Uralic–Yukaghir languages

Similarities between Uralic and Yukaghir were first pointed out by Paasonen (1907) and Lewy (1928), although they did not consider these to be sufficient evidence for a genetic relationship between the two.{{sfnp|Paasonen|1907|pp=19}}{{sfnp|Lewy|1928|pp=287|ps=: "Das Jukagirische zeigt zahlreiche Anklänge an das Finnougrische [...] Beweisen tut das zunächst gar nichts, aber es kann veranlassen, weiter zu prüfen." ('Yukaghir shows numerous points of resemblance to Finno-Ugric [...] For the moment, this does not prove anything, but it can motivate further research.')}} Holger Pedersen (1931) included Uralic and Yukaghir in his proposed Nostratic language family, and also noted some similarities between them.{{sfnp|Pedersen|1931|p=338}} A genetic relationship between Uralic and Yukaghir was first argued for in detail in 1940, independently by Karl Bouda and Björn Collinder.{{sfnp|Bouda|1940|p=92|ps=: "Wir haben gesehen, daß das Jukagirische eine so starke uralische Schicht besitzt, daß man es als diesem Sprachgebiet zugehörig ansehen kann." ('We have seen that Yukhagir has such a strong Uralic stratum, that we can consider it to belong the latter's speech area.')}}{{sfnp|Collinder|1940}}{{sfnp|Piispanen|2013|p=167}} The hypothesis was further elaborated by Collinder in subsequent publications,{{sfnp|Collinder|1957}}{{sfnp|Collinder|1965a}}{{sfnp|Collinder|1965b}} and also by other scholars including Harms (1977), Nikolaeva (1988) and Piispanen (2013).{{sfnp|Harms|1977}}{{sfnp|Nikolaeva|1988}}{{sfnp|Piispanen|2013}}

Uralic–Yukaghir is listed as a language family in A Guide to the World's Languages by Merritt Ruhlen (1987), and is accepted as a unit in controversial long-range proposals such as "Eurasiatic" by Joseph Greenberg (2000, 2002) and "Nostratic" by Allan Bomhard (2008), both based on evidence collected by earlier scholars like Collinder.{{sfnp|Greenberg|2000|pp=279-81}}{{sfnp|Bomhard|2008|p=176}}

Collinder based his case for a genetic relationship between Uralic and Yukaghir on lexical and grammatical evidence; the latter included according to him similarities between pronouns, nominal case suffixes, and verb inflection.{{harvcoltxt|Collinder|1965b}}, p. 30: "The features common to Yukagir and Uralic are so numerous and so characteristic that they must be remainders of a primordial unity. The case system of Yukagir is almost identical with that of Northern Samoyed. The imperative of the verbs is formed with the same suffixes as in Southern Samoyed and the most conservative of the Fenno-Ugric languages. The two negative auxiliary verbs of the Uralic languages are also found in Yukagir. There are striking common traits in verb derivation. Most of the pronominal stems are more or less identical. Yukagir has half a hundred words in common with Uralic, in addition to those that may fairly be suspected of being loanwords. This number is not lower than should be expected on the assumption that Yukagir is akin to Uralic. In Yukagir texts one may find sentences of up to a dozen words that consist exclusively or almost exclusively of words that also occur in Uralic. Nothing in the phonologic or morphologic structure of Yukagir contradicts the hypothesis of affinity, and Yukagir agrees well with Uralic as far as the syntax is concerned."

The following list of lexical correspondences is taken from Nikolaeva (2006).{{sfnp|Nikolaeva|2006|pp=146, 158, 178, 215, 238, 274, 300, 325, 336, 344, 354, 379, 384, 458}}

The following list of lexical correspondences is taken from Aikio (2019).{{cite encyclopedia |last1=Aikio |first1=Ante |title=Proto-Uralic |editor1-last=Bakró-Nagy |editor1-first=Marianne |editor2-last=Laakso |editor2-first=Johanna |editor3-last=Skribnik |editor3-first=Elena |encyclopedia=Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages |date=2019 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=Oxford, UK |url=https://www.academia.edu/40193033 }}{{rp|52}}

In Yukaghir numbers also share similarities such as Proto-Uralic "ükte/*ikte" and Yukaghir "irke" 'one'.

The Uralic–Yukaghir hypothesis is rejected by many researchers as unsupported. While most agree that there is a core of common vocabulary that cannot be simply dismissed as chance resemblances, it has been argued that these are not the result of common inheritance, but rather due to contact between Yukaghir and Uralic speakers, which resulted in borrowing of vocabulary from Uralic languages (especially Samoyedic) into Yukaghir. Rédei (1999) assembled a large corpus of what he considered as loans from Uralic into Yukaghir.{{sfnp|Rédei|1999}} Häkkinen (2012) argues that the grammatical systems show too few convincing resemblances, especially the morphology, and proposes that putative Uralic–Yukaghir cognates are in fact borrowings from an early stage of Uralic (c. 3000 BC; he dates Proto-Uralic to c. 2000 BC) into an early stage of Yukaghir, while Uralic was (according to him) spoken near the Sayan region and Yukaghir near the Upper Lena River and near Lake Baikal.{{sfnp|Häkkinen|2012}} Aikio (2014) agrees with Rédei and Häkkinen that Uralic–Yukaghir is unsupported and implausible, and that common vocabulary shared by the two families is best explained as the result of borrowing from Uralic into Yukaghir, although he rejects many of their (especially Rédei's) examples as spurious or accidental resemblances and puts the date of borrowing much later, arguing that the loanwords he accepts as valid were borrowed from an early stage of Samoyedic (preceding Proto-Samoyedic; thus roughly in the 1st millennium BC) into Yukaghir, in the same general region between the Yenisei River and Lake Baikal.{{sfnp|Aikio|2014}}

Proponents of the theory have attempted to respond to criticisms with arguments that Uralic correspondences are found very extensively in function words and in the most used vocabulary which is allegedly very rarely borrowed. In particular, demonstrative pronouns, personal pronouns, numbers, kinship terms, and many verbs - these kinds of words are very rarely borrowed from other languages and are very resistant to loaning. According to Peter S. Piispanen, these proposed common words include the Yukaghir numeral "irke" 'one' compared to Proto-Uralic *ikte 'one', the first and second person singular pronouns in Proto-Yukaghir "*mət" 'I' and "*tət" 'you', compared to Proto-Uralic "*mon" 'I' and "*te/*ton" 'you' alongside the Yukaghir demonstrative pronoun root *ta- compared to the Proto-Uralic root *ta-. Peter S. Piispanen (Stockholm). [https://web.archive.org/web/20190305001714/http://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e2e6/c23bc4aa6586d6f0c0075ff145666ce9a53c.pdf The Uralic-Yukaghiric connection revisited: Sound Correspondences of Geminate Clusters]. SUSA/JSFOu 94, 2013 However, even basic vocabulary can be borrowed in cases of extensive contact.{{cite book |last1=Thomason |first1=Sarah Grey |last2=Kaufman |first2=Terrence |title=Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=b_6OMfZ1QpUC&q=%22basic+vocabulary%22 |publisher=University of California Press |page=48 |language=en |date=15 November 2023|isbn=978-0-520-91279-3 }}

According to Vladimir Napolskikh, the split between Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic branches might have occurred somewhere in the area between the Ob River and the Irtysh River, following an earlier split between Proto-Uralic and Proto-Yukaghir somewhere in Eastern Siberia.[http://udmurt.info/pdf/library/napolskikh/napolskikh-predystoriya-narodov-ural-yaz-semyi.pdf Предыстория народов уральской языковой семьи] (in Russian).

• Indo-Uralic languages
• Ural–Altaic languages
• Borean languages

{{reflist}}

{{use dmy dates|date=October 2023}}

{{refbegin|30em}}

• {{cite journal | title = The Uralic–Yukaghir lexical correspondences: genetic inheritance, language contact or chance resemblance?

| last = Aikio | first = Ante

| journal = Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen

| trans-journal = Finno-Ugric research

| year = 2014 | volume = 2014 | issue = 62 | pages = 7–76

| url = https://journal.fi/fuf/article/download/86078/44958/

| doi = 10.33339/fuf.86078

| doi-access = free

}}

• {{Cite book| title = Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary

| last = Bomhard | first = Allan R. | year = 2008

| publisher = Brill | location = Leiden

}}

• {{cite journal | title = Die finnisch-ugrisch-samojedische Schicht des Jukagirischen

| last = Bouda | first = Karl

| journal = Ungarische Jahrbücher

| year = 1940 | volume = 20 | pages = 80–101

| language = de

| url = http://real-j.mtak.hu/7013/

}}

• {{cite book| title = Jukagirisch und Uralisch

| trans-title = Yukagirian and Uralic

| last = Collinder | first = Björn | year = 1940

| publisher = Almqvist & Wiksell | location = Uppsala

| series = Uppsala Universitets Årsskrift 8

}}

• {{cite journal | title = Uralo-jukagirische Nachlese

| last = Collinder | first = Björn

| journal = Uppsala Universitets Årsskrift

| year = 1957 | volume = 12 | pages = 105–130

}}

• {{cite journal | title = Hat das Uralische Verwandte? Eine sprachvergleichende Untersuchung

| last = Collinder | first = Björn

| journal = Acta Societatis Linguisticae Upsaliensis

| year = 1965a | volume = 1 | pages = 109–180

}}

• {{cite book| title = An Introduction to the Uralic Languages

| last = Collinder | first = Björn | year = 2021

| orig-year = First published 1965

| publisher = University of California Press | location = Berkeley and Los Angeles

| isbn = 978-052036929-0

| ref = {{harvid|Collinder|1965b}}

}}

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| last = Greenberg | first = Joseph H. | year = 2000

| publisher = Stanford University Press | location = Stanford, California

| isbn = 978-080473812-5

}}

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| publisher = Stanford University Press | location = Stanford, California

| isbn = 978-080474624-3

}}

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| editor-last = Croft | editor-first = William

| publisher = Oxford University Press

| isbn = 978-019925771-3

}}

• {{cite journal | title = Early contacts between Uralic and Yukaghir

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| journal = Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne

| year = 2012 | volume = 264 | pages = 91–101

| url = https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/publications/early-contacts-between-uralic-and-yukaghir

}}

• {{cite book| title = Studies in descriptive and historical linguistics. Festschrift for Winfred P. Lehmann

| last = Harms | first = Robert | year = 1977

| editor-last = Hopper | editor-first = Paul J.

| publisher = John Benjamins | location = Amsterdam

| series = Current Issues in Linguistic Theory

| pages = 301–316

| isbn = 978-902720905-4

}}

• {{cite journal | title = Possessivisch und Passivisch. Bemerkungen zum Verbalausdruck in der sprachlichen Typenlehre

| trans-title = Possessive and passive. Notes on verbal expression in linguistic type theory

| last = Lewy | first = Ernst

| journal = Ungarische Jahrbücher

| year = 1928 | volume = 8 | pages = 274–289

| url = http://real-j.mtak.hu/7022/

}}

• {{cite thesis| type = PhD dissertation| title = Проблема урало-юкагирских генетических связей

| last = Nikolaeva | first = Irina | year = 1988

| trans-title = The Problem of Uralo-Yukaghir Genetic Relationship

| lang = ru

| publisher = Institute of Linguistics | location = Moscow

}}

• {{cite book| title = A Historical Dictionary of Yukaghir

| last = Nikolaeva | first = Irina | year = 2006

| publisher = Mouton de Gruyter | location = Berlin/New York

| series = Trends in Linguistics. Documentation

| isbn = 978-311018689-5

}}

• {{cite journal | title = Zur Frage von der Urverwandschaft der finnisch-ugrischen und indoeuropäischen Sprachen

| trans-title = On the question of the original relationship of the Finnish-Ugric and Indo-European languages

| last = Paasonen | first = Heikki

| journal = Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen | via = Internet Archive

| year = 1907 | volume = 7 | pages = 13–31

| url = https://archive.org/details/finnischugrische07helsuoft/page/n21

}}

• {{cite book| title = Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century: Methods and Results

| last = Pedersen | first = Holger | year = 1931

| translator = John Webster Spargo

| publisher = Harvard University Press | location = Cambridge, Massachusetts

}}

• {{Cite journal | title = Zur Frage nach der Urverwandtschaft des Indoeuropäischen mit dem Ugrofinnischen

| trans-title = On the question of the original relationship between Indo-European and Ugro-Finnish

| last = Pedersen | first = Holger

| journal = Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne

| year = 1933 | volume = 67 | pages = 308–325

}}

• {{cite journal | title = The Uralic-Yukaghiric Connection Revisited: Sound Correspondences of Geminate Clusters

| last = Piispanen | first = Peter

| journal = Journal de la Société Finno-Ougrienne

| year = 2013 | volume = 2013 | issue = 94 | pages = 165–197

| doi = 10.33340/susa.82515

| doi-access = free

}}

• {{cite journal | title = Zu den uralisch-jukagirischen Sprachkontakten

| trans-title = On Uralic-Yukagirian language contacts

| last = Rédei | first = Károly

| journal = Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen

| year = 1999 | volume = 55 | pages = 1–58

| url = http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:ELE-534758 | archive-url = https://archive.today/20130412155928/http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:ELE-534758 | url-status = dead | archive-date = 12 April 2013 | url-access = subscription

}}

• {{Cite book| title = A Guide to the World's Languages, Volume 1: Classification

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| publisher = Stanford University Press | location = Stanford, California

| isbn = 978-080471894-3

}}

{{refend}}

• Angere, J. 1956. Die uralo-jukagirische Frage. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der sprachlichen Urverwandschaft. Stockholm: Almqvist & Viksell.
• Bouda, Karl. 1940. "Die finnisch-ugrisch-samojedische Schicht des Jukagirischen." Ungarische Jahrbücher 20, 80–101.
• Fortescue, Michael. 1998. Language Relations Across Bering Strait: Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence. London and New York: Cassell.
• Hyllested, Adam. 2010. "Internal Reconstruction vs. External Comparison: The Case of the Indo-Uralic Laryngeals." Internal Reconstruction in Indo-European, eds. J.E. Rasmussen & T. Olander, 111–136. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.
• Janhunen, Juha. 2009. "Proto-Uralic—what, where, and when?" Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Toimituksia 258. pp. 57–78. [http://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust258/sust258_janhunen.pdf Online article].
• Mithen, Steven. 2003. After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000 – 5000 BC. Orion Publishing Co.
• Nikolaeva, Irina. 1986. "Yukaghir-Altaic parallels" (in Russian). Istoriko-kul'turnye kontakty narodov altajskoj jazykovoj obshchnosti: Tezisy dolkadov XXIX sessii Postojannoj Mezhdunarodnoj Altaisticheskoj Konferencii PIAC, Vol. 2: Lingvistika, pp. 84–86. Tashkent: Akademija Nauk.
• Nikolaeva, Irina. 1987. "On the reconstruction of Proto-Yukaghir: Inlaut consonantism" (in Russian). Jazyk-mif-kul'tura narodov Sibir, 43–48. Jakutsk: JaGU.
• Nikolaeva, Irina. 1988. "On the correspondence of Uralic sibilants and affricates in Yukaghir" (in Russian). Sovetskoe Finnougrovedenie 2, 81–89.
• Rédei, K. 1990. "Zu den uralisch-jukagirischen Sprachkontakten." Congressus septimus internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum. Pars 1 A. Sessiones plenares, 27–36. Debrecen.
• Sauvegeot, Au. 1963. "L'appartenance du youkaguir." Ural-altaische Jahrbücher 35, 109–117.
• Sauvegeot, Au. 1969. "La position du youkaguir." Ural-altaische Jahrbücher 41, 344–359.
• Swadesh, Morris. 1962. "Linguistic relations across the Bering Strait." American Anthropologist 64, 1262–1291.
• Tailleur, O.G. 1959. "Plaidoyer pour le youkaghir, branche orientale de la famille ouralienne." Lingua 6, 403–423.

• [http://www.sgr.fi/yukaghir/intro/bibliography/bibliography.html#historical Bibliography] at [http://www.sgr.fi/yukaghir/intro.html Online Documentation of Kolyma Yukaghir] by Irina Nikolaeva

{{Eurasian languages}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Uralic-Yukaghir languages}}

Category:Paleo-Siberian languages

Category:Proposed language families

Category:Uralic languages

Category:Yukaghir languages