Misplaced Pages

#578421

126-571: The relationship of the Yukaghir languages with other language families is uncertain, though it has been suggested that they are distantly related to the Uralic languages , thus forming the putative Uralic–Yukaghir language family. Tundra and Kolyma Yukaghir are the only two remnants of what used to be one of the dominant languages/language families of northeastern Siberia, spreading from the River Anadyr in

252-561: A customs union . A large bloc of countries, the Schengen Area , have also abolished internal border and immigration controls. Regular popular elections take place every five years within the EU; they are considered to be the second-largest democratic elections in the world after India's . The EU is the third-largest economy in the world. The place name Evros was first used by the ancient Greeks to refer to their northernmost province, which bears

378-665: 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

504-842: A German naturalist, Peter Simon Pallas , as a valley that once connected the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and subsequently was proposed as a natural boundary between continents. By the mid-19th century, there were three main conventions, one following the Don, the Volga–Don Canal and the Volga, the other following the Kuma–Manych Depression to the Caspian and then the Ural River, and the third abandoning

630-631: A Semitic term for west , this being either Akkadian erebu meaning 'to go down, set' (said of the sun) or Phoenician 'ereb 'evening, west', which is at the origin of Arabic maghreb and Hebrew ma'arav . Martin Litchfield West stated that "phonologically, the match between Europa's name and any form of the Semitic word is very poor", while Beekes considers a connection to Semitic languages improbable. Most major world languages use words derived from Eurṓpē or Europa to refer to

756-791: A boundary along the Terek and Kuban rivers, so southwards from the Kuma and the Manych, but still with the Caucasus entirely in Asia. However, most geographers in the Soviet Union favoured the boundary along the Caucasus crest, and this became the common convention in the later 20th century, although the Kuma–Manych boundary remained in use in some 20th-century maps. Some view the separation of Eurasia into Asia and Europe as

882-475: A broadly split-intransitive manner, though actual assignment is very complex, involving semantic role, focus, relative animacy of the participants (first or second person versus third), and nature of the noun itself. The assigned cases are primary (used for focused or high animacy nominative arguments), neutral (for low animacy nominative arguments and high animacy accusative ones), and focus case (most focused accusative arguments). Indexation of arguments on

1008-502: 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

1134-458: 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

1260-520: 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,

1386-1118: 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 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

SECTION 10

#1733114402579

1512-406: A large land mass completely or almost completely surrounded by water at its borders. Prior to the adoption of the current convention that includes mountain divides, the border between Europe and Asia had been redefined several times since its first conception in classical antiquity , but always as a series of rivers, seas and straits that were believed to extend an unknown distance east and north from

1638-730: A precise eastern boundary of Europe arises in the Early Modern period, as the eastern extension of Muscovy began to include North Asia . Throughout the Middle Ages and into the 18th century, the traditional division of the landmass of Eurasia into two continents, Europe and Asia, followed Ptolemy, with the boundary following the Turkish Straits , the Black Sea , the Kerch Strait , the Sea of Azov and

1764-526: A range of national and regional cultures, which form the central roots of the wider Western civilisation , and together commonly reference ancient Greece and ancient Rome , particularly through their Christian successors , as crucial and shared roots. Beginning with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, Christian consolidation of Europe in the wake of the Migration Period marked

1890-652: A residue of Eurocentrism : "In physical, cultural and historical diversity, China and India are comparable to the entire European landmass, not to a single European country. [...]." During the 2.5 million years of the Pleistocene , numerous cold phases called glacials ( Quaternary ice age ), or significant advances of continental ice sheets, in Europe and North America, occurred at intervals of approximately 40,000 to 100,000 years. The long glacial periods were separated by more temperate and shorter interglacials which lasted about 10,000–15,000 years. The last cold episode of

2016-661: A result, the Reconquista took the greater part of eight hundred years, in which period a long list of Alfonsos, Sanchos, Ordoños, Ramiros, Fernandos, and Bermudos would be fighting their Christian rivals as much as the Muslim invaders. During the Dark Ages, the Western Roman Empire fell under the control of various tribes. The Germanic and Slav tribes established their domains over Western and Eastern Europe, respectively. Eventually

2142-473: 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

2268-401: Is also evidence that Homo sapiens arrived in Europe around 54,000 years ago, some 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. The earliest sites in Europe dated 48,000 years ago are Riparo Mochi (Italy), Geissenklösterle (Germany) and Isturitz (France). The European Neolithic period—marked by the cultivation of crops and the raising of livestock, increased numbers of settlements and

2394-441: 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

2520-600: 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

2646-481: Is closest to Anatolia (or Asia Minor), but is considered part of Europe politically and it is a member state of the EU. Malta was considered an island of North-western Africa for centuries, but now it is considered to be part of Europe as well. "Europe", as used specifically in British English , may also refer to Continental Europe exclusively. The term "continent" usually implies the physical geography of

SECTION 20

#1733114402579

2772-556: Is generally considered a transcontinental country divided entirely by water, while Russia and Kazakhstan are only partly divided by waterways. France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain are also transcontinental (or more properly, intercontinental, when oceans or large seas are involved) in that their main land areas are in Europe while pockets of their territories are located on other continents separated from Europe by large bodies of water. Spain, for example, has territories south of

2898-581: Is realized as a stop [ ɢ ] after / ŋ / . Syllable structure is CVC, i.e. up to one consonant can occur at the beginning or end of a word and up to two in the middle. In the first Yukagir primer for the Tundra Yukaghir language, an alphabet close to the Yakut was used: Some editions also use the letter Ԝ ԝ . The books published in St. Petersburg use an alphabet similar to the "Yakut" version, but instead of

3024-470: Is sometimes considered to mark the end of antiquity; alternatively antiquity is considered to end with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE; the closure of the pagan Platonic Academy of Athens in 529 CE; or the rise of Islam in the early 7th century CE. During most of its existence, the Byzantine Empire was one of the most powerful economic, cultural, and military forces in Europe. During

3150-422: Is somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent compared to any clear-cut definition of the term "continent". The current division of Eurasia into two continents now reflects East-West cultural, linguistic and ethnic differences which vary on a spectrum rather than with a sharp dividing line. The geographic border between Europe and Asia does not follow any state boundaries and now only follows a few bodies of water. Turkey

3276-639: 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

3402-759: The Americas , almost all of Africa and Oceania , and the majority of Asia. The Age of Enlightenment , the French Revolution , and the Napoleonic Wars shaped the continent culturally, politically, and economically from the end of the 17th century until the first half of the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution , which began in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century, gave rise to radical economic, cultural, and social change in Western Europe and eventually

3528-809: The Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th century. From that time, the term designated the sphere of influence of the Western Church , as opposed to both the Eastern Orthodox churches and to the Islamic world . A cultural definition of Europe as the lands of Latin Christendom coalesced in the 8th century, signifying the new cultural condominium created through the confluence of Germanic traditions and Christian-Latin culture, defined partly in contrast with Byzantium and Islam , and limited to northern Iberia ,

3654-509: The Don (ancient Tanais ). But maps produced during the 16th to 18th centuries tended to differ in how to continue the boundary beyond the Don bend at Kalach-na-Donu (where it is closest to the Volga, now joined with it by the Volga–Don Canal ), into territory not described in any detail by the ancient geographers. Around 1715, Herman Moll produced a map showing the northern part of the Ob River and

3780-665: The East . This divide ended with the Revolutions of 1989 , the fall of the Berlin Wall , and the dissolution of the Soviet Union , which allowed European integration to advance significantly. European integration is being advanced institutionally since 1948 with the founding of the Council of Europe , and significantly through the realisation of the European Union (EU), which represents today

3906-805: The Eastern Hemisphere . It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east. Europe shares the landmass of Eurasia with Asia, and of Afro-Eurasia with both Asia and Africa . Europe is commonly considered to be separated from Asia by the watershed of the Ural Mountains , the Ural River , the Caspian Sea ,

Tundra Yukaghir language - Misplaced Pages Continue

4032-533: 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

4158-607: The European population at the time. The plague had a devastating effect on Europe's social structure; it induced people to live for the moment as illustrated by Giovanni Boccaccio in The Decameron (1353). It was a serious blow to the Roman Catholic Church and led to increased persecution of Jews , beggars and lepers . The plague is thought to have returned every generation with varying virulence and mortalities until

4284-549: The Greater Caucasus , the Black Sea , and the waterway of the Bosporus Strait . Europe covers about 10.18 million km (3.93 million sq mi), or 2% of Earth's surface (6.8% of land area), making it the second-smallest continent (using the seven-continent model ). Politically, Europe is divided into about fifty sovereign states , of which Russia is the largest and most populous , spanning 39% of

4410-508: The Greeks and Phoenicians gave rise to early Mediterranean cities. Early Iron Age Italy and Greece from around the 8th century BCE gradually gave rise to historical Classical antiquity, whose beginning is sometimes dated to 776 BCE, the year of the first Olympic Games . Ancient Greece was the founding culture of Western civilisation. Western democratic and rationalist culture are often attributed to Ancient Greece. The Greek city-state,

4536-612: The Inquisition against heretics. In the Iberian Peninsula , the Reconquista concluded with the fall of Granada in 1492 , ending over seven centuries of Islamic rule in the south-western peninsula. In the east, a resurgent Byzantine Empire recaptured Crete and Cyprus from the Muslims, and reconquered the Balkans. Constantinople was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe from the 9th to

4662-706: The Irtysh River , a major tributary of the Ob, as components of a series of partly-joined waterways taking the boundary between Europe and Asia from the Turkish Straits, and the Don River all the way to the Arctic Ocean. In 1721, he produced a more up to date map that was easier to read. However, his proposal to adhere to major rivers as the line of demarcation was never taken up by other geographers who were beginning to move away from

4788-473: The Mediterranean Sea —namely, Ceuta and Melilla —which are parts of Africa and share a border with Morocco. According to the current convention, Georgia and Azerbaijan are transcontinental countries where waterways have been completely replaced by mountains as the divide between continents. The first recorded usage of Eurṓpē as a geographic term is in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo , in reference to

4914-680: The Megalithic Temples of Malta and Stonehenge , were constructed throughout Western and Southern Europe. The modern native populations of Europe largely descend from three distinct lineages: Mesolithic hunter-gatherers , descended from populations associated with the Paleolithic Epigravettian culture; Neolithic Early European Farmers who migrated from Anatolia during the Neolithic Revolution 9,000 years ago; and Yamnaya Steppe herders who expanded into Europe from

5040-588: The Neandertal valley in Germany ) appeared in Europe 150,000 years ago (115,000 years ago it is found already in the territory of present-day Poland ) and disappeared from the fossil record about 40,000 years ago, with their final refuge being the Iberian Peninsula. The Neanderthals were supplanted by modern humans ( Cro-Magnons ), who seem to have appeared in Europe around 43,000 to 40,000 years ago. However, there

5166-432: The Pechenegs and the Cuman-Kipchaks , caused a massive migration of Slavic populations to the safer, heavily forested regions of the north, and temporarily halted the expansion of the Rus' state to the south and east. Like many other parts of Eurasia , these territories were overrun by the Mongols . The invaders, who became known as Tatars , were mostly Turkic-speaking peoples under Mongol suzerainty. They established

Tundra Yukaghir language - Misplaced Pages Continue

5292-409: The Pontic–Caspian steppe of Ukraine and southern Russia in the context of Indo-European migrations 5,000 years ago. The European Bronze Age began c. 3200 BCE in Greece with the Minoan civilisation on Crete , the first advanced civilisation in Europe. The Minoans were followed by the Myceneans , who collapsed suddenly around 1200 BCE, ushering the European Iron Age . Iron Age colonisation by

5418-411: The Proto-Uralic language include: Dziebel, German (1 October 2012). "On the homeland of the Uralic language family" (blog) . Retrieved 21 March 2019 – via anthropogenesis.kinshipstudies.org. </ref> 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

5544-406: The Serbian Principality (later Kingdom and Empire ), and the Duchy of Croatia (later Kingdom of Croatia ). To the east, Kievan Rus' expanded from its capital in Kiev to become the largest state in Europe by the 10th century. In 988, Vladimir the Great adopted Orthodox Christianity as the religion of state. Further east, Volga Bulgaria became an Islamic state in the 10th century, but

5670-426: 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 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

5796-419: The Uralian languages ( / j ʊəˈr eɪ l i ə n / yoor- AY -lee-ən ), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia . The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (which alone accounts for approximately 60% of speakers), Finnish , and Estonian . Other languages with speakers above 100,000 are Erzya , Moksha , Mari , Udmurt and Komi spoken in the European parts of

5922-490: 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

6048-426: The decline of the Roman Empire , Europe entered a long period of change arising from what historians call the " Age of Migrations ". There were numerous invasions and migrations amongst the Ostrogoths , Visigoths , Goths , Vandals , Huns , Franks , Angles , Saxons , Slavs , Avars , Bulgars , Vikings , Pechenegs , Cumans , and Magyars . Renaissance thinkers such as Petrarch would later refer to this as

6174-432: The last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago. Earth is currently in an interglacial period of the Quaternary, called the Holocene . Homo erectus georgicus , which lived roughly 1.8 million years ago in Georgia , is the earliest hominin to have been discovered in Europe. Other hominin remains, dating back roughly 1 million years, have been discovered in Atapuerca , Spain . Neanderthal man (named after

6300-517: The polis , was the fundamental political unit of classical Greece. In 508 BCE, Cleisthenes instituted the world's first democratic system of government in Athens . The Greek political ideals were rediscovered in the late 18th century by European philosophers and idealists. Greece also generated many cultural contributions: in philosophy , humanism and rationalism under Aristotle , Socrates and Plato ; in history with Herodotus and Thucydides ; in dramatic and narrative verse, starting with

6426-402: The "Dark Ages". Isolated monastic communities were the only places to safeguard and compile written knowledge accumulated previously; apart from this, very few written records survive. Much literature, philosophy, mathematics, and other thinking from the classical period disappeared from Western Europe, though they were preserved in the east, in the Byzantine Empire. While the Roman empire in

SECTION 50

#1733114402579

6552-461: The 12th centuries, with a population of approximately 400,000. The Empire was weakened following the defeat at Manzikert , and was weakened considerably by the sack of Constantinople in 1204 , during the Fourth Crusade . Although it would recover Constantinople in 1261, Byzantium fell in 1453 when Constantinople was taken by the Ottoman Empire . In the 11th and 12th centuries, constant incursions by nomadic Turkic tribes, such as

6678-401: The 12th to the 15th centuries, the Grand Duchy of Moscow grew from a small principality under Mongol rule to the largest state in Europe, overthrowing the Mongols in 1480, and eventually becoming the Tsardom of Russia . The state was consolidated under Ivan III the Great and Ivan the Terrible , steadily expanding to the east and south over the next centuries. The Great Famine of 1315–1317

6804-444: The 18th century. During this period, more than 100 plague epidemics swept across Europe. The Renaissance was a period of cultural change originating in Florence , and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The rise of a new humanism was accompanied by the recovery of forgotten classical Greek and Arabic knowledge from monastic libraries, often translated from Arabic into Latin . The Renaissance spread across Europe between

6930-471: 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

7056-400: The 50 years of peace that followed are known as Golden Age of Athens , the seminal period of ancient Greece that laid many of the foundations of Western civilisation. Greece was followed by Rome , which left its mark on law , politics , language , engineering , architecture , government , and many more key aspects in western civilisation. By 200 BCE, Rome had conquered Italy and over

7182-421: The British Isles, France, Christianised western Germany, the Alpine regions and northern and central Italy. The concept is one of the lasting legacies of the Carolingian Renaissance : Europa often figures in the letters of Charlemagne's court scholar, Alcuin . The transition of Europe to being a cultural term as well as a geographic one led to the borders of Europe being affected by cultural considerations in

7308-448: The Don altogether, following the Greater Caucasus watershed to the Caspian. The question was still treated as a "controversy" in geographical literature of the 1860s, with Douglas Freshfield advocating the Caucasus crest boundary as the "best possible", citing support from various "modern geographers". In Russia and the Soviet Union , the boundary along the Kuma–Manych Depression was the most commonly used as early as 1906. In 1958,

7434-427: The Early Middle Ages, and soon spread throughout Europe. A struggle for influence between the nobility and the monarchy in England led to the writing of Magna Carta and the establishment of a parliament . The primary source of culture in this period came from the Roman Catholic Church . Through monasteries and cathedral schools , the Church was responsible for education in much of Europe. The Papacy reached

7560-452: The East, especially relating to areas under Byzantine, Ottoman, and Russian influence. Such questions were affected by the positive connotations associated with the term Europe by its users. Such cultural considerations were not applied to the Americas, despite their conquest and settlement by European states. Instead, the concept of "Western civilisation" emerged as a way of grouping together Europe and these colonies. The question of defining

7686-427: The European post-classical Middle Ages . The Italian Renaissance spread in the continent a new humanist interest in art and science which led to the modern era . Since the Age of Discovery , led by Spain and Portugal , Europe played a predominant role in global affairs with multiple explorations and conquests around the world. Between the 16th and 20th centuries, European powers colonised at various times

SECTION 60

#1733114402579

7812-421: The Frankish tribes were united under Clovis I . Charlemagne , a Frankish king of the Carolingian dynasty who had conquered most of Western Europe, was anointed " Holy Roman Emperor " by the Pope in 800. This led in 962 to the founding of the Holy Roman Empire , which eventually became centred in the German principalities of central Europe. East Central Europe saw the creation of the first Slavic states and

7938-404: The Great 's efforts to make Russia more European, ignored the whole boundary question with his claim that neither Russia, Scandinavia, northern Germany, nor Poland were fully part of Europe. Since then, many modern analytical geographers like Halford Mackinder have declared that they see little validity in the Ural Mountains as a boundary between continents. The mapmakers continued to differ on

8064-427: The Levant and North Africa and making inroads into Asia Minor . In the mid-7th century, following the Muslim conquest of Persia , Islam penetrated into the Caucasus region. Over the next centuries Muslim forces took Cyprus , Malta , Crete , Sicily , and parts of southern Italy . Between 711 and 720, most of the lands of the Visigothic Kingdom of Iberia were brought under Muslim rule—save for small areas in

8190-414: The Mediterranean Sea without the inclusion of any mountain ranges. Cartographer Herman Moll suggested in 1715 Europe was bounded by a series of partly-joined waterways directed towards the Turkish straits, and the Irtysh River draining into the upper part of the Ob River and the Arctic Ocean . In contrast, the present eastern boundary of Europe partially adheres to the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, which

8316-448: The Russian Federation. Still smaller minority languages are Sámi languages of the northern Fennoscandia ; other members of the Finnic languages , ranging from Livonian in northern Latvia to Karelian in northwesternmost Russia; and the Samoyedic languages , Mansi and Khanty spoken in Western Siberia . The name Uralic derives from the family's purported "original homeland" ( Urheimat ) hypothesized to have been somewhere in

8442-433: The Soviet Geographical Society formally recommended that the boundary between the Europe and Asia be drawn in textbooks from Baydaratskaya Bay , on the Kara Sea , along the eastern foot of Ural Mountains, then following the Ural River until the Mugodzhar Hills , and then the Emba River ; and Kuma–Manych Depression, thus placing the Caucasus entirely in Asia and the Urals entirely in Europe. The Flora Europaea adopted

8568-401: 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 the similarities of Sámi, Estonian, and Finnish, and also on

8694-400: The Tanais (the modern Don River) as the boundary. The Roman Empire did not attach a strong identity to the concept of continental divisions. However, following the fall of the Western Roman Empire , the culture that developed in its place , linked to Latin and the Catholic church, began to associate itself with the concept of "Europe". The term "Europe" is first used for a cultural sphere in

8820-417: 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

8946-409: 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

9072-486: The adoption of Christianity ( c. 1000 CE) . The powerful West Slavic state of Great Moravia spread its territory all the way south to the Balkans, reaching its largest territorial extent under Svatopluk I and causing a series of armed conflicts with East Francia . Further south, the first South Slavic states emerged in the late 7th and 8th century and adopted Christianity : the First Bulgarian Empire ,

9198-521: 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

9324-625: The basis of many modern legal systems, funded the construction of the Hagia Sophia and brought the Christian church under state control. From the 7th century onwards, as the Byzantines and neighbouring Sasanid Persians were severely weakened due to the protracted, centuries-lasting and frequent Byzantine–Sasanian wars , the Muslim Arabs began to make inroads into historically Roman territory, taking

9450-556: The boundary between the lower Don and Samara well into the 19th century. The 1745 atlas published by the Russian Academy of Sciences has the boundary follow the Don beyond Kalach as far as Serafimovich before cutting north towards Arkhangelsk , while other 18th- to 19th-century mapmakers such as John Cary followed Strahlenberg's prescription. To the south, the Kuma–Manych Depression was identified c.  1773 by

9576-801: 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

9702-460: The continent The prevalent definition of Europe as a geographical term has been in use since the mid-19th century. Europe is taken to be bounded by large bodies of water to the north, west and south; Europe's limits to the east and north-east are usually taken to be the Ural Mountains , the Ural River , and the Caspian Sea ; to the south-east, the Caucasus Mountains , the Black Sea , and

9828-567: The continent and comprising 15% of its population. Europe had a total population of about 745 million (about 10% of the world population ) in 2021; the third-largest after Asia and Africa. The European climate is affected by warm Atlantic currents, such as the Gulf Stream , which produce a temperate climate , tempering winters and summers, on much of the continent. Further from the sea, seasonal differences are more noticeable producing more continental climates . European culture consists of

9954-561: The continent. Chinese, for example, uses the word Ōuzhōu ( 歐洲 / 欧洲 ), which is an abbreviation of the transliterated name Ōuluóbā zhōu ( 歐羅巴洲 ) ( zhōu means "continent"); a similar Chinese-derived term Ōshū ( 欧州 ) is also sometimes used in Japanese such as in the Japanese name of the European Union, Ōshū Rengō ( 欧州連合 ) , despite the katakana Yōroppa ( ヨーロッパ ) being more commonly used. In some Turkic languages,

10080-621: The continents as the lands given by Noah to his three sons; Europe was defined as stretching from the Pillars of Hercules at the Strait of Gibraltar , separating it from Northwest Africa , to the Don, separating it from Asia. The convention received by the Middle Ages and surviving into modern usage is that of the Roman era used by Roman-era authors such as Posidonius , Strabo , and Ptolemy , who took

10206-616: The development of major commercial routes along the coast of the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas . The growing wealth and independence acquired by some coastal cities gave the Maritime Republics a leading role in the European scene. The Middle Ages on the mainland were dominated by the two upper echelons of the social structure: the nobility and the clergy. Feudalism developed in France in

10332-499: 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

10458-503: The east to the River Lena in the west. On the basis of the evidence of early sources, it can be assumed that there existed a Yukaghir dialect continuum, with what is today Tundra Yukaghir and Kolyma Yukaghir at the extremes. Tundra Yukaghir and Kolyma Yukaghir are not mutually intelligible today. The long mid vowels /eː øː oː/ are realized as diphthongs when stressed : they are [ie uø uo] , respectively. ¹The uvular fricative / ʁ /

10584-570: The epic poems of Homer ; in drama with Sophocles and Euripides ; in medicine with Hippocrates and Galen ; and in science with Pythagoras , Euclid , and Archimedes . In the course of the 5th century BCE, several of the Greek city states would ultimately check the Achaemenid Persian advance in Europe through the Greco-Persian Wars , considered a pivotal moment in world history, as

10710-564: 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

10836-567: The following two centuries it conquered Greece , Hispania ( Spain and Portugal ), the North African coast, much of the Middle East , Gaul ( France and Belgium ), and Britannia ( England and Wales ). Expanding from their base in central Italy beginning in the third century BCE, the Romans gradually expanded to eventually rule the entire Mediterranean basin and Western Europe by the turn of

10962-402: 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

11088-624: The height of its power during the High Middle Ages. An East-West Schism in 1054 split the former Roman Empire religiously, with the Eastern Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire and the Roman Catholic Church in the former Western Roman Empire. In 1095 Pope Urban II called for a crusade against Muslims occupying Jerusalem and the Holy Land . In Europe itself, the Church organised

11214-499: The idea of water boundaries as the only legitimate divides between Europe and Asia. Four years later, in 1725, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg was the first to depart from the classical Don boundary. He drew a new line along the Volga , following the Volga north until the Samara Bend , along Obshchy Syrt (the drainage divide between the Volga and Ural Rivers ), then north and east along

11340-548: 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 was first proposed in the late 17th century. Three candidates can be credited for the discovery: the German scholar Martin Fogel  [ de ] ,

11466-589: The latter waterway to its source in the Ural Mountains . At this point he proposed that mountain ranges could be included as boundaries between continents as alternatives to nearby waterways. Accordingly, he drew the new boundary north along Ural Mountains rather than the nearby and parallel running Ob and Irtysh rivers. This was endorsed by the Russian Empire and introduced the convention that would eventually become commonly accepted. However, this did not come without criticism. Voltaire , writing in 1760 about Peter

11592-437: The letters Ҕ ҕ and Ҥ ҥ , Ӷ ӷ and Ӈ ӈ are used, respectively. Both Yukaghir languages have residual vowel harmony and a complex phonotactics of consonants, rich agglutinative morphology and are strictly head-final . They have practically no finite subordination and very few coordinate structures. Yukaghir has a split intransitive alignment system based on discourse-pragmatic features. In absence of narrow focus ,

11718-431: The majority of Europe. The European Union is a supranational political entity that lies between a confederation and a federation and is based on a system of European treaties . The EU originated in Western Europe but has been expanding eastward since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. A majority of its members have adopted a common currency, the euro , and participate in the European single market and

11844-567: The millennium. The Roman Republic ended in 27 BCE, when Augustus proclaimed the Roman Empire . The two centuries that followed are known as the pax romana , a period of unprecedented peace, prosperity and political stability in most of Europe. The empire continued to expand under emperors such as Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius , who spent time on the Empire's northern border fighting Germanic , Pictish and Scottish tribes. Christianity

11970-516: 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

12096-520: 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

12222-444: 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

12348-687: The northwest ( Asturias ) and largely Basque regions in the Pyrenees . This territory, under the Arabic name Al-Andalus , became part of the expanding Umayyad Caliphate . The unsuccessful second siege of Constantinople (717) weakened the Umayyad dynasty and reduced their prestige. The Umayyads were then defeated by the Frankish leader Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitiers in 732, which ended their northward advance. In

12474-535: 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

12600-479: The originally Persian name Frangistan ("land of the Franks ") is used casually in referring to much of Europe, besides official names such as Avrupa or Evropa . Clickable map of Europe, showing one of the most commonly used continental boundaries Key: blue : states which straddle the border between Europe and Asia ; green : countries not geographically in Europe, but closely associated with

12726-443: 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

12852-446: 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

12978-497: The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion and the poetry devoted to it. An alternative view is that of Robert Beekes , who has argued in favour of a pre-Indo-European origin for the name, explaining that a derivation from eurus would yield a different toponym than Europa. Beekes has located toponyms related to that of Europa in the territory of ancient Greece, and localities such as that of Europos in ancient Macedonia . There have been attempts to connect Eurṓpē to

13104-503: The remote regions of north-western Iberia and the middle Pyrenees the power of the Muslims in the south was scarcely felt. It was here that the foundations of the Christian kingdoms of Asturias , Leon , and Galicia were laid and from where the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula would start. However, no coordinated attempt would be made to drive the Moors out. The Christian kingdoms were mainly focused on their own internal power struggles. As

13230-685: The same name today. The principal river there – Evros (today's Maritsa ) – flows through the fertile valleys of Thrace , which itself was also called Europe, before the term meant the continent. In classical Greek mythology , Europa ( Ancient Greek : Εὐρώπη , Eurṓpē ) was a Phoenician princess. One view is that her name derives from the Ancient Greek elements εὐρύς ( eurús ) 'wide, broad', and ὤψ ( ōps , gen. ὠπός , ōpós ) 'eye, face, countenance', hence their composite Eurṓpē would mean 'wide-gazing' or 'broad of aspect'. Broad has been an epithet of Earth herself in

13356-588: 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

13482-525: The state of the Golden Horde with headquarters in Crimea, which later adopted Islam as a religion, and ruled over modern-day southern and central Russia for more than three centuries. After the collapse of Mongol dominions, the first Romanian states (principalities) emerged in the 14th century: Moldavia and Walachia . Previously, these territories were under the successive control of Pechenegs and Cumans. From

13608-460: The system is organised on a nominative–accusative basis; when focused, direct objects and subjects of intransitive verbs are co-aligned (special focus case, special focus agreement). Tundra Yukaghir is largely head-final and dependent-marking: the default position for the verb is at the end of the clause, nouns are marked for case, adjectives precede nouns and relative clauses precede main clauses. Case assignment for core participants behaves in

13734-413: 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

13860-917: 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

13986-592: 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

14112-475: 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. Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in

14238-422: The verb is similarly conditioned by focus and animacy as well as mood . Oblique cases include dative , instrumental , comitative , locative , ablative , prolative , and transformative, the latter indicating the intended use or function of an argument. There is limited incorporation , used in reflexive constructions. Tundra Yukaghir verbs are marked for switch reference . Besides indicating whether

14364-415: The verb of a following clause shares the same subject, the switch-reference markers also describe the temporal relationship between clauses, the connection between the actions involved, and in the case of different subjects, the person (first or second versus third) and number of the subject. Uralic languages The Uralic languages ( / j ʊəˈr æ l ɪ k / yoor- AL -ik ), sometimes called

14490-567: 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

14616-407: The waterways connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea . Islands are generally grouped with the nearest continental landmass, hence Iceland is considered to be part of Europe, while the nearby island of Greenland is usually assigned to North America , although politically belonging to Denmark. Nevertheless, there are some exceptions based on sociopolitical and cultural differences. Cyprus

14742-551: The west and the north, transmitting newly acquired skills in producing copper artifacts. In Western Europe the Neolithic period was characterised not by large agricultural settlements but by field monuments, such as causewayed enclosures , burial mounds and megalithic tombs . The Corded Ware cultural horizon flourished at the transition from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic . During this period giant megalithic monuments, such as

14868-523: The west continued to decline, Roman traditions and the Roman state remained strong in the predominantly Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire , also known as the Byzantine Empire . During most of its existence, the Byzantine Empire was the most powerful economic, cultural, and military force in Europe. Emperor Justinian I presided over Constantinople's first golden age: he established a legal code that forms

14994-506: The western shore of the Aegean Sea . As a name for a part of the known world, it is first used in the 6th century BCE by Anaximander and Hecataeus . Anaximander placed the boundary between Asia and Europe along the Phasis River (the modern Rioni River on the territory of Georgia ) in the Caucasus, a convention still followed by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. Herodotus mentioned that

15120-735: The wider world. Both world wars began and were fought to a great extent in Europe, contributing to a decline in Western European dominance in world affairs by the mid-20th century as the Soviet Union and the United States took prominence and competed over dominance in Europe and globally. The resulting Cold War divided Europe along the Iron Curtain , with NATO in the West and the Warsaw Pact in

15246-712: The widespread use of pottery—began around 7000 BCE in Greece and the Balkans , probably influenced by earlier farming practices in Anatolia and the Near East . It spread from the Balkans along the valleys of the Danube and the Rhine ( Linear Pottery culture ), and along the Mediterranean coast ( Cardial culture ). Between 4500 and 3000 BCE, these central European neolithic cultures developed further to

15372-464: 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

15498-609: The world had been divided by unknown persons into three parts—Europe, Asia, and Libya (Africa)—with the Nile and the Phasis forming their boundaries—though he also states that some considered the River Don , rather than the Phasis, as the boundary between Europe and Asia. Europe's eastern frontier was defined in the 1st century by geographer Strabo at the River Don. The Book of Jubilees described

15624-422: Was legalised by Constantine I in 313 CE after three centuries of imperial persecution . Constantine also permanently moved the capital of the empire from Rome to the city of Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul ) which was renamed Constantinople in his honour in 330 CE. Christianity became the sole official religion of the empire in 380 CE, and in 391–392 CE the emperor Theodosius outlawed pagan religions. This

15750-597: Was eventually absorbed into Russia several centuries later. The period between the year 1000 and 1250 is known as the High Middle Ages , followed by the Late Middle Ages until c. 1500. During the High Middle Ages the population of Europe experienced significant growth, culminating in the Renaissance of the 12th century . Economic growth, together with the lack of safety on the mainland trading routes, made possible

15876-548: Was the first crisis that would strike Europe in the late Middle Ages. The period between 1348 and 1420 witnessed the heaviest loss. The population of France was reduced by half. Medieval Britain was afflicted by 95 famines, and France suffered the effects of 75 or more in the same period. Europe was devastated in the mid-14th century by the Black Death , one of the most deadly pandemics in human history which killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe alone—a third of

#578421