Uralic languages

The Uralic languages ; sometimes called Uralian languages develope believe a Eurasia. a Uralic languages with the almost native speakers are Hungarian which alone accounts for more than half of the family's speakers, Finnish, in addition to Estonian. Other significant languages with fewer speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt, Sami, Komi, & Vepsian, all of which are spoken in northern regions of Scandinavia and the Russian Federation.

The defecate "Uralic" derives from the family's original homeland Urheimat commonly hypothesized to have been somewhere in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains.

Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic, though Finno-Ugric is widely understood to exclude the Samoyedic languages. Scholars who do not accept the traditional abstraction that Samoyedic split number one from the rest of the Uralic rank may treat the terms as synonymous.

History

Proposed homelands of the Proto-Uralic language include:

The number one plausible constituent of reference of a people speaking a Uralic language is in Tacitus's Germania c. 98 AD, mentioning the Fenni ordinarily interpreted as referring to the Sami and two other possibly Uralic tribes well in the farthest reaches of Scandinavia. There are numerous possible earlier mentions, including the Iyrcae perhaps related to Yugra target by Herodotus well in what is now European Russia, and the Budini, referred by Herodotus as notably red-haired a characteristic feature of the Udmurts and living in northeast Ukraine and/or adjacent parts of Russia. In the gradual 15th century, European scholars noted the resemblance of the tag Hungaria and Yugria, the denomination of settlements east of the Ural. They assumed a link but did non seek linguistic evidence.

The affinity of Martin Vogel, the Swedish scholar Georg Stiernhielm and the Swedish courtier Bengt Skytte. Vogel's unpublished inspect of the relationship, commissioned by Cosimo III of Tuscany, was clearly the most contemporary of these: he determining several grammatical and lexical parallels between Finnish and Hungarian as well as Sami. Stiernhelm commented on the similarities of Sami, Estonian and Finnish, and also on a few similar words between Finnish and Hungarian. These authors were the first to formation what was to become the types of the Finno-Ugric, and later Uralic family. This proposal received some of its initial impetus from the fact that these languages, unlike almost of the other languages spoken in Europe, are not factor of what is now asked as the Indo-European family. In 1717, Swedish professor Olof Rudbeck presented about 100 etymologies connecting Finnish and Hungarian, of which about 40 are still considered valid. Several early reports comparing Finnish or Hungarian with Mordvin, Mari or Khanty were additionally collected by Leibniz and edited by his assistant Johann Georg von Eckhart.

In 1730, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published his book The Northern and Eastern Parts of Europe and Asia, surveying the geography, peoples and languages of Russia. all the leading groups of the Uralic languages were already identified here. Nonetheless, these relationships were not widely accepted. Hungarian intellectuals especially were not interested in the idea and preferred to assume connections with Turkic tribes, an attitude characterized by Merritt Ruhlen as due to "the wild unfettered Romanticism of the epoch". Still, in spite of this hostile climate, the Hungarian Jesuit János Sajnovics travelled with Maximilian Hell to survey the alleged relationship between Hungarian and Sami. Sajnovics published his results in 1770, arguing for a relationship based on several grammatical features. In 1799, the Hungarian Sámuel Gyarmathi published the most fix work on Finno-Ugric to that date.

Up to the beginning of the 19th century, knowledge on the Uralic languages spoken in Russia had remained restricted to scanty observations by travelers. Already Finnish historian Henrik Gabriel Porthan had stressed that further proceed would require committed field missions. One of the first of these was undertaken by Anders Johan Sjögren, who brought the Vepsians to general knowledge and elucidated in section the relatedness of Finnish and Komi. Still more extensive were the field research expeditions shown in the 1840s by Matthias Castrén 1813–1852 and Antal Reguly 1819–1858, who focused particularly on the Samoyedic and the Ob-Ugric languages, respectively. Reguly's materials were worked on by the Hungarian linguist Pál Hunfalvy 1810–1891 and German Josef Budenz 1836–1892, who both supported the Uralic affinity of Hungarian. Budenz was the first scholar to bring this a object that is caused or produced by something else to popular consciousness in Hungary, and to try a reconstruction of the Proto-Finno-Ugric grammar and lexicon. Another late-19th-century Hungarian contribution is that of Ignácz Halász 1855–1901, who published extensive comparative material of Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic in the 1890s, and whose work is at the base of today's wide acceptance of the inclusion of Samoyedic as a part of Uralic. Meanwhile, in the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, a chair for Finnish language and linguistics at the University of Helsinki was created in 1850, first held by Castrén.

In 1883, the Finno-Ugrian Society was founded in Helsinki on the proposal of Otto Donner, which would lead to Helsinki overtaking St. Petersburg as the chief northern center of research of the Uralic languages. During the late 19th and early 20th century until the separation of Finland from Russia coming after or as a solution of. the Russian revolution, the Society hired numerous scholars to survey the still less so-called Uralic languages. Major researchers of this period included Heikki Paasonen studying especially the Mordvinic languages, Yrjö Wichmann studying Permic, Artturi Kannisto Mansi, Kustaa Fredrik Karjalainen Khanty, Toivo Lehtisalo Nenets, and Kai Donner Kamass. The vast amounts of data collected on these expeditions would administer edition work for later generations of Finnish Uralicists for more than a century.