Еуропа-Азия тілдерінің генетикалық байланысы жөніндегі гипотеза

Controversial hypothetical language family consisting of Indo European and Uralic

Indo Uralic is a highly controversial linguistic hypothesis proposing a genealogical family consisting of Indo European and Uralic. The suggestion of a genetic relationship between Indo European and Uralic is often credited to the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in 1869 (Pedersen 1931:336), though an even earlier version was proposed by Finnish linguist Daniel Europaeus in 1853 and 1863. Both were received with little enthusiasm. Since then, the predominant opinion in the linguistic community has remained that the evidence for such a relationship is insufficient to confirm a genetic relationship versus similarity due to language contact. However, quite a few prominent linguists have always taken the contrary view (e. g. Henry Sweet, Holger Pedersen, Björn Collinder, Warren Cowgill, Jochem Schindler, Eugene Helimski, Frederik Kortlandt and Alwin Kloekhorst). The Indo Uralic hypothesis has been questioned by recent linguistic data, contradicting previous argued cognates, finding no support for a genealogical relationship between Uralic and Indo European.

The Dutch linguist Frederik Kortlandt supports a model of Indo Uralic in which the original Indo Uralic speakers lived north of the Caspian Sea, and the Proto Indo European speakers began as a group that branched off westward from there to come into geographic proximity with the Northwest Caucasian languages, absorbing a Northwest Caucasian lexical blending before moving farther westward to a region north of the Black Sea where their language settled into canonical Proto Indo European (2002:1). Allan Bomhard suggests a similar schema in Indo European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1996). Alternatively, the common protolanguage may have been located north of the Black Sea, with Proto Uralic moving northwards with the climatic improvement of post glacial times. Expanding upon his earlier hypothesis, Kortlandt (2021) proposes that Proto Indo European, rather than being a sister of Proto Uralic, is a daughter of Proto Uralic, and that Indo European is a branch of the Uralic family. More specifically, he proposes that Proto Indo European and Proto Finno Ugric share a more recent common ancestor with each other than either of them do with Proto Samoyedic. If valid, this would mean the traditional conception of the Uralic family (with Indo European excluded) is a paraphyletic clade.

The history of early opposition to the Indo Uralic hypothesis does not appear to have been written. It is clear from the statements of supporters such as Sweet that they were facing considerable opposition and that the general climate of opinion was against them, except perhaps in Scandinavia. Károly Rédei, editor of the etymological dictionary of the Uralic languages (1986a), rejected the idea of a genetic relationship between Uralic and Indo European, arguing that the lexical items shared by Uralic and Indo European were due to borrowing from Indo European into Proto Uralic (1986b). Perhaps the best known critique of recent times is that of Jorma Koivulehto, issued in a series of carefully formulated articles. Koivulehto’s central contention, agreeing with Rédei's views, is that all of the lexical items claimed to be Indo Uralic can be explained as loans from Indo European into Uralic (see below for examples). The linguists Christian Carpelan, Asko Parpola and Petteri Koskikallio suggest that early Indo European and Uralic stand in early contact and suggest that any similarities between them are explained through early language contact and borrowings. According to Angela Marcantonio (2014) and Johan Schalin a genetic relation between Uralic and Indo European is very unlikely and mostly all similarities are explained through borrowings and chance resemblances. Marcantonio argued that the fundamental typological differences between Uralic and Indo European are so much, that a relationship is unlikely. In 2022, a group of scholars concluded that proto Uralic and proto Indo European do not share a genealogical relationship with each other, as "whether based on cognacy or loans the argument from lexical resemblances is flawed". According to them, "Uralic is distinctive in western Eurasia. A number of typological properties are eastern looking overall, fitting comfortably into northeast Asia, Siberia, or the North Pacific Rim". Previously proposed cognates can be largely explained via borrowings from Indo Iranian languages. They concluded in regards to the Indo Uralic hypothese that "of what we take to be the two statistically soundest recent quantitative tests, Kessler and Lehtonen (2006), using a 100 item Swadesh like wordlist, found no evidence for Indo Uralic".

The most common arguments in favour of a relationship between Indo European and Uralic are based on seemingly common elements of morphology, such as the pronominal roots (*m for first person; *t for second person; *i for third person), case markings (accusative * m; ablative/partitive * ta), interrogative/relative pronouns (*kʷ "who?, which? "; *y "who, which" to signal relative clauses) and a common SOV word order. Other, less obvious correspondences are suggested, such as the Indo European plural marker * es (or * s in the accusative plural *) and its Uralic counterpart * t. This same word final assibilation of * t to * s may also be present in Indo European second person singular * s in comparison with Uralic second person singular * t. Compare, within Indo European itself, * s second person singular injunctive, * si second person singular present indicative, * tHa second person singular perfect, * te second person plural present indicative, *tu "you" (singular) nominative, *tei "to you" (singular) enclitic pronoun. These forms suggest that the underlying second person marker in Indo European may be *t and that the *u found in forms such as *tu was originally an affixal particle or merely analogical. Similarities have long been noted between the verb conjugation systems of Uralic languages (e. g. that of Finnish) and Indo European languages (e. g. those of Latin, Russian, and Lithuanian). Although it would not be uncommon for a language to borrow heavily from the vocabulary of another language (as in the cases of English from French, Persian from Arabic, and Korean from Chinese), it would be extremely unusual for a language to borrow its basic system of verb conjugation from another. Supporters of the existence of Indo Uralic have thus used morphological arguments to support the Indo Uralic thesis by, for example, arguing that Finnish verb conjugations and pronouns are much more closely related to Indo European than they would be expected to be by chance; and since borrowing basic grammar is rare, that this would suggest a common origin with Indo European. (Finnish is preferred for this argument over Saami or Hungarian because it seems to be more conservative, i. e. to have diverged less than the others have from Proto Uralic. But even then, similar suspicious parallels have been noted between Hungarian and Armenian verb conjugation.) However, the strongly divergent sound systems of Proto Indo European and Proto Uralic are an aggravating factor both in the morphological and the lexical realm, making it additionally difficult to judge resemblances and interpret them as either borrowings, possible cognates or chance resemblances.

A second type of evidence advanced in favor of an Indo Uralic family is lexical. Numerous words in Indo European and Uralic resemble each other (see list below). The problem is to distinguish between cognates and borrowings. Uralic languages have been in contact with a succession of Indo European languages for millennia. As a result, many words have been borrowed between them, most often from Indo European languages into Uralic ones. An example of a Uralic word that cannot be original is Finno Ugric *śata "hundred". The Proto Indo European form of this word was *ḱm̥tóm (compare Latin centum), which became *ćatám in early Indo Iranian (reanalyzed as the neuter nominative–accusative singular of an a stem > Sanskrit śatá , Avestan sata ). This is evidence that the word was borrowed into Finno Ugric from Indo Iranian or Indo Aryan. This borrowing may have occurred in the region north of the Pontic–Caspian steppes around 2100–1800 BC, the approximate floruit of Indo Iranian (Anthony 2007:371–411). It provides linguistic evidence for the geographical location of these languages around that time, agreeing with archeological evidence that Indo European speakers were present in the Pontic Caspian steppes by around 4500 BCE (the Kurgan hypothesis) and that Uralic speakers may have been established in the Pit Comb Ware culture to their north in the fifth millennium BCE (Carpelan & Parpola 2001:79). Another ancient borrowing is Finno Ugric *porćas "piglet". This word corresponds closely in form to the Proto Indo European word reconstructed as *porḱos, attested by such forms as Latin porcus "hog", Old English fearh (> English farrow "young pig"), Lithuanian par̃šas "piglet, castrated boar", and Saka pāsa (< *pārsa) "pig". In the Indo European word, * os (> Finno Ugric * as) is a masculine nominative singular ending, but it is quite meaningless in Uralic languages. This shows that the whole word was borrowed as a unit and is not part of the original Uralic vocabulary. One of the most famous borrowings is the Finnish word kuningas "king" (< Proto Finnic *kuningas), which was borrowed from Proto Germanic *kuningaz. Finnish has been very conservative in retaining the basic structure of the borrowed word, nearly preserving the nominative singular case marker reconstructed for Proto Germanic masculine 'a' stems. Furthermore, the Proto Germanic * az ending corresponds exactly to the * os ending reconstructable for Proto Indo European masculine o stems. Thus, *śata cannot be Indo Uralic on account of its phonology, while *porćas and *kuningas cannot be Indo Uralic on account of their morphology. Such words as those for "hundred", "pig", and "king" have something in common: they represent "cultural vocabulary" as opposed to "basic vocabulary". They are likely to have been acquired along with a novel number system and the domestic pig from Indo Europeans in the south. Similarly, the Indo Europeans themselves had acquired such words and cultural items from peoples to their south or west, including possibly their words for "ox", *gʷou (compare English cow) and "grain", *bʰars (compare English barley). In contrast, basic vocabulary – words such as "me", "hand", "water", and "be" – is much less readily borrowed between languages. If Indo European and Uralic are genetically related, there should be agreements regarding basic vocabulary, with more agreements if they are closely related, fewer if they are less closely related. Advocates of a genetic relation between Indo European and Uralic maintain that the borrowings can be filtered out by application of phonological and morphological analysis and that a core of vocabulary common to Indo European and Uralic remains. As examples they advance such comparisons as Proto Uralic * (or *) : Proto Indo European *, oblique stem *, both meaning 'water', and Proto Uralic * (or *) : Proto Indo European *, both meaning 'name'. In contrast to * and *, the phonology of these words shows no sound changes from Indo European daughter languages such as Indo Iranian. In contrast to * and *, they show no morphological affixes from Indo European that are absent in Uralic. According to advocates of the Indo Uralic hypothesis, the resulting core of common vocabulary can only be explained by the hypothesis of common origin.

It has been countered that nothing prevents this common vocabulary from having been borrowed from Proto Indo European into Proto Uralic. For the old loans, as well as uncontroversial ones from Proto Baltic and Proto Germanic, it is more the rule than the exception that only the stem is borrowed, without any case endings. Proto Uralic *nimi has been explained according to sound laws governing substitutions in borrowings (Koivulehto 1999), on the assumption that the original was a zero grade oblique stem PIE *(H)nmen as attested in later Balto Slavic *inmen and Proto Celtic *anmen Proto Uralic *weti could be a loan from the PIE oblique e grade form for 'water' or from an indirectly attested cognate root noun *wed Proto Uralic *toHį 'give' and PFU *wetä 'lead' also make perfect phonologic sense as borrowings. The number systems of Indo European and Uralic show no commonalities. Moreover, while the numbers in all Indo European languages can be traced back to reconstructed Proto Indo European numbers, this cannot be done for the Uralic numbers, where only "two" and "five" are common to all of the family (roots for 3 6 are common to all subgroups other than Samoyedic, and slightly less widespread roots are known for 1 and 10). This would appear to show that if Proto Indo European and Proto Uralic are to be related, the connection must lie so far back that the families developed their number systems independently and did not inherit them from their purported common ancestor. Although, the fact that Uralic languages themselves do not share the same numbers across all Uralic branches indicates that they would not with Indo European languages in any case, even if they were in fact related. It is also objected that some or all of the common vocabulary items claimed are false cognates – words whose resemblance is merely coincidental, like English bad and Persian bad.

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