Uralo-Siberian languages: Encyclopedia - Uralo-Siberian languages

Uralo-Siberian languages

Uralo-Siberian is a hypothetical language family consisting of the following language families:

• Uralic
• Yukaghir
• Chukotko-Kamchatkan
• Eskimo-Aleut

Uralo-Siberian languages - History

Structural similarities between Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut languages were observed early. In 1746, the Danish theologian Marcus Wöldike compared Greenlandic to Hungarian. In 1818, Rasmus Rask considered Greenlandic to be related to the Uralic languages, and presented a list of lexical correspondences. (Rask also considered Uralic and Altaic to be related to each other.) In 1959, Knut Bergsland published the paper The Eskimo-Uralic Hypothesis, in which he, like other authors before him, presented a number of grammatical similarities and a small number of lexical correspondences. In 1962, Morris Swadesh proposed a relationship between the Eskimo-Aleut and Chukotko-Kamchatkan language families. In 1998, Michael Fortescue put all the strings together in his book, Language Relations across Bering Strait.

Uralo-Siberian languages - Evidence

Uralo-Siberian languages - Phonology

The consonant inventories of the reconstructed protolanguages of the four Uralo-Siberian families are very similar to each other. A common feature is that there are only voiceless and no voiced stops, while there is a set of voiced (but no voiceless) non-sibilant fricatives with the same places of articulation (labial, dental, palatal and velar; in Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut, also uvular). There are also nasals in the same places of articulation. In addition, there are three sibilants, and liquids and semivowels.

Uralo-Siberian languages - Morphology

Apparently shared elements of Uralo-Siberian morphology include the following:

Uralo-Siberian languages - Lexicon

Fortescue (1998) lists 95 lexical correspondence sets with reflexes in at least three of the four language families, and even more shared by two of the languages. Examples are *ap(p)a 'grandfather', *kað'a 'mountain' and many others.

Uralo-Siberian languages - Sources

• Knut Bergsland (1959) The Eskimo-Uralic hypothesis. Journal de la Societé Finno-Ougrienne, 61, 1-29.
• Michael Fortescue (1998) Language Relations across Bering Strait. ISBN 0-304-70330-3.

See also

• Indo-Uralic languages
• Ural-Altaic languages
• Eurasiatic languages
• Nostratic languages

Categories: Proposed language families | Historical linguistics

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