Finno-Ugric languages: Encyclopedia II - Finno-Ugric languages - Structural features

Finno-Ugric languages - Structural features

All of the Finno-Ugric languages share structural features and basic vocabulary. Around 200 basic words have been proposed and include word stems for concepts related to humans such as names for relatives and body parts. This common vocabulary includes, according to Lyle Campbell, at least 55 words related to fishing, 33 related to hunting and eating animals, 12 related to reindeer, 17 related to plant foods, 31 related to technology, 26 related to building, 11 related to clothing, 18 related to climate, 4 related to society, 11 related to religion, and 3 related to commerce, giving an interesting picture of proto-Finno-Ugric society.

The structural features are seen by linguists as strong evidence for a common ancestry. These include inflection by adding suffixes (instead of prepositions in English). The Finno-Ugric languages are also famous for having a large number of grammatical cases, of which Finnish has at least 15 and Hungarian has at least 24.

Another feature of the Finno-Ugric languages is that verbs are inflected, i.e. conjugated, by person and number. (This is the familiar way verbs are conjugated in most Indo-European languages; but Chinese, Vietnamese and other isolating languages do not share this feature.)

Finally, the Finno-Ugric languages lack possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns, such as my and your, communicating the same information via declension. In some languages, the genitive of the personal pronoun is used to express possession. Examples: Estonian mu koer 'my dog' (literally 'I-gen. dog'), Northern Sami mu beana 'my dog' (literally 'I-gen. dog') or beatnagan 'my dog' (literally 'dog-my'). In others, a pronominal suffix is used, optionally together with the genitive case of a pronoun: thus Finnish (minun) koirani, 'my dog' (literally 'I-gen. dog-my'), from koira "dog". Similarly, Hungarian, lacking possessive adjectives, uses possessive noun suffixes, optionally together with pronouns; cf. 'the dog' = a kutya vs. 'my dog' = az én kutyám (literally, 'the I dog-my') or simply a kutyám (literally, 'the dog-my'). Hungarian, however, does have independent possessive pronouns; e.g. enyém 'mine', tiéd 'yours', etc. These are declined; e.g. nom. enyém, acc. enyémet, dat. enyémnek, etc.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Structural features", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki