Uralic
North Samoyedic
Uralic Languages
In The Beginning
Some 15,000 years ago during the last ice age, various Paleo-Siberian tribes inhabited the North extending into central Europe. They were the original people of Europe extending to the very edge of the ice. Their northern brothers were born under the Northern Lights and expert hunters and fishers who lived and/or traveled and traded over a large area. Their range included Europe, Baltics and Mongolia. Sometimes these tribes were cut off from each other for extended periods such as when weather changed and the melting ice stopped melting. During these periods the people looked hunger in the face, and invented ways to survive.
They fished, hunted game, some eventually tamed reindeer and dogs as draught animals,and lived in relative peace and harmony for millennia. Some preferred the Northern climates and the food found in the arctic while others preferred to stay further South. Those who remained in Europe were absorbed by new arrivals. Some stayed in the woods, others took to the plains. The Paleo-Siberians, (who some believe resemble various Mongolian/Samoyed tribes) through mixing and dispersion, differentiated into Finnic, Lapp, Samoyed, and Ugric people.
As the ice continued to melt, lakes and rivers formed at the ice edge, new land rose out of the water. Water fowl such as swans and ducks came in huge flocks on time every year. Game and fish were plentiful. The Finns loved fish and were the first people in the world to fish with nets. All these stone-aged men roamed the rich lands, moving East and West, meeting other strange people coming from the opposite direction and perhaps sharing a meal, shamanistic ritual, a shelter...exchanging women. East meets west on shores of the ice melt.
All of the Uralic languages have been shown to be related. The vocabulary and grammar of each language can be examined as between Hungarian -d and Finnish -nt-. Laws of correspondence have not yet been determined. Take k and h for example. They switch both in Finnish and Hungarian, but also in Mongolian. Just as an example, k as in kalain Finnish becomes an h in Hungarian hal (fish). In Mongolian, k and h in the same word also switch between some dialects.
Uralic Languages
The Uralic languages are divided into two branches, Finno-Ugric and Samoyed. Finno-Ugric contains two subgroups: Finnic and Ugric. Finnic is divided into the Baltic-Finnic, Volga-Finnic, and Permian languages; Ugric comprises Hungarian and the Ob-Ugric languages.
Baltic-Finnic
Finnish, with 5.2 million speakers, and Estonian, with 1.1 million, are the largest groups of the Baltic-Finnic languages. The statistics of numbers of Finno-Ugric speakers are often outdated. Karelian, is said to be spoken by 175,000 people (perhaps half of that today) in northwestern Russia and eastern Finland (very little); Veps, spoken by 8,000 people south of Lake Onega; (now only 2,000) Votian, spoken by 700 people (somewhat less) of the Udmurt Autonomous Republic of the former USSR; and Livonian, spoken by 500 people in the Livonia district of Latvia. (now perhaps 200) Lapp is similar in structure to Finnish, but the various Lapp dialects--spoken by 40,000 people (and declining) spread over Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia--diverge greatly from each other in phonology and even to some extent in grammar. All these languages are worth saving, but some may be beyond hope, and we should concentrate on saving the most saveable first, while not forgetting the others. Thier languages are living testaments of the past, which can never be recaptured once they are gone. Some of you will no doubt help to save them. Yours is a worthy task.
Finnish is famous for its many cases, 12 of which are productive--ie. any Finnish noun can be followed by one of the 12 case suffixes. Consonant gradation, such as the t/d alternation found in the declination of the Finnish word for "hundred": nominative sata, genitive sadan, ablative sadalta, partitive sataa and so on, are characteristics of the language. One distinctive Finnish word means "not to." Compare ulvon, "I howl," with en ulvo, "I do not howl," and ulvo, "you howl," with et ulvo, "you do not howl," where en means "(I) do not" and et "(you) do not."
Volga-Finnic and Permic
Mordvinian, spoken by 1,262,000 people along the middle Volga, and Cheremis, (Mari) spoken by 600,000 people in the district where the Kama joins the Volga, constitute the Volga-Finnic language group. Both of them, but especially Mordvinian, have many similarities to Finnish. Less like Finnish are the Permian languages--Zyrien with its 628,000 speakers, and Votyak with its 704,000 in northeastern European Russia. All of the Volga-Finnic and Permian languages have a negative verb and a large number of cases.
Ugric
Whereas the Finnic languages are more or less geographically contiguous, the Ugric languages lie at opposite ends of the Finno-Ugric area. Hungarian is in the extreme south-west, and the Ob-Ugric languages, Vogul and Ostyak, are situated in the extreme north-east. Hungarian has 13 million speakers--the largest number of any Uralic language. They migrated from the western Ural Mountains ce835 - ce 893 and settled in the Danube/Carpathian Basin areas. Vogul's 8,000 speakers and Ostyak's 21,000 live east of the Urals, in the Ob Valley.
Objective conjugation is a striking characteristic of Ugric languages. In Hungarian, , adok means "I give," and adom means "I give it" or "I give them." The object of the verb--"it" or "them"--is part of the verb form. Vogul and Ostyak exhibit still more precision. The objective conjugation has three distinct forms, "it," "them" (plural), or "the two things" (dual). Vogul and Ostyak also expresses the subject in the singular, plural, or dual.
Samoyed People
The easternmost representatives of Uralic as it exists today are the Samoyeds. They were possibly the first to separate from the original, proto-Uralic language. The Samoyeds occupied the arctic regions between the Ural Mountains and Dvina (Finnish Vienan Karjala) Karelia. They came into contact with Lapps, Zyrians and other Finno-Ugric inhabitants of the North. During the Viking trading operations in the north before ce1200 the Samoyeds were moving westward, presumeably to trade furs and ivory. After this trade ended, they became dispersed toward Siberia due to pressures from the south. As a result, they began to mix with Siberians and Mongolian tribes.
Nenets, Enets and Nganasa form a North Samoyed group, and they can be distinguished from the South Samoyed language, Selkup. Other Samoyed languages, now extinct, are known only from 18th- and 19th-century records.
Loan Words
Uralic languages have, in course of their long histories, come into contact with many languages from other language families such as Turkic, Germanic, Baltic (an earlier form of Latvian and Lithuanian), and Slavic. Finnish kuningas, "king," is an early loan from a Germanic language, and so it resembles English king and German Konig. Finnish vapaa, "free," was borrowed from a Slavic language--compare the Slavic root svobod-. Obviously the Finns did not need such a word when there was no slavery or even serfdom amongst the Finns. These were alien, Slavic concepts. The same Slavic root found its way into the Hungarian word szabad.
How similar are Estonian and Finnish?
The oldest significant text written in a Uralic language is a funeral sermon in Hungarian from about 1195. Finnish and Estonian texts survive from the Protestant Reformation, which swept over Scandinavia and much of the Baltic in the 16th century. The reformer of the Finns, Michael Agricola (1512-57), also translated the Bible into Finnish. Zyrien was recorded in the 15th century by Saint Stephen (Tapani) of Perm, apostle of the Zyriens, who fashioned a special alphabet for the language. Tapani the Holy skillfully even wrote a reader for them in their own text.
Counting from 1 -10 in various languages
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