The Myth of the Uralic language family (Hungarian reconsidered)

[Proto-Shaman]

ABOUT SOME MORPHOLOGICAL FEATURES OF PROTO-URALIC
Prof. Ago Künnap, University of Tartu

General

Every scientific society loves its old traditional theories. Scientific paradigm changes itself from time to time. The change of scientific paradigm turns old traditional scientific theories to myths. The majority of scientists cannot believe that old scientific paradigms turn to myths. There are always some rebels in science. The paradigm of Uralistics is changing just now under the leadership of some Uralistic rebels. Their war against tradition is not Uralic-nationalistic: the paradigm of humanities is being changed by the Indo-European scientists, not by the Uralic ones. The Indo-Europists started it in the first place. The very first ideas concerning the Uralians as the first wave of migration that reached Northern Europe are proposed by the Indo-European archaeologists (Russian Pavel Dolukhanov in England, Czeck Miloslav Zvelebil in Czeckia and Cubinian Milton Nuńez in Finland). Quite a different thing is that this paradigm changes and the changes in scientific views of the rebels concerning the Uralistics are suitable for the new scientific identity of Hungarians, Estonians and Finns. It just so happened, it was not for nationalistic purposes.

Uralistics

Indo-European scientists are interested in the Uralistics, too. Uralists must help them in their work as they know more about Uralic languages, archaeology, history, physical anthropology, genetics etc.

Geneticists look at Finno-Ugrians as pure Europoids (Caucasoids) and Samoyeds as pure Mongoloids. Geneticists are strictly asking for our help. They say: we have a lot of genetic data but no idea how to work with these data. Give us such ideas, theories, hypotheses and we will check them. Geneticists cannot work with their databanks without concrete aims – databanks are so large that they overload the computers: the capacity of computers ends. Uralists must help them.

Yuri Tambovtsev. Novosibirsk Pedagogical University. Novosibirsk, Russia. “Language Taxons and the Naturalness of their Classification”. California Linguistic Notes. Volume XXX No. 2 Fall, 2005.

“Although some linguists believe the united set of Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic languages called "Uralic family" is a natural taxon of languages, some other linguists (e.g. Ago Kuennap, Angela Marcantonio, Kalevi Wiik, etc.) do not believe them to be a family, that is, a genetically related language taxon, which can be called natural.“

“Some specialists in Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic studies are quite sceptical that all Uralic languages, especially Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic, are genetically related. That is they do not believe Uralic taxon of languages to be a natural language taxon.”

“...we can propose to define the following ordered series of language taxons, from the smallest to the largest: 1. branch 2. subgroup 3. group 4. family 5. unity 6. phylum 7. union 8. community”

“We can see the similar negative reaction of the majority of the specialists in Uralistics to the new theories of Ago Kuennap, Angela Marcantonio, Wiik Kalevi and others, who try to reject the old scientific paradigm in Uralistics.”

“It is easy to explain psychologically why the old scientific paradigms are more stable and why many scholars would rather cling to a false (but old) paradigm, than switch over to the true (but new and unknown) one. It is quite cosy to remain in the embrace of the old and known paradigm. One can always close his or her eyes to its inconsistences and drawbacks. Many Uralic linguists got used to the old classification, which they first studied as students. They do not want to think about it twice since they usually work on some other linguistic problems, which do not concern the classification of languages. Usually, many linguists do not want to disturb "sleeping dogs". They do not believe that thisor that linguistic classification must be checked again and again. Fortunately, in Uralistics there are some other linguists who think that with growing linguistic knowledge the old linguistic classifications should be verified. That is, every new linguistic fact should be used to verify the old linguistic classifications. If more and more new linguistic facts contradict the old classification, then it would have to be reconsidered on the basis of the new leverl of linguistic knowledge. The linguists with modern linguistic thinking argue that the old linguistics classifications must be verified and checked again and again and reconsidered if necessary again and again. However, in Uralistics, as well as in linguistics in general, old classifications are not reconsidered after an abundance of new linguistic facts has been received. One must bear in mind a simple idea: what was good and logical several centuries ago, i.e., at the old level development of linguistics, may be neither good nor logical at the advanced development of linguistics, of course, if we want to call this entity "science". Any linguist must understand the difference between a linguistic fact, which may remain true, though discovered several centuries ago, and a linguistic theory, which can be altered or rejected when the abundance of new linguistic facts are discovered.”

“We begin our analysis with the most compact language families. The most compact turned out to be the Mongolian language family. The Samoyedic and Turkic language families are also very compact.”

“Compactness of Finno-Ugric Language Taxon: Let us consider the Finno-Ugric language taxon, beginning from the Ugric subgroup, which is said to include Mansi, Hanty and Hungarian. As a matter of fact, it is necessary to point out that we compare Hungarian not only to Finno-Ugric, but also to Turkic languages, because during its long history of development Hungarian had a lot of contact with Turkic languages. Daniel Abondolo, Bela Kalman and other linguists underline that Hungarian is not typical among the Uralic family (Abondodolo, 1990: 577).

At the first sight it is quite striking that Hungarian makes the compactness of the Turkic taxon higher (MV= 18.42, MTMB= 0.21). However, if one takes into consideration the ethnic contacts of the Hungarian during their history it is not so striking. It may be because of the ancient contacts of Hungarians with Turkic peoples in Siberia and then for the period of the Hungarians living for more than one thousand years on the Volga river. The speech communication between Hungarians and the Ob-Ugrians, i.e. Mansi (Vogul) and Hanty (Ostjak), is not possible. We must point out to the fact that the frequency of occurrence of eight consonantal groups turns out to be quite different. It is important to bear in mind that A. Marcantonio came to the conclusion that Hungarian is not a Uralic language. She writes about the history of attribution of Hungarian either to the Finno-Ugric family (J. Budenz) or to the Turkic family (A. Vambery). She points out that 52% of the Hungarian lexicon should not be considered Uralic. She finds only 19% of the Budenz core lexicon to be surely Finno-Ugric (Marcantonio, 2002: 37 - 48).

Let us indicate that the dispersion of the whole Finno-Ugric family (MV= 24.14%, MTMB= 0.47) is greater than that of its parts. Actually, it may be a sort of indication of the whole taxon having gaps, thus being rather dispersed than homogenious.”

“Compactness of Uralic Language Taxon: Now let us consider the Uralic language taxon, which has been recently strongly criticised. Our investigation revealed that Uralic language taxon (MV= 28.31%, MTMB= 0.57) is more disperced than the Samoyedic (MV= 18.29%, MTMB= 0.16) or Finno-Ugric (MV= 24.14%, MTMB= 0.47) family. It shows that Uralic taxon is not natural, but rather artificial, i.e. created by linguists. Our data may give the Uralic linguists another impetus to reconsider the Uralic language taxon.“

“Some linguists think that the Indo-European genealogical tree should be reconsidered in order to make it more correct, though they still think it is possible to construct such a tree. The majority of the linguists in the field of Finno-Ugristics and Uralistics seem to be quite happy with their old classical tree. However, the majority of the Turkologists do not think it is possible to construct a true Turkic tree, because many features in Turkic languages interface and because the Turkic languages are too close to each other.”

“In fact, Ago Kuennap and Angela Marcantonio believe that it is high time to reconsider some of the language families. They consider it quite wrong to call the Uralic set of languages "a family", since their genetic relationship has not been properly proved (Marcantonio, 2002). One can hope that our phonostatistical typological data may give lots of new material to reconsider different language taxons. It may allow linguists to verify some language taxons and to reject others.”

“Let us recall that the dispersion of the Turkic taxon is less (MV= 18.77%) than the dispersion of the Finno-Ugric taxon (24.14%). On the contrary, the compactness of the Turkic family is higher than that of the Finno-Ugric family. The compactnes of the united Turkic-Finno-Ugric mixture is 12.39, while that of the Turkic family is 32.16 and Finno-Ugric family only 8.32, that is about 4 times less. The mixture does not prove natural, because it makes the dispertion greater. One can see that Finno-Ugric languages make the compactness of the Turkic taxon much less. It is possible to conclude that the Finno-Ugric languages cannot be mixed with the Turkic languages, because they are typologically different.”

“Let us use the same procedure for the Turkic (V= 150.16%, MV= 18.77%) and Mongolian (V= 86.24%. MV= 10.78%) families. Let us unite the Turkic and Mongolian families into one taxon. The dispersion of the mixture of the Turkic and Mongolian languages is much greater (V= 170.90%), than the dispersion of each of the families in question.”

“The united group of the Samoyedic and Finno-Ugric languages is called the Uralic language unity. The compactness of the Uralic (V= 226.49%, TMB= 4.58; MV= 28.31%, MTMB= 0.57) taxon is less than those of the Samoyedic (V= 128.04%, TMB= 1.10; MV= 18.29%, MTMB= 0.16) and Finno-Ugric taxons (V= 193.13%, TMB= 3.77; MV= 24.14%, MTMB= 0.47). This means that they are a sort of artificial language taxon. It may also mean that those linguists (e.g., Kuennap, 1998, 2003; Marcantonio, 2002) who want to reconsider the Uralic taxon are right. They do not believe the Uralic taxon to be a genetic family.” 38
“Robert Austerlitz calls the Ural-Altaic taxon as "a superstructure, a unit larger than a family". He proposes to call it a "stock or phylum" (Austerlitz, 1990: 569). The Ural-Altaic taxon embraces the Uralic and Altaic languages. It is more disperse (V= 247.82%) than each of them. It may mean that Ural-Altaic is quite an artificial taxon.”

“However, we may look upon the Altaic taxon from the other angle. That is, from the point of view of the degree of the dispersion of the Indo-European family, whose dispersion is greater (V= 223.79%), than that of the Altaic (V= 207.76%) taxon. This speaks for the Altaic theory. Really, if the majority of linguists support the idea of the Indo-European family, then one should think twice before rejecting the Altaic taxon as a family, because the compactness of Altaic is greater.”

Conclusions

“Our data show that it is possible to make the following conclusions:
1. The sound chains of the Uralic languages show that Uralic taxon is not natural
from the typological point of view, but rather artificial, i.e. created by linguists.”

“5. By the total of the 7 chosen features (without voiced consonants) the most compact is the Mongolic family. Then comes Samoyedic, Turkic, Tungus-Manchurian and Finno-Ugric family. The Paleo-Asiativ family is demonstrates such dispersion that it looks more like a language unity than a family.”

“7. It is high time to reconsider the place of Hungarian in the Ugric language taxon. One can see that the main conclusion of this article is that a typologo-metrical approach on phonological level shows that that the Uralic taxon is not natural, but looks like a mechanical conglomeration of different languages of Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic origin, put in one set by linguists for classification purposes. However, this artificial language taxon is quite useful for the students of linguistics to embrace all the scope of Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic language. Our data may give the Uralic linguists more impetus to reconsider the Uralic language taxon.”