Article 37029 of soc.culture.nordic: Path: prime.mdata.fi!news.eunet.fi!news.funet.fi!hydra.Helsinki.FI!news.helsinki.fi!porsumac16.pc.helsinki.fi!user From: holman@katk.helsinki.fi (Eugene Holman) Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic Subject: Re: Is Finnish... Followup-To: soc.culture.nordic Date: 25 Sep 1994 18:01:59 GMT Organization: University of Helsinki Lines: 124 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: porsumac16.pc.helsinki.fi Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In article , kurt@dna.lth.se (Kurt Swanson Esq.) wrote: > > ... one of those languages (like Turkish) where one cannot pronounce > two consonants in a row, unless they come in separate syllables? > Finnish has strict phonoloigical constraints on syllables, morphemes, and words, but that does not preclude two successive consonants in the same syllable. At the margins of words, Finnish allows at most one consonant word initially, and at most one dental consonant from the set /t, s, n, l, r/ word finally. Recent loans and neologisms do not necessarily conform to these constraints, e.g. kriisi 'crisis', spurgu 'drunken bum', prameileva 'gaudy'. stidi 'match' Between syllables in root morphemes Finnish allows numerous consonant clusters,, some of them articularily complex, e.g. mels-ke 'noise, din', kort-su 'condom', mark-ka 'mark', palt-tu 'blood pudding'. These examples are sufficient to refute your hypothesis. > Please excuse being compared to Turkish. Apparently this is a sore > spot. I met a Frenchman in Helsinki who said that he had also > remarked a similarity between Finnish and Turkish. He mentioned this > to his Finnish girlfriend who became quite angry at the thought. During the 19th century many reputable scholars entertained the hypothesis that Finnish was the westernmost representative of a group of languages which stretched across Eurasia and included Mongolian, the Turkic languages, Yukaghir, Korean, Ainu, and perhaps Japanese. The great Finnish linguist C. J. Ramstedt (1873-1950) was one of the scholars who investigated the question seriously. His research was inconclusive, but he seems to have been in favor of this idea. The Swedish linguist Björn Collinder, and the recently deceased American linguist Robert Austerlitz are among the modern scholars to have the knowledge of Eurasian languages and linguistic methodology to have tackled the question seriously. I once attended a paper given by prof. Austerlitz on the topic. While not wanting to claim that an actual relationship cpuld be demonstrated, he pointed out that Finnish and Lappish form the westernmost arm of a large group of languages which are united by numerous structural features. These include vowel harmony, agglutination as the favored grammatical strategy, lack of grammatical gender, use of the singular with numbers larger than one, a preference for SOV word order, a strict phonological constratints on the shape of syllables, morphemes, and words, etc. stretching from Scandinavia across Eurasia to the Northern Pacific, the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, and possibly including Korean, Japanase, Ainu, and Gilyak (Nivkh). The methodology developed during the 19th century to deomonstrate that langauges were genologically related was based on the assumption of regular sound change. The evidence for these assumptions was usually culled from written records produced by relatively settled populations interacting with a small number of languages. These methods have succesfully been used in the study of American Indian and African langauges, that is to say, of languages lacking continuous written records. The conditions in which the northern Eurasian languages are spoken - vast tracts of sparsely inhabited land in which many small have languages coexisted and intermingled over the centuries, confronts tradional historical linguistics with challeneges that it has not been able to deal with satisfactorily. Specifically, what weight is to be given to structural similarity when trying to determione whether two languages are geneologically related? > > Personally I don't see any connection between Turkish and Finnish > other than what I mentioned, as well as both being of Asiatic origin. > -- Hungarian and Finnish have numerous structural similarities, even if the number of roots they can be demonstrated to hold in common numbers no more than a few hundred. Turkish, Hungarian, and Finnish all share numerous structural similarities, but, Finnish and Turkish, at least, do not appear to have a significant number of roots in common. (With Hungarian the story is different because of a long period of historical contact between speakers of Hungarian and Turkish.) In any case, speakers of Turkish and Finnish learning each others languages are surprised by the large number of organizational similarities. Just to name a few: vowel harmony, consonant gradation, a strong tensency towards haplosemia (= bidirectional one-form one-meaning relationships for morphemes), a system of local cases based on a tripartite division into 'motion towards', 'location at', 'separation from', opposing definite to indefinite by using different cases, a tendency to express more subtle local relationships by postpositions, use of the singular form of nouns in conjunction with numbers higher than one, lack of any trace of grammatical gender, sentence structure characterized by heavy premodification. If structural features which are known to have been abandoned due to contact with Indo-European langauges are admitted, the list must be lengthened to include a preference for SOV word order (largely given up in Finnish, still the norm in the non-Baltic--Finnic Uralic languages and Turkish), and no case agreement between adjective and noun (Finnish has recently acquired agreement on the model of neighboring languages, agreement is not even fully implemented in Estonian). I should finally add that millennia of contact between the Uralic (Finno-Ugric + Samoyed) and Turkic languages have resulted in languages which show the features of both: Mari (also known as Cheremis) is a strongly Turkicized Finno-Ugric language, while Chuvash is a strongly Finno-Ugricized Turkic language. Concluding, then, the hypothesis of a geneological relationship between Finnish and Turkish has not been demonstrated, and the present methods used for determining the answer to questions of this type are incapable of providing a definitive answer. Given that our knowledge of the languages and movements of peoples in prehistoric northern Eurasia is sketchy, we can neither fully support nor fully debunk the hypothesis. The structural relationships we see between Finnish and Turkish can thus be attributed to chance - languages which have invested heavily in agglutination as their primary grammatical strategy can be expected to develop certain kinds of organizational strategies, borrowing - language long spoken by primarily nomadic populations inhabiting vast, sparsely populated areas which come into contact with other languages of the same type through trade, spouse exchange, warfare, will borrow words, expressions, and organizational strategies, to common origin, or to some combination of the above. **************** With best regards, Eugene Holman University of Helsinki Article 37083 of soc.culture.nordic: Path: prime.mdata.fi!news.eunet.fi!news.funet.fi!news.csc.fi!news.helsinki.fi!porsumac15.pc.helsinki.fi!user From: holman@katk.helsinki.fi (Eugene Holman) Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic Subject: Re: Is Finnish... Followup-To: soc.culture.nordic Date: Mon, 26 Sep 1994 21:13:10 +0200 Organization: University of helsinki Lines: 206 Message-ID: References: <366gm0$isl@tukki.cc.jyu.fi> NNTP-Posting-Host: porsumac15.pc.helsinki.fi Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In article <366gm0$isl@tukki.cc.jyu.fi>, joheko@network.cc.jyu.fi (Jonne Henrikki Kolima) wrote: > In article , Kurt Swanson Esq. wrote: > > > > > >Personally I don't see any connection between Turkish and Finnish > >other than what I mentioned, as well as both being of Asiatic origin. > > > I think this question has already been concluded in some former discussion. > In any case, Finnish at least is not of Asiatic origin, its original source > (like, thousands of years ago) was near Volga a good way west of the Urals > mountains. And, I think that every form of historical linguistics places > Finnish in its own 'camp' of Fenno-Ugric languages, which Turkish isn't > a part of. > The answer to the question is more complex. THE ORIGIN OF FINNISH Finnish originated in Finland. The mixture of Finno-Ugric, Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic elements out of which the Baltic-Finnic dialects which provided the input out of which modern Finnish developed consolidated itself in the territory of what is now Estonia and northern Latvia some 3,000 years ago, and was introduced to what is now Finland over the Baltic and, in a version which came to be somewhat more heavily influenced by Slavic, up along the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland across the Neva, and upwards and outwards into the wildernesses of Karelia and the isthmus separating Lake Ladoga from Lake Ladoga. Fifteen hundred years ago there was a continuum of dialects covering most of the southern part of the interior of present day Finland, Karelia, the shores of the Neva, the isthmus between Lakes Onega and Ladoga, the southern shores of the Gulf of Finland, modern Estonia, and extending well into modern Latvia (at least down to the River Dvina). The territory which is now Finland also had a considerable Germanic-speaking population on the Aaland Islands as well as in at least a few scattered settlements in the archipelagos and the western shore. In the northern parts of the country extending well down into modern Savo there was a small nomadic population, the ancestors of the modern Saami. Increased influx of Baltic-Finnic population across the Gulf of Finland, the Karelian isthmus, and, to a lesser extent, the forested areas of Karelia resulted in the consolidation of locally differentiated regional dialects. An influx of Scandinavian population during and after the Crusades influenced those dalects spoken in the western part of the cuontry, particularly those in the area of the medieval center Turku/Aabo, contact with and the gradual assimilation of the Saam-speaking population left their imprint on the dialects in the north, while increased cultural influence from speakers of Old Russian began to leave their imprint on the dialects of the east. With the severance of the Protestant West from the Orthodox East during the early 14th century (1323, treaty of Nötteborg, if I remember correctly) the prerequisites were lain down for the centipetal development of a relatively uniform set of dialects influenced to varying degrees by Swedish and Saami in the Protestant province of Finland, and the continued centrifugal development of a more hetrerogeneous set of dialects which eventually differentiated to such a degree that they have to be regarded as separate languages, i.e. Karelian, Olonetsian (Ludic), Vepsian, and Votian. The expansion of the Teutonic knights to the south in what are now Estonia and Latvia resulted in a weakening of contacts between southern Finland and northern Estonia, allowing for more differentiation, as well as in the erection of cultural and administrative boundaries which allowed the dialects of southern Estonia and Livonia to develop each in its own manner. At the time of the Reformation 'Finnish' was thus a group of closely allied byt distinct dialects. The Finnish bishop Mikael Agricola forged a written language based primarily on the heavily Suedicized speech of the Turku/Aabo area, but also incorporating a few more typically Finnish elements from the Häme and south-eastern dialects. As is well known, this written standard saw only limited use, and it was rejected during the 1820s (the period of the 'Battle of the Dialects') in favor of a compromise standard which was more oriented towards the Eastern dialects then popularly regarded as the source of Finnish culture and national identity. It took several generations before this standard - which either selects obviously eastern (e.g. tie 'road', yö 'night', suo 'swamp' or than western tiä, yä, sua) with obviously western (e.g. pää 'head', maa 'land' rather than peä, moa) features, or allows a choice with sylistic differentiation (e.g. talossansa (W) or talossaan (E) 'in his house', lähdin (W) or läksin (E) 'I left') had established itself to the extent that it could seriously replace the dialects. Even today it is difficult to say precisely how successfully this artificial written standard and its spoken variants have been at replacing the long established historical dialects. It cannot be emphasized too much that Finnish is spoken by people of several ethnic backgrounds. An experiment I have conducted in my classes several times over the years seems to indicate that only for a distinct minority of Finns were all eight great-grandparents Finnish speaking Finns, in the Helsinki region slightly more than half of the more than hundred students I've asked had four grandparents who were Finnish-speaking Finns. Finnish-speaking Swedes, Swedes, Russians, Estonians, Germans, Lapps, Tartars, Poles, Gypsies, not to mention the occasional immigrant from further afield have all contributed to the genetic makeup of the current Finnish population. There is no reason to assume that the gene-pool was 'purer' at some earlier period, if anything, the evidence of loanwords from Baltic languages such as morsian 'bride', sisar 'sister', tytär 'daughter', heimo 'tribe, clan'; hammas 'tooth', reisi 'thigh' seem to indicate the reverse to be true. Ideas of some primitive Pekka Lehtinen leading a tribe of round-faced, blond-haired, blue-eyed proto-Finns from the Volga to the Baltics and through them to Finland are to be dismissed as unscientific nonsense. THUS. Finnish originated in Finland. BUT. The elements out of which its fundamental structure derives originate 'in the East'. THE ORIGIN OF THE FINNO-UGRIC ELEMENTS IN FINNISH Efforts to trace the place where these elements orginated assume that such a place actually existed. We have to remember that posing the question in this way is very much a product of the romanticist inspired historiography of the 19th century, which viewed nations as having racial and linguistic continuity as well as some original homeland. If we accept these assumptions we can make some tentative conclusions as to where the original homeland would have been. The methods used include the study of cognates. The fact that the Finno-Ugric languages all share the same root for the tree called 'spruce', for example, would have us restrict our search to the area where the spruce (and mutatis mutandis the other flora and fauna, the names of which are common to all or most of the F-U languages) are or have been indigenous. Another method would involve the study of loanwords. Without going into details, we can say that the two Mordvin languages (spoken over a large area around Saransk near the lower reaches of the Volga) have a lexical structure which appears to indicate that their borrowed words are superstratic (= have been taken from peoples who have passed through the area) rather than (substratic = taken from people who inhabited the area before they did). If, then, we entertain the idea that Mordvin is to Finno-Ugric like Italian is to Latin - the modern version of a language which has been spoken in the same area since time immemorial - then the area inhabited by the Mordvins would be approximately the place where the Finno-Ugric elements of Finnish (but not the Finns themselves) originated. However, the fact that we cannot find any substratum elements in Mordvin only means that there is no evidence of there having been a population in the area before the pre-Mordvins arrived. Thus, trivially, the area where Mordvin is now spoken seems to be the most likely candidate for the 'homeland' of where the original Finno-Ugric language was spoken. Let us assume that this is so. It is obvious that this 'original Finno-Ugrian languyage' was not the product of spontaneous generation. All evidence points to the fact that the Finno-Ugric languages and the Samoyedic languages - spoken much further to the north and east - are also related, they form the Uralic family of languages. We do not know enough about the prehistory of these languages to be able to reliably reconstruct their history. As I wrote in a previous posting, the fact that we are dealing with languages that share organizational strategies, seem to have been spoken by small populations which wandered, traded and freely intermingled with one another means that the entire question 'what do we mean when we say that two languages are geneologically affiliated?' takes assumes an entirely different aspect within the Eurasian context. These questions have to be studied with scholarly objectivity, and any findings have to be evaluated in the light of new facts. Regarding the pained expressions one often sees on the faces of Finns when the question of the Asian origin of Finnish is discussed, I'd like to remind those of you who have stuck it out to this point of the fate of the Hungarian linguists J. Gyarmathyi and M. Sajnovics. Gyarmathyi spent a year in Lapland and, having nothing better to do, he learned Saami. He discovered that the resemblences between Hungarian and Saami were so striking that they could not be the result of chance. He wrote a book about his findings - inappropariately titled 'Demonstratio. Idioma ungarorum et lapponum idem esse' ('A demonstration that that the language of the Hungarians and of the Lapps is the same'). The Hungarians regarded such a claim as so outrageous ('Es stinkt nach Fischtran') that they refused to publish it, and poor Sajnovics had to have it printed in Copenhagen in 1770. Sajnovic, who supplemented Gyarmathi's findings with systematic comparisons of phonology, morphology, and semantics, published a more modestly entitled 'Affinitas...' ('The Affinity of the Hungarian and Finnish Languages') in 1799. The book was was hostily received, and in his obituary he was said to have done his country a greater service by having introduced two strains of potato than by having demonstrated beyond any doubt that Hungarian, Finnish, Saami and numerous minor tongues spoken in the depths of Russia were related. So, I'd like to stop here, but the history of the basic elements of Finnish obviously extends back a long time before the (possible) settlement of a tribe of neolithic nomads along the uninhabited shores of the Volga. The history of a people and the history of a language are intertwined, but nevertheless distinct. As far as the history of the basic vocabulary and structural organization of Finnish goes, all available evidence points towards the northeast... (This essay was written off the top of my head, but the material can be found in 'Jazyki narodov SSSR', volume III (1966), V Lytkin (ed.) 'Vvedenie v finno-ugorskoe jazykoznanie', 1970 ff. vol. 1-3, A. Laanest, 'Sissejuhatus läänemeresoome keeltesse',1980, B. Collinder, Survey of the Uralic Languages, 1960, A. Anttila, An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics, 1974, E. Itkonen Kieli ja sen tutkimus,1966, E. Kivikoski, Suomen esihistoria, 196?, T. Vuorela The Finno-Ugric Peoples, 196?, Gy. Decsy 'Einfuerung in die finnisch-ugrische Sprachwissenschaft, 196?, L. Hakulinen Suomen kielen rakenne ja kehtys 1980, and T. Sebeok, Portraits of Linguists, 196?.) With best regards, Eugene Holman University of Helsinki Article 37084 of soc.culture.nordic: Path: prime.mdata.fi!news.eunet.fi!news.funet.fi!news.csc.fi!news.helsinki.fi!porsumac15.pc.helsinki.fi!user From: holman@katk.helsinki.fi (Eugene Holman) Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic Subject: Re: Is Finnish... Followup-To: soc.culture.nordic Date: Mon, 26 Sep 1994 22:58:43 +0200 Organization: University of helsinki Lines: 32 Message-ID: References: <366gm0$isl@tukki.cc.jyu.fi> NNTP-Posting-Host: porsumac15.pc.helsinki.fi Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In article , holman@katk.helsinki.fi (Eugene Holman) wrote: Changing the clock last night has taxed my attention span. The paragraph about Sajnovics and Gyarmathi should have read: I'd like to remind those of > you who have stuck it out to this point of the fate of the Hungarian > linguists J. Gyarmathyi and M. Sajnovics. Gyarmathyi spent a year in > Lapland and, having nothing better to do, he learned Saami. He discovered > that the resemblences between Hungarian and Saami were so striking that > they could not be the result of chance. He wrote a book about his findings > - inappropariately titled 'Demonstratio. Idioma ungarorum et lapponum idem > esse' ('A demonstration that that the language of the Hungarians and of the > Lapps is the same'). The Hungarians regarded such a claim as so outrageous > ('Es stinkt nach Fischtran') that they refused to publish it, and poor > Sajnovics had to have it printed in Copenhagen in 1770. GYARMATHI, who > supplemented SAJNOVICS's findings with systematic comparisons of phonology, > morphology, and semantics, published a more modestly entitled > 'Affinitas...' ('The Affinity of the Hungarian and Finnish Languages') in > 1799. The book was hostily received, and in his obituary he was said to > have done his country a greater service by having introduced two strains of > potato than by having demonstrated beyond any doubt that Hungarian, > Finnish, Saami and numerous minor tongues spoken in the depths of Russia > were related. > > Sorry about the slip-up, Regards, Eugene Holman University of Helsinki