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The present paper examines the distribution of referentially independent genitive and unmarked subjects and subject-oriented person-number inflections in non-finite clauses in Meadow Mari (Uralic), focusing on participles, event nominals, and temporal gerunds. Empirically, the study addresses existing gaps in the description of these phenomena, uncovering more general patterns as well as several microparameters. It also reveals a striking similarity between event nominals and temporal gerunds. Theoretically, the paper contributes to a better understanding of these constructions in the following ways. First, it proposes an analysis of temporal gerunds as event nominals embedded in postpositional phrases. Second, it outlines an approach to licensing overt subjects and inflections in participial clauses and event nominals. Third, building upon Dékány & Georgieva's (2020) work on Udmurt, it explores ways to unify the treatment of event nominals and participial modifiers in Mari, which share morphology; a covert N account is shown to be the most promising one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four types of archaeogenetic data mining are used to investigate the origin of the Minoans and the Uralic peoples: (1) six SNP mutations related to eye, hair, and skin phenotypes; (2) whole-genome admixture analysis using the G25 system; (3) an analysis of the history of the U5 mitochondrial DNA haplogroup; and (4) an analysis of the origin of each currently known Minoan mitochondrial and y-DNA haplotypes. The uniform result of these analyses is that the Minoans and the Uralic peoples had a common homeland in the lower and middle Danube Basin, as well as the Black Sea coastal regions. This new result helps to reconcile archaeogenetics with linguistics, which have shown that the Minoan language belongs to the Uralic language family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the prosodic realization of stress and focus in Udmurt (Uralic, Permic). According to the literature, Udmurt has fixed final stress, but also has several sets of morphosyntactic exceptions with initial stress. We report the results of two production studies. The first one targets nominals with final stress, and the second one investigates the stress properties of minimal pairs consisting of (i) indicative verbs (prs.3sg; final stress) and (ii) imperative verbs (imp.2sg/pl; initial stress). To control for the information-structural contexts, the test words are studied in contexts that elicit narrow focus either on the test word ('F' condition) or on another constituent ('non-F' condition). The results show that all four acoustic parameters surveyed in the paper – duration, intensity, fundamental frequency (f0), and first formant (F1) values – participate in stress marking in Udmurt. The results for focus marking vary by study and demonstrate that all cues except for intensity may be involved in focus marking. At the same time, we find wide interspeaker variation with respect to the acoustic cues marking stress and/or focus. Finally, we outline a preliminary Autosegmental-Metrical interpretation of our f0 results; a full account of Udmurt intonation awaits further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Old Permic, also known as Old Komi, is an extinct variety of Komi that was spoken in the late Middle Ages in the lower Vychegda river basin in Northeastern European Russia, in an area that currently is not Komi-speaking. This language variety is attested in fragmentary records from the 14th to 17th century written both in the Old Permic alphabet and in Cyrillic. These records are of significant importance for research on the history of the Komi language. Here we introduce our attempt towards a new Universal Dependencies treebank that will eventually contain the existing corpus of Old Permic in a structured and CoNLL-U annotated format. This will be the first time this material is being made openly available in digital format, and our contribution describes the current state of the art and remaining challenges.

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Customarily, studies of Early Modern Russia stress agency emanating from below or from policy-makers at the top. This investigation chooses a middle path by examining the contributions of low-ranking administrative workers to homogenizing records-keeping through the creation of surnames. This was no easy task as these government personnel, with or without central direction, had to contrive criteria to formulate surname-creation. Surnames derived from occupations, physical characteristics, and perceived personality traits were one solution but so was topography and ethnicity. This study, using anthroponymy (the study of names) and hydronymy (the study of naming bodies of water) will portray how government workers in the field were able to organize local populations for the fisc through formulating surnames. This inquiry selects the Uralic-speaking populations of Northern Russia and Northwestern Siberia as its focus. The activities described unveil how local officials, whose identities remain unknown in larger thematic and national studies, were significant contributors to realm- and state-building through their unobtrusive policy-making via surname creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last year two publications shed new light on the linguistic and genomic history of ancient Uralic speakers. Here I show that these novel genetic and linguistic data are compatible with each-other and with the archaeological inferences, allowing us to formulate a very plausible hypothesis about the prehistory of Ugric speakers. Both genetic and archaeological data indicate the admixture of the Mezhovskaya population with northern forest hunters in the late Bronze Age, which gave rise to a "proto-Ugric" community. This finding is consistent with the linguistic reconstruction of the proto-Ugric language. Genetic data indicate an admixture of proto-Hungarians with early Sarmatians and early Huns, and I show that the first admixture can be reconciled with the formation of the Gorokhovo culture and its integration into the early Sarmatian Prokhorovka culture, while the second admixture corresponds to the transformation of the Sargat and Sarmatian cultures due to Xiongnu invasions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to answer why the Uralic languages use, or used until intensive contacts with Indo-European languages, only non-finite subordination. It argues against regarding the evolution of finite subordination language development, showing that languages with non-finite subordination and parataxis have the same expressive power as languages with finite subordination. It claims that non-finite subordination is a concomitant of SOV word order, and the growing proportion of finite subordination in the Uralic languages from east to west, and in the history of Hungarian is a consequence of the loosening of the SOV order and the emergence of SVO. The paper examines two hypotheses about the correlations between SOV and non-finite subordination, and SVO and finite subordination, the Final-Over-Final Condition of Biberauer, Holmberg & Roberts (2014, etc.), a formal principle constraining clausal architecture, and the Minimize Domains Principle of Hawkins (2004, etc.), a functional principle of processing efficiency. The two theories make largely overlapping correct predictions for the Uralic languages, which suggests that the Final-Over-Final Condition may be the syntacticization of the condition that ensures processing efficiency in SOV and SVO languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to widespread contact with Russian, Khanty (Uralic; Finno-Ugric) did not have overt conjunctions or phrasal coordination. Instead, Khanty texts from the late 19th–early 20th centuries only include examples of conjunction-less clausal juxtaposition, which was used for both clausal and phrasal coordination. By comparing Khanty texts over the 20th century, we trace the emergence of overt conjunctions and coordination of phrasal constituents. We show that overt conjunctions first appeared in the context of clausal coordination, followed by coordination of smaller phrases. Based on novel elicitation data, we demonstrate that, in contemporary Khanty, (i) overt conjunctions are commonplace, (ii) coordinated clausal constituents may be derived via phrasal coordination or clausal coordination with conjunction reduction/ellipsis, but (iii) ellipsis of syntactic heads is banned (nouns & postpositions) or dispreferred (verbs). Based on this diachronic picture, we conclude that the coordination of phrasal constituents only emerged in Khanty once overt conjunctions became available. We derive this correlation from the Maximize On-line Processing principle (Hawkins 2004), and show that this maxim, usually invoked in the context of speech planning and production, can be successfully applied to modelling language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on clitics usually distinguishes between syntactic and phonological clitics (e.g. Embick & Noyer 2001; Anderson 2005). The latter ones are treated as highly locally restricted (Embick & Noyer 2001): they can be dislocated to the nearest possible host, i.e. attach to a nearest overtly realized head in the clausal spine or flip order with the nearest full word, irrespective of its category. Such analyses makes a prediction that phonological clitics cannot skip full words or overtly realized heads, when they are seeking for a host. In more recent research some counterarguments to this prediction have been introduced, e.g. Irish pronominal clitics (Bennett et al. 2016) and Tiwa focus clitic (Dawson 2017), which are displaced in the prosodic structure and are sensitive to bigger constituents, i.e. phonological phrases. A goal of this paper is to provide one further counterexample to this generalization and to argue that not only phonological phrases, but also prosodic prominence can play a role in clitic displacement. Namely, I describe the behavior of the conditional clitic in Kazym Khanty (Ob-Ugric, Uralic) and argue that its placement can be only analyzed as a prominence-sensitive displacement in the hierarchically organized prosodic structure. I argue that the conditional clitic in Kazym Khanty attaches to the most prosodically prominent prosodic phrase, which is defined independently. The distribution of Kazym Khanty ki ‘if’ also allows to falsify a descriptive generalization that all C-clitics stay close to the edges of a clause. This is indeed not the case with ki, since the correct analysis of the data must allow it to leave its base-position and occur clause- and phrase-internally (contra Embick & Noyer 1999). The study is based on my own fieldwork with native speakers of Kazym dialect of Nothern Khanty language (Ob-Ugric, Uralic).

Volgo-Kama Neolithic resulted from an expansion of the Elshan culture to Lower Kama c. 5700 BCE. Corresponding “Indo-Uralic” linguistic parallels attest to an expansion of pre-Proto-Indo-European speakers to the area of pre-Proto-Uralic speakers. This supports the evidence of linguistic palaeontology (Proto-Uralic words for ‘cembra pine’ and for ‘bee’ and ‘honey’) for the Kama River Valley as the Uralic homeland. Proto-Uralic had loanwords from pre-Proto-Indo-Iranian, whose speakers can now be traced to the Abashevo culture of 2200–2000 BCE: the Abashevo expansion from Lower Kama to the Ural-Tobol interfluve created the Sintashta culture (2000–1900 BCE), which has the earliest archaeological evidence for horse-drawn chariots, matching Proto-Indo-Iranian chariot vocabulary. Between 2200 and 1900 BCE, the Sejma-Turbino network (ST) of warrior-smith-traders distributed high-quality weapons along the border of taiga and steppe between the Upper Ob and Finland. This long but narrow corridor matches the distribution of the intermediate proto-languages of the Uralic family. It is argued that the ST came into being when Abashevo smiths moved from Balanbash on Lower Kama to Turbino on Mid-Kama and there created the ST metal axe-celt to replace the local stone-celt. The metal axe and Abashevo-like lance-heads and other weapons were then traded west and east, to hunter-fisher-cultures of Europe and Siberia (where weapons of tin-bronze were produced), establishing Proto-Uralic as the language of the areas of ST rule.

Introduction. This article is an attempt to extract information about the interactions of dialects of the Indo-European dialect continuum with each other using a comparative analysis of the basic vocabularies of some Indo-European (IE) descendant languages.The search for external borrowings and influence of a common substrate would help to clarify the ethno-linguistic surrounding of the area where the IE proto-dialects developed.In turn, these data are actual being pro and contra arguments of the well-known hypotheses about the IE ancestral home.Methodology and sources. The number of mutually understandable basic lexemes taken in relation to the number of lexemes in the compared lists was chosen as a measure of the interaction of IE dialects, indicators of their commonality.207-word Swadesh lists of 12 languages in their possibly more ancient states were analysed.For geographical binding of the IE language areal we have selected cross-borrowings from/to neighboring / substrate non-IE languages, the ancient settlement areas of native speakers of which are considered well-known.Results and discussion. The results of the comparison of the basic vocabularies of 12 IE languages have been interpreted in the form of a graph demonstrating the relative location of areas of the corresponding IE dialects. Lexemes meaning 'predator (bear, lion, etc.)', 'cattle (bull, ox)' determined the ethno-linguistic surrounding of the IE areal.Conclusion. The relevant linguistic data permitted to identify in the IE dialect continuum the core of proto-dialects: Baltic, Slavic, Aryan and Italic – and partially superimposed dialect subcontinua:– Balto-Greco-Aryo-Tocharo-Anatolian subcontinuum in the northern part of the IE areal;– Tocharo-Celto-Germanic subcontinuum in the eastern part;– Germano-Celto-Italo-Greco-Armeno-Baltic subcontinuum in the southern part;– Balto-Slavo-Italo-Aryan subcontinuum in the western part.The representation of the Proto-IE areal as a dialect continuum solves a number of difficulties inherent in the most common model of a single IE proto-language.

This article discusses the emergence of the partitive case in the three western-most branches of the Uralic language family, which are Saamic and Finnic in North Europe, and Mordvinic in Central Russia. The Finnic languages represent the outer edge of development in the partitive from an earlier ablative case, which used to manifest 'source', a specific property of spatial relations. In Finnic the partitive case is a multifunctional and conceptually distinct case, an inflectional category which has developed highly specific functions in object marking, negative phrase and as a case of non-canonical subject. Traces of this development are found in Saamic and Mordvinic as well, whereas other Uralic languages don't share this kind of secondary development and functional extension. The development of this particular affix consists of several stages, special bottlenecks, enhancing functional properties and triggering the reanalysis of an inherited affix *-ta/-tä. This article focuses on the diachrony of this particular affix with special emphasis on western Uralic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates non-finite forms in Kazym Khanty (Ob-Ugric, Uralic). In Khanty, almost all subordination makes use of one of the two non-finite forms: -ti (nfin.npst) or -əm (nfin.pst). We propose that their uses are best treated under the headings 'bare non-finites, 'head-agreement non-finites', and 'verb-agreement non-finites'. The three classes are defined based on the subject agreement pattern used in non-finite constructions. Different syntactic tests, such as interaction with argument alternations, island effects, and adverbial modification, are used to show the morphosyntactic nature of the classification. The three classes differ in the amount of functional structure they involve: bare non-finites can vary from vP to TP, head-agreement non-finites are of AspP–TP size, and verb-agreement non-finites are CPs dominated by a nominal shell. The findings support both Givón's Binding Hierarchy and the Implicational Complementation Hierarchy proposed by Wurmbrand and Lohninger, showing that both are also true for languages where all the subordination is done by means of a single form. We also discuss the Khanty data in light of Cristofaro's Subordination Deranking Hierarchy and argue that the amount of functional structure does not correlate with the degree of deranking/balancing of the embedded clause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using etymological methods, the present study has identified two Sinitic and Germanic shared (Sino-Germanic) etymologies (etyma):【南, 陰】. These two etyma form a rhyme correspondence. This regular sound change validates the etymological connection in question. The etymon 【南】 for 'southern sky' has been identified in Sinitic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Celtic, Albanian, Hellenic, Anatolian, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, some Tibeto-Burman, some Uralic and Hungarian. The etymon 【陰】 for 'dark' has been identified in Sinitic, Germanic and Gyalrong. In words of Western linguistics, the Proto-Indo-European root *nebh- 'moist, water from it damp, mist, fog, cloud' is newly identified in Sinitic, some Tibeto-Burman, some Uralic and Hungarian; the Proto-Germanic root *ēbanþ-/ēbunþ- 'evening' is identified in Sinitic and Gyalrong.

Using etymological methods, the present study has researched four Sinitic and Germanic shared (Sino-Germanic) etymologies (etyma) and two Sinitic and Uralic shared (Sino-Uralic) etyma. Two of the Sino-Germanic etyma form a rhyme correspondence. Three of the Sino-Germanic etyma form an onset correspondence. Two of the Sino-Uralic etyma form another rhyme correspondence. These regular sound changes validate the etymological connections in question. The Sino-Germanic term for 'star' and Sino-Uralic term for 'star' are supported.

Using etymological methods, the present study has identified seven Sinitic and Uralic shared etymologies (etyma). Three of them form a rhyme correspondence. Two of them form an onset correspondence. Four of them form another rhyme correspondence. These regular sound changes validate the genetic connection between Sinitic and Uralic. The Sino-Uralic etymology (etymon) for 'Jupiter, year' is among these etyma. It is demonstrated that this term should be aboriginal in Sino-Uralic languages.

Using etymological methods, the present study has researched four Sinitic and Uralic shared etymologies (etyma). Two of them form a rhyme correspondence. Three of them form an onset correspondence. These regular sound changes validate the genetic connection between Sinitic and Uralic. The Sino-Finnic term for 'moon, month' is among these four etyma. It is demonstrated that this term should be aboriginal in Sino-Uralic languages.

Loanword analysis is a unique contribution of historical linguistics to our understanding of prehistoric cultural interfaces. As language reflects the lives of its speakers, the substantiation of loanwords draws on the composite evidence from linguistic as well as auxiliary data from archaeology and genetics through triangulation. The Bronze Age of Central Asia is in principle linguistically mute, but a host of recent independent observations that tie languages, cultures and genetics together in various ways invites a comprehensive reassessment of six highly diagnostic loanwords (‘seven’, ‘name/fame’, ‘sister-in-law’, ‘honey’, ‘metal’ and ‘horse’) that are associated with the Bronze Age. Moreover, they are shared between Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic and sometimes Old Chinese. The successful identification of the interfaces for these loanwords can help settle longstanding debates on languages, migrations and the items themselves. Each item is analysed using the comparative method with reference to the archaeological record to assess the plausibility of a transfer. I argue that the six items can be dated to have entered Central and East Asian languages from immigrant Indo-European languages spoken in the Afanasievo and Andronovo cultures, including a novel source for the ‘horse’ in Old Chinese.

The Amele language of Papua New Guinea is one of many Trans-New Guinea languages spoken in Papua New Guinea. Amele has a negator 'qee' ('q' represents a voiced dorso-labiovelar plosive), which follows the element negated. Yet, while having verb conjugations for persons and numbers, Amele has no negative conjugation in the present tense. Typologically, some other languages, for example, Finnish, also exhibit negative conjugations of verbs, but these behaviors of the negations differ in interesting ways. This contrastive study investigates the negation of grammars in Amele (Papua New Guinea) and Finnish (Finland, Uralic), by comparing negative particles and negative verb conjugations in both of these languages, while clarifying their morphological behaviors. As such, the study describes Amele's and Finnish's positive-negative and present/past distinctions through their verbal morphologies and through their functional markedness in past tenses, ultimately observing these functional points in the languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During their migration from the Eastern European steppes to the Tarim Basin, the ancestors of the Tocharians must have come into contact with speakers of different languages, which may have influenced the early Tocharian language. Early Uralic has been identified as possibly having been the source of such influence, especially in the domain of phonology and nominal morphology. In a 2019 article, Michaël Peyrot focused specifically on pre-Proto-Samoyed influence on Tocharian, proposing among other things a comparison of the vowel systems. I will discuss this comparison and give an alternative interpretation. Three difficulties remained with Peyrot's comparison regarding details of 1) the relative chronology of Tocharian sound changes, 2) the mechanism of change, and 3) the relative chronology of sound changes in Samoyed. After addressing these problems in more detail, I conclude that a different vowel comparison is possible, so that the hypothesis that pre-Proto-Tocharians were in contact with pre-Proto-Samoyed substrate is still plausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using etymological methods, the present study has identified five Sinitic and Uralic shared etymologies. These five etymologies form a rhyme correspondence. This regular sound change validates the etymological connection between Sinitic and Uralic. The Finnic term for 'sky' is among these five etymologies. It is demonstrated that this word root should be aboriginal in Sino-Uralic languages.

The traditional hypothesis of a typological cycle from agglutination via fusion to isolation and back to agglutination, still invoked by many linguists (albeit with caveats and limitations), would imply a natural drift behind typological changes. Accordingly, such typological changes would typically result from internal developments (such as reductive sound changes), while etymological counter-currents (such as segmentable suffixes replacing earlier stem alternations) could rather be due to language contact. On the other hand, the agglutinative type seems to be stable and resistant to typological change especially in Northern Eurasia, and for the change towards a more fusional type, characteristic of some Finnic and Saami languages in the northwestern periphery of Uralic, a contact explanation might seem plausible. However, a closer scrutiny of Estonian, often mentioned as an example of typological change and characteristically impacted by Germanic, shows that in typological change, internal and external motivations intertwine and interact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides a detailed examination of reflexive strategies in the Kuznetsovo dialect of Hill Mari (Mari, Uralic) filling in an existing gap in the description of anaphoric elements in Uralic languages. Firstly, I focus on simple lexical reflexives derived from the stem (ə̈)škə̈-. Having examined their morphosyntactic and binding properties, I adopt several typological classifications and approach the Hill Mari data from a cross-linguistic perspective comparing them to anaphors in other Uralic languages. Secondly, I consider other reflexive strategies employed in Uralic languages, such as complex (reduplicative) reflexive pronouns and reflexive detransitivization of a predicate, and I demonstrate that these scenarios are unavailable in the variety of Hill Mari under discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a detailed etymological analysis of words for 'fox' in Indo-European (IE) languages. We argue that most IE 'fox'-words go back to two distinct PIE stems: * h₂lō̆p-eḱ - 'fox' and * ulp-i - 'wildcat, fox'. We provide a revised analysis of the etymology and relationship among the various Indo-Iranian 'fox'-words, and we argue that Baltic preserves remnants of the ḱ -suffix found in Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian. Additionally, we describe how * h₂lō̆p-eḱ - was borrowed from Indo-Iranian into Uralic and we outline the relationship among the reflexes of this word in various Uralic languages. Finally, we reconstruct the paradigm of * h₂lō̆p-eḱ - as a unique type of hysterodynamic stem, which nonetheless has close parallels in PIE. We observe that a similar ḱ -suffix is found in PIE adjectives and animal names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is an in-depth review of Petar Kehayov's monograph The Fate of Mood and Modality in Language Death: Evidence from Minor Finnic (De Gruyter Mouton, 2017). The book investigates the development of mood and modality in four moribund Finnic languages spoken in the Russian Federation: Votic, Ingrian, Central Lude, and Eastern Seto. After a detailed summary of the book, I discuss a number of issues relating to (a) the semantic map used to analyze the modal meanings; (b) the difference between language death-related changes and "regular" language change; and (c) the explanation of the observed patterns in terms of conceptual complexity. On the last point, I suggest that usage frequency may provide a better explanation for some of the observed changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study inspects Karl August Hermann's article published in 1895, in which he compared Mandarin Chinese to Uralic languages, especially to Finnish and Estonian, and concluded that these languages are related. His proofs of phonology, morphology, and syntax domains are various. His findings of conception similarities are original. The present author estimates that of Hermann's eight etymological comparisons, five are valid, one is doubtful, two are invalid. The author has amended the valid comparisons and corrected invalid comparisons. In order to verify these comparisons, further 12 etymological comparisons are given, which form onset or rhyme correspondences. As a result, a total of 19 Sino-Uralic etymologies are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The morphological expression of non-verbal predication is a geographically widespread, although not very frequent, typological feature. This paper highlights the existence of two radically contrasting types of non-verbal predicative inflection. Construction A has already been described in the literature. It consists of attaching person-sensitive inflection markers to non-verbal predicates, possibly extending this treatment to adverbs and adverbial phrases (locational and temporal), pronouns and quantifiers. This type is well attested in Uralic, Turkic, and Paleosiberian, as well as in some Amazonian language families (most notably Chicham), but it has also been pointed out for some sparse languages of Oceania and Africa. Such non-verbal person inflections diachronically stem from incorporation of conjugated copula elements. Construction B, by contrast, is much rarer and is described here for the first time. It also consists of a dedicated morphological form of the non-verbal predicate (limited, however, to nouns and adjectives), but such form stands out as morphologically lighter than any other form to be found in nouns or adjectives in argument or attribute position. While the latter forms carry some kind of case marker, the noun/adjective predicate merely consists (or historically did) of the word's root. This type of construction can be found in the small Zamucoan family and still survives in some Tupí-Guaraní languages. Diachronic inspection of Semitic indicates, however, that this predicative strategy was possibly adopted in some ancient varieties, although at later stages it intertwined with the expression of referential specificity. The paper compares the two construction types, highlighting similarities and differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tocharian agglutinative case inflexion as well as its single series of voiceless stops, the two most striking typological deviations from Proto-Indo-European, can be explained through influence from Uralic. A number of other typological features of Tocharian may likewise be interpreted as due to contact with a Uralic language. The supposed contacts are likely to be associated with the Afanas'evo Culture of South Siberia. This Indo-European culture probably represents an intermediate phase in the movement of speakers of early Tocharian from the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Eastern European steppe to the Tarim Basin in Northwest China. At the same time, the Proto-Samoyedic homeland must have been in or close to the Afanas'evo area. A close match between the Pre-Proto-Tocharian and Pre-Proto-Samoyedic vowel systems is a strong indication that the Uralic contact language was an early form of Samoyedic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The non-possessive uses of possessive morphology in Uralic languages have been a topic of intense debate (Fraurud 2001; Nikolaeva 2003; Gerland 2014; Janda 2015; É. Kiss and Tánczos to appear). In this paper, I focus on a special use of the POSS.3SG suffix in Hungarian constructions such as a hülyéje (the stupid-POSS.3SG): lit. ‘its stupid’, meaning ‘that total idiot’. My main claim is that this suffix is an affective demonstrative suffix (Lakoff 1974; Liberman 2008; Potts and Schwarz 2010), and that it has developed as a result of grammaticalization from a full-fledged possessive construction of the form a világ hülyéje (the world stupid-POSS.3SG): lit. ‘the world’s stupid’, meaning: ‘the biggest idiot in the world’. I will show that this gradual process can be reconstructed fairly accurately using historical and contemporary corpora. I also claim that this grammaticalization pathway is very natural as it is based on a set-element relationship which is often expressed by possessive constructions cross-linguistically. I also identify two parameters which facilitate this grammaticalization process: the availability of (silent) pro possessors and the lack of gender agreement on the possessive suffix. Since Uralic languages in general have these parameters, I will argue that this grammaticalization pathway should at least be considered as one of the possible sources of the demonstrative (and definiteness marking) uses of POSS.3SG suffixes in Uralic languages. Finally, my results are also an important contribution to the debate on whether demonstratives can be derived from other functional elements through grammaticalization (Plank 1979; Traugott 1982; Himmelmann 1997). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical datasets used for computational phylogenetic inference suffer a unique type of data error. Some words actually present in a language may be absent from the dataset at no fault of its curators: especially for lesser-studied languages, a word may be missing from all available sources such as dictionaries. It is thus important to be able to (i) check how robust one's inferences are to dictionary omission errors, and (ii) incorporate the knowledge that such errors may be present into one's inference. I introduce two simple techniques that work towards those goals, and study the possible effects of dictionary omission errors in two real-life case studies on the Lezgian and Uralic datasets from Kassian (2015) and Syrjänen et al. (2013), respectively. The effects of dictionary omission turn out to be moderate (Lezgian) to negligible (Uralic), and certainly far less significant than the possible effects of modeling choices, including priors, on the inferred phylogeny, as demonstrated in the Uralic case study. Assessing the possible effects of dictionary omissions is advisable, but severe problems are unlikely. Collecting significantly larger lexical datasets, in order to overcome sensitivity to priors, is likely more important than expending resources on verifying data against dictionary omissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes digital resources available for Enets, an endangered Northern Samoyedic language: a multimedia dictionary and a digital corpus, both created by the author with her collaborators. Possible uses of these resources for linguistic research are discussed with the help of several examples. The dictionary is shown to seize limits of phonetic variation involving a mixture of two vowel phonemes, and the corpus is shown to provide a better description to grammatical structures involving ditransitive semantics. All examples illustrate the added value of the digital resources’ use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the digital vitality of Uralic languages and dialects, and discuss how existing approaches to language revitalization relate to this model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transitivizing/detransitivizing typology of Nichols et al. 2004 also proves useful to historical linguistics. We focus on language families of northern Eurasia, chiefly the three oldest families (Indo-European, Uralic, Nakh-Daghestanian), some of their daughter branches aged about 2000-3000 years, and one younger family for which we have data on enough daughters to support a family phylogeny (Tungusic). We use the 18-pair wordlist of Nichols et al. 2004, which typologizes each pair of verbs depending on which of the two is derived. We make some improvements in the coding of grammatical properties and the typologization of pairs. NeighborNet trees based on this information reveal family-wide linguistic geography and areal trends. Adding minimal information about the cognacy or non-cognacy of the roots of the wordlist items produces Neighbor- Net trees which approximate well the known phylogeny of the family. Thus very small closed data sets, collected originally for typology, yield rich information about language family history - strikingly, a mere 18 verbs (9 pairs), coded for morphological type and cognacy, yield a very good genealogical tree - while historical methods have also improved the typology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows that Yukaghir underwent a regular sound change whereby all word-internal and word-final w phonemes became j, probably in Early Proto-Yukaghir. After degemination had occurred, possibly in Middle Proto-Yukaghir, any j in an intervocalic position of disyllabic roots was followed by an epenthetic l, as it still is in the modern Yukaghir languages. Palatalization, labialization, uvularization, and assimilative effects finally formed the Late Proto-Yukaghir forms from which the modern languages have arisen. Word-class prosody controls epenthesis, vowel lengthening, and any further word-final vowel changes. Identifying these historical processes also strengthens the evidence that Yukaghir is genealogically related to Uralic. The Uralic and Yukaghiric correspondences are carefully analyzed as to phonology and semantics, resulting in over fifty new or revised cognate suggestions. Further, Yukaghiric shows a trend towards a reduction of the number of root syllables in the comparison. The semi-vowel w remained unchanged word-initially in Tundra Yukaghir and has thus been a continuous part of the Yukaghir phonemic register. Lexemes containing the semi-vowel w found in modern Yukaghir in word-internal and final positions arose from other sources only after the semi-vowel alternation sound change rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]