical except for how they affect the consonant grade, e.g. leht 'leaf' belongs to a declension class in which both

9990-470: The same time the frequency of diphthong use is greater in Finnish than in Estonian due to certain historical long vowels having diphthongised in Finnish but not in Estonian. On a global scale the Finnic languages have a high number of vowels. The Finnic languages form a complex dialect continuum with few clear-cut boundaries. Innovations have often spread through a variety of areas, even after variety-specific changes. A broad twofold conventional division of

10101-516: The similarities of Sámi, Estonian, and Finnish, and also on a few similar words between Finnish and Hungarian. These authors were the first to outline what was to become the classification of the Finno-Ugric, and later Uralic family. This proposal received some of its initial impetus from the fact that these languages, unlike most of the other languages spoken in Europe, are not part of what is now known as

10212-539: The standard form kurjen . Short t also has developed more complex gradation due to various assimilations. Patterns include t  : d (tie t ää : tie d än), rt  : rr (ke rt oa : ke rr on), lt  : ll (pe lt o : pe ll on), and nt ~ nn (a nt aa ~ a nn an). Alternation patterns for p include p  : v (ta p a : ta v an) and mp  : mm (la mp i : la mm en). The consonant clusters /ht/ and /hk/ were, comprising two obstruents, not originally subject to gradation (as

10323-588: The standard, focusing on consonant isoglosses (which does not consider the position of the Samoyedic languages) is presented by Viitso (1997), and refined in Viitso (2000): The grouping of the four bottom-level branches remains to some degree open to interpretation, with competing models of Finno-Saamic vs. Eastern Finno-Ugric (Mari, Mordvinic, Permic-Ugric; *k > ɣ between vowels, degemination of stops) and Finno-Volgaic (Finno-Saamic, Mari, Mordvinic; *δʲ > *ð between vowels) vs. Permic-Ugric. Viitso finds no evidence for

10434-433: The strong grade in the infinitive ending, going counter to the rules of gradation. However, historically it is in fact a weak grade: the stem of the verb itself ended in * -at/ät- , and this is still visible in the 3rd person imperative ending -atkoon/ätköön . Thus, when combined with the infinitive ending, the verb ended in * -attak/ättäk (similar to the origin of the -ton/tön suffix described above). The -k then weakened

10545-474: The strong grade the first consonant is lengthened, e.g. must [musːt] , 'black (nom.)' vs. musta [mustɑ] 'black (gen.)'. Before single consonants, long vowels and diphthongs also become overlong in strong forms and remain merely long in weak forms, e.g. kool [koːːl] , 'school (nom.)' vs. kooli [koːli] 'school (gen.)'. Gradation was present in Proto-Samic , and is inherited in most Samic languages. It

10656-652: The strong grade, even if the suffix may cause the syllable to be closed. For example, 'our bed' is sänkymme , not ˣsängymme . Strong grades may also be found in closed syllables in contractions such as jotta en → jotten . Several recent loans and coinages with simple /p, t, k/ are also left entirely outside of gradation, e.g. auto (: auton ) 'car', eka (: ekan ) 'first', muki (: mukin ) 'mug', peti (: petin , sometimes pedin ) 'bed', söpö (: söpön ) 'cute'. A number of proper names such as Alepa , Arto , Malta , Marko belong in this class as well. Suffixal gradation has been largely lost, usually in favor of

10767-477: The strong grade. In the Finnic and Samoyedic languages, there was instead lenition in the weak grade. Thus, the exact realization of the contrast is not crucial. The language groups differ in regard to their treatment sequences of a vowel followed by j or w in Proto-Uralic. In the Samic languages, the second part of these remains phonologically a consonant, and can thus close the syllable before it, triggering

10878-418: The strong-grade singletons underwent a secondary lenition which prevented this merger. Gradation later expanded to include a pattern *s ~ *h , presumed to reflect a former pattern *s ~ *z . This type of gradation only systematically appears in cases of word-final *s , which between vowels uniformly becomes *h : Finnish pensas 'bush' has the genitive pensaan < * pensahen . An example

10989-413: The theory as "outlandish" and "not meriting a second look" even in contrast to hypotheses such as Uralo-Yukaghir or Indo-Uralic. Nostratic associates Uralic, Indo-European, Altaic, Dravidian, Afroasiatic, and various other language families of Asia. The Nostratic hypothesis was first propounded by Holger Pedersen in 1903 and subsequently revived by Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky in

11100-917: The three families where gradation is found) is noted by Helimski (1995): an original allophonic gradation system between voiceless and voiced stops would have been easily disrupted by a spreading of voicing to previously unvoiced stops as well. A computational phylogenetic study by Honkola, et al. (2013) classifies the Uralic languages as follows. Estimated divergence dates from Honkola, et al. (2013) are also given. Structural characteristics generally said to be typical of Uralic languages include: Basic vocabulary of about 200 words, including body parts (e.g. eye, heart, head, foot, mouth), family members (e.g. father, mother-in-law), animals (e.g. viper, partridge, fish), nature objects (e.g. tree, stone, nest, water), basic verbs (e.g. live, fall, run, make, see, suck, go, die, swim, know), basic pronouns (e.g. who, what, we, you, I), numerals (e.g. two, five); derivatives increase

11211-542: The traditional family tree that are recognized in some overview sources. Little explicit evidence has however been presented in favour of Donner's model since his original proposal, and numerous alternate schemes have been proposed. Especially in Finland, there has been a growing tendency to reject the Finno-Ugric intermediate protolanguage. A recent competing proposal instead unites Ugric and Samoyedic in an "East Uralic" group for which shared innovations can be noted. The Finno-Permic grouping still holds some support, though

11322-515: The validity of several subgroups of the Uralic family, as well against the family itself, claiming that many of the languages are no more closely related to each other than they are to various other Eurasian languages (e.g. Yukaghir or Turkic), and that in particular Hungarian is a language isolate. Marcantonio's proposal has been strongly dismissed by most reviewers as unfounded and methodologically flawed. Problems identified by reviewers include: Consonant gradation Consonant gradation

11433-457: The various Finnic languages include the following: Superstrate influence of the neighboring Indo-European language groups (Baltic and Germanic) has been proposed as an explanation for a majority of these changes, though for most of the phonetical details the case is not particularly strong. Uralic language family The name Uralic derives from the family's purported "original homeland" ( Urheimat ) hypothesized to have been somewhere in

11544-623: The vicinity of the Ural Mountains , and was first proposed by Julius Klaproth in Asia Polyglotta (1823). Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic, though Finno-Ugric is widely understood to exclude the Samoyedic languages. Scholars who do not accept the traditional notion that Samoyedic split first from the rest of the Uralic family may treat the terms as synonymous. Uralic languages are known for their often complex case systems and vowel harmony . Proposed homelands of

11655-534: The weak grade *ð of /t/ in inherited vocabulary has been lost or assimilated to adjacent sounds in Votic; the weak grade *β of /p/ has similarly become /v/ , or assimilated to /m/ in the cluster /mm/ . However, the weak grade of /k/ survives, as /ɡ/ before a back vowel or /j ~ dʲ ~ dʒ/ before a front vowel. A noticeable feature of Votic is that gradation has been extended to several consonant clusters that were not originally affected. As in Finnish, this includes

11766-461: The weak grade. It also takes part in gradation itself, lengthening in the strong grade. In Finnic, on the other hand, these were treated as diphthongs, and were equivalent to long vowels in terms of syllable structure. Consequently, they did not close the syllable and did not affect gradation. Consonant gradation is understood to have originally been a predictable phonological process . In all languages that retain it, however, it has evolved further to

11877-639: The weak grade. While the partitive plurals of kana 'hen' and lakana 'bedsheet' still show distinct treatment of the original *-ta ( kanoja , lakanoi t a ), the partitive singulars in modern Finnish both have the weak grade ( kanaa , lakanaa ), although in several dialects of older Finnish the form lakanata occurred for the latter. Similarly the participle ending *-pa is now uniformly -va , even after stressed syllables; e.g. syö-vä 'eating', voi-va 'being able'. (The original forms may remain in diverged sense or fossilized derivatives: syöpä 'cancer', kaikki-voipa 'almighty'.) Karelian consonant gradation

11988-464: The word for "language" is similar in Estonian ( keel ) and Mongolian ( хэл ( hel )). These theories are now generally rejected and most such similarities are attributed to language contact or coincidence. The Indo-Uralic (or "Indo-Euralic") hypothesis suggests that Uralic and Indo-European are related at a fairly close level or, in its stronger form, that they are more closely related than either

12099-431: Was caused by the loss of * h and * ð between unstressed vowels. Loss of h affected nouns and adjectives ending in * -s or * -h , such as kuningas 'king'. In the nominative, this -s appeared as usual, and as the preceding syllable was closed, the weak grade ng appeared. But when a case ending such as the genitive -(e)n was added, the result was originally * kuninkasen , which was then weakened to * kuninkahen , and

12210-591: Was first proposed in the late 17th century. Three candidates can be credited for the discovery: the German scholar Martin Fogel  [ de ] , the Swedish scholar Georg Stiernhielm , and the Swedish courtier Bengt Skytte . Fogel's unpublished study of the relationship, commissioned by Cosimo III of Tuscany, was clearly the most modern of these: he established several grammatical and lexical parallels between Finnish and Hungarian as well as Sámi. Stiernhielm commented on

12321-496: Was the loss of word-final *-k and *-h early on in the history of Finnish. This resulted in many open syllables with weak grades. In particular, the majority of nouns ending in -e are affected by this, with a weak grade in the nominative form. The imperative form of verbs also ended in a now-lost -k . For examples, side 'bandage', from * siðe , earlier * siðek (cf. Veps sideg , Eastern Votic sidõg ); hakea 'to get' → hae! 'get! (imp.)' from * haɣe , earlier * haɣek . Traces of

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