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People seem to study Uralic languages both historically and synchronically, and there are also discussion about them around the board, so I thought we could have an own thread for discussing the Uralic languages and linguistics.

This is not a theachin thread but I though to start it with some typology.
What are said to be Uralic features:

vowel harmony
tuo-ssa 'there'
työ-ssä 'at work'

palatalisation

trochee
The main stress on the first syllable and secondary stresses on every second syllable, the last syllable never stressed

agglutinative morphology, but no Uralic language is polysynthetic
Morphemes can make 'grammatical' but meaningless combinations like the famous epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän

many noun cases, all of the Uralic lnaguges have cases. The number varies between around 3 and 30.
Proto-Uralic, one version (Fish)
NOM kala
ACC kalam
GEN(DAT?) kalan
LOC kalana
SEP kalata
LAT kalas/k
TRANSL kalaksi
PL.NOM kalat
PL.OBL kalaj

Object conjugation, different verb endings if the (direct) object is definite. (Some languages have a third intransitive/middle-voice/reflexive conjugation)

látok 'I see'
látom 'I see it'

The negative verb

As it happens, I am currently reading a "Comparative Overview of Finno-Ugric Languages".
Surprisingly, 6 out of 11 languages described there have lost vowel harmony.
Also, the Udmurt language has stress on the ultimate syllable, probably due to Turkic influences.

And, what you haven't mentioned is that, as a general rule, no Uralic language permits word-initial consonant clusters.

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UNUS•ET•UNICUS

I've always had a desire to create a Uralic language spoken in India, so I'll be watching this.

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"Wait for the starvation of glaciers, chicken hamburger Noel Weber Arthur."

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What are those languages? Estonian, Davvin Sami, I suppose.

Does your book agree that it's easy to postulate an older state of these languages with the vowel harmony? I've heard that but never found any justification.
Another thing is that Proto-Uralic maybe had three manners of articulation, unlike the modern languages. Only the closed and the open vowel agreed vowel harmony, so it seems to me that the phenomenon has got stronger in Finnish and Hungarian, at least.

Udmurt has the stress on the last vowel, and Komi has it on the last full vowel, if I remember right what languages they were.


Yes, Estonian permits them better than Finnish but only in loan words.
Sami has odd sC klusters, for example the name of Skolt Sami is really Skolt.

The languages in the book are Mansi, Komi, Udmurt, Khanty, Estonian and Sami. The annoying thing is that the author grouped all Sami languages into one, so most probably under "Sami" he means Northern Sami.

Yes. It says that Proto-Uralic had front and back vowels and vowel harmony.

I never encountered this theory. Can you explain further?

Also Mari has not-initial stress pattern. It says that Hill Mari has mostly penultimate stress, but Meadow Mari has no fixed stress.

Sami languages are strange in general. There is little information about them out there, which is sad.

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UNUS•ET•UNICUS

Sami (again) and another language, I don't remember, give hint that ɔ and ɛ could have exested. So, only o, ɔ, ɛ and e don't have the harmony. So, the harmony thendense must have got stronger in the languages that nowadays have ø.

Sami is somewhat odd. There are hypothesis that it has a strong substrate of some older European language. Even the Same peoples genes are different. On the other hand, some claim that Finnic and Sami have slowly separated just where they are now.

Would be interesting to know to what extent traces of vowel harmony can be found in Uralic languages that have lost it.

On the topic of vowel harmony, Finnish has a couple of funny words. /i/ and /e/ are neutral in Finnish, so there's basically (/y ä ö/ vs. /u a o/) + /i e/ or whatever way we pick to reasonably annotate that. However, a word whose stem only contains /i e/ belongs to the /y ä ö/-class.

There's two words, meri and veri (sea, blood), which for all cases except one belong to the /y ä ö/-class:
meressä, veressä, merellä, verellä, meriä, merettä, merittä, ... then you have the singular partitive, which is merta/verta. I like those words.

I just one day found that fenomenon but forgot what the words were, and began to suspect I had mistaken. Thanks, thay are odd. And as seen, completely autonomous and not conscious.

There are words that have changed their harmony (why?) tälvi > talvi

The derivational suffixes that Manoba (how his name is typed) likes tek-o 'an act' < tehdä 'to do' Apparently, the derivation is older than the ö-sound.

I've read that Proto-Uralic and some modern Uralic languages don't mark number on nouns marked for case.
So that, singular and plural is only distinguished in nominative (and maybe accusative?) case, but not in other cases.
Can someone point me on further information about this feature?

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UNUS•ET•UNICUS

Apparently Russia's song for Eurovision this year is in Udmurt. Sounds like just another Slavic language to me. Dat influence from Mother Russia.

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‹› · Ḿḿ Ńń Ĺĺ Śś Źź Ąą Ǫǫ Ųų Æ̨æ̨ Ǽǽ Œ̨œ̨ Œ́œ́ Ɣɣ Y̋y̋ Įį Şş Z̧z̧ θ
Āā Ēē Īī Ōō Ūū ↗ Ṭṭ C̣c̣ Łł Ḍḍ Ṣṣ Ẓẓ Ṇṇ Ŋŋ e˞ o˞ ʷ ʲ ʰ ə

Plural had two cases, nominative -t and oblique -j.
I have no idea of how the oblique was used, either it was used for the local functions or then the local cases were just used as in the singular.

I guess no one knows too much about it. That's what I found. Not the whole book. It has something about the cases/numbers, too.
https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10224/4083

Many Uralic languages sound like the Slavonic languages, I guess it's palatalisation.
Actually, I have thought the Slavonic languages sound like the Uralic languages. Palatalisation is however not an Indo-European feature.

I saw a video clip that said 'a language closely related to Finnish'.
WTF, if when somebody sings in French, do they say it's closely related to English?

kaikki on suhteellista, niinkuin sanotaan:DD Do you remember what video it was?

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ɑɬœø

everyone is relative as if it's said? What do you mean by relative?

everything is relative. kohtuullisen yleinen sanonta täälläpäin. Sitä voi, muummuassa, käyttää ylläolevan(See: omniksen viesti) kaltaisissa tilanteissa.

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ɑɬœø

Either the link is broken, or it just won't open =\


WTF? Can you provide me with a link?

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UNUS•ET•UNICUS

I'm not Sko, but http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J-7YWLyNo8

OMG, Cthulhu devour me now! I wonder if they even understand what they're singing in English...

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UNUS•ET•UNICUS

Russian is affected much more by Mari and Udmurt... in the core area of standard Russian in the environment or Moscow. There is much substrate effect:
- Nominal copula
- existentil possission structure
- The a>o change in unstressed syllables (It has a finer name?)

If the Uralic languages have affected Swidish, it must be an older event. "pojke" is a loan word. There is much more Swedish effect in Finnish, eg. the /d/ sound - the normal example how a sound can develop in a very odd way.
Swedish had so strong prestige in Finland. It's unnormal that Finnish even became the leading language in Finland. Nationalism relly made the upper class Swedish speakers to change their language for lower Status Finnish, be cause it shall be the national language of our young nation.

Cheesus, so much I need to share here. Where to begin?

1.Yes: French, and any Romance language sounds similar to English, but not because of palatalization but because of the Latin loan words in English.
2. Moscow is an "Russified" Uralic word. If I remember correctly "mosk" meaning "bear", but it was a while since I redd that.
3. Finnish /d/ was [D], in the begin.

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When scientists in the future speak of our life-time they will say that most of the things, ideas that was possible for us to invent was never invented in our life-time because we hadn't yet invented the words to describe the components.