#uralic

[tiivuline]

Livonian Heritage Day

@ Ikla-Ainaži border

[allethnicities]

Ethnonyms: Magyar, Hungarian

Total population: c. 14.5 million

Ethnolinguistic classification: Uralic → Ugric

Homeland: Pannonian Basin, Hungary

Regions with significant populations: Hungary, Romania, Transylvania, Harghita County, Covasna County, Mureș County, the Slovak Republic, the Republic of Serbia, the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, Ukraine, the Republic of Croatia, the Republic of Austria

Languages and dialects: Hungarian

Religion: Christianity (majority), the Catholic Church, Reformed Christianity, Lutheranism, the Hungarian Greek Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, Judaism, Irreligion

The Hungarians, or Magyars, are the people most closely associated with Hungary, though substantial Hungarian communities also live in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Croatia, and Serbia; their own name for the country, Magyarország, reflects the central place of Magyar identity in their national history. They are unusual in Europe because their language is not Indo-European but belongs to the Uralic family, specifically the Finno-Ugric/Ugric branch, and it has long been written in a modified Latin alphabet; its grammar is strongly agglutinative, with extensive suffixing, vowel harmony, and a sound system and morphology that remain recognizably Uralic despite heavy borrowing from Iranian, Turkic, Slavic, Latin, German, and other languages over centuries of contact. Historically, the proto-Hungarians are described as a blend of Ugric and Turkic elements who moved from the eastern steppe world into the Carpathian Basin by the late ninth century, where they established a durable polity that became one of Europe’s long-lasting states; after Christianization, they were drawn into Latin Christendom, but later their region became a frontier zone shaped by repeated invasions, Ottoman occupation, Habsburg rule, and the territorial losses after World War I, all of which deeply influenced Hungarian collective memory and identity. Culturally, Hungarians have maintained a strong sense of distinctiveness through art, music, literature, and folk traditions such as embroidery and ceramics, while modern Hungarian culture remains strongly centered on Budapest and marked by a long tradition of scholarship, science, and artistic achievement that has also extended into a large diaspora abroad.

[mehilaiselokuva]

Is finnish the outlier (in uralic languages) by having diffrent types of no's depending on whos talking?

Hi!

Not at all. The Uralic languages are known for having a negation verb that is conjugated according to person. Only a few Uralic languages do not have this feature, mainly Hungarian and Estonian. It is speculated that this feature existed in Proto-Uralic, and whichever language no longer has it, has lost it.

The Uralic negative verb is reconstructed as *e- and can mostly be found in the rest of the languages.

Here are some examples of how this verb functions in some other Uralic languages;

(1~3ps) FINNISH - en, et, ei VOTIC - en, ed, eb LIVONIAN - ä'b, ä'b, iz KOMI - og, on, oz MOKSHA - ašeń, ašeť, ašeź N. SÁMI - in, it, ii S. SÁMI - im, ih, ij A. SÁMI - jim, jik, ij

In general, there are very few features which make Finnish an outlier in the Uralic language family. I would say that this language is very stereotypical and preserves so many features from Proto-Uralic (and other language families, like Germanic). You might hear Finnish being called a "language fridge" for this reason.

[ukfrislandembassy]

Uralic vowels do seem to behave rather oddly typologically. Generally speaking, as linguists we expect vowel quantity distinctions to shift to vowel quality over time; it's all over the place in Indo-European,

Uralic seems to be the exception, where, if anything, the direction of travel is reversed; the branches of the family that have length contrasts (whether that be in a long-short or full-reduced form) have innovated this contrast seemingly by emphasising a difference in phonetic length between high and low vowels (which does seem to hold as a minor phonetic correlate cross-linguistically). Brugmann's Law in Indo-European seems to be the closest comparison I can come to, and that it pretty much unique in the family from what I can tell.

Furthermore, the varieties which lack vowel length (Mordvinic and Permic) have undergone radical height-based 'reshuffling' of their vowel systems that resemble the way vowel qualities have re-organised in the languages which have length (low vowels raising alongside lengthening and centralisation and lowering for shortened high vowels). It's also interesting that Turkic varieties spoken nearby (Chuvash and the Tatar-Bashkir group within Kipchak) have also undergone a similar 'quality-flip' (much more messily in Chuvash it looks like); I don't know quite what that does for the relative chronology of these changes, but it does strike me as putting them well within the historical period.

Now, reconstructing contrastive length in vowels of the same quality in the initial syllable (on the order of *e vs. *ee) for Proto-Uralic does seem to be unnecessary. On the other hand, given the extent to which length contrasts seem to readily emerge seemingly spontaneously across the entire family, I do have to wonder whether there is any way that e.g. Proto-Uralic low vowels might have been phonetically longer than high vowels above and beyond the usual length differences that we know tend to be present between high and low vowels anyway? Are there discrepancies between which vowels get lengthened between the sub-branches which would make this unworkable?

And what other families are there that show similar patterning to Uralic in this regard? It doesn't seem to me like Austronesian ever gets vowel length this way, and I'm not yet aware of anything similar having been proposed in Africa either (though I perhaps ought to look into it more deeply). Sino-Tibetan and maybe Tai-Kadai on the other hand look to me like they perhaps do have some of this going on, but I'll own to not knowing enough about the historical phonology of these languages to make any real concrete statements in that regard.

[otherworldmythology]

Kuutar

In the night she shines as the golden moon, weaving garments from her threads to produce shimmering clothes. In a compiling of folklore called the Kalevala the sun and moon were formed from a bird's egg cracking, the whites becoming the moon. By one runic song she is said to produce tears with her opposite, Päivätär, which became the Great Oak tree. She doesn't appear often without Päivätär in incantations. According to some the moon shifts phases due to animals who chase after and eat it, and moon worship was apparently important along with sun worship. Like her opposite she is seen as a goddess who protects against wasps, said to be her children, and was later used as an equivalent to the Virgin Mary.

Pantheon: Finnish

Domain: Moon, weaving, gold, wasps, protection.

Alternate Names: Huutari, Kater, and more depending on the region.

Character Traits: Usually described as a beautiful maiden.

Visual Traits: She is said to weave and wear clothes made of sparkling gold.

Symbolism: Moon, gold, wasps.

Sources: 1 2

[aroundtheworldinstamps]

I know this might not look too flashy, but this might be my favourite stamp sheet. These Estonian stamps are a language tree of the Uralic languages.

Going anti-clockwise from the bottom middle stamp, we have:

The Samoyedic Languages: Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Selkup, and Kamasin

The Ugric Languages: Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi

The Permic Languages: Komi and Udmurt

The Mari and Mordvinic (Erzya and Moksha) Languages

The Sami Languages (Nortern, Southern, Skolt, Inari, Lule, Ume, Pite, Ter and Kildin Sami)

The Baltic-Finnic Languages: Veps, Karelian, Izhorian, Livonian, Finnish, Estonian and Votic

Languages in brackets weren't mentioned in the stamp, but I thought I'd elaborate anyway

Edit: put Ingrian instead of Izhorian. Should've known better, sorry

[baroquelove]

[archaeologs]

Ancient DNA Traces Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian Ancestry to Siberia 4,500 Years Ago - Archaeologs

A groundbreaking study published in Nature has revealed that modern Uralic-speaking populations—particularly Estonians, Finns, and Hungarian

Ancient DNA Traces Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian Ancestry to Siberia 4,500 Years Ago

https://archaeologs.com/n/ancient-dna-traces-estonian-finnish-and-hungarian-ancestry-to-siberia-4500-years-ago