holman1.txt

Article 37029 of soc.culture.nordic:
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From: holman@katk.helsinki.fi (Eugene Holman)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic
Subject: Re: Is Finnish...
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Date: 25 Sep 1994 18:01:59 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
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In article <kurt.780330538@bavur>, 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
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In article <366gm0$isl@tukki.cc.jyu.fi>, joheko@network.cc.jyu.fi (Jonne
Henrikki Kolima) wrote:

> In article <kurt.780330538@bavur>, Kurt Swanson Esq. <kurt@dna.lth.se> 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:
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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
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In article <holman-260994211310@porsusc-15.pc.helsinki.fi>,
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