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Suomalais-ugrilaisen seuran toimituksia, ISSN 0355-0230 #185
Symposium saeculare Societatis Fenno-Ugricae (Suomalais-ugrilaisen Seuran toimituksia)
Latin, German, English, Hungarian, Estonian, Russian
281 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
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May 15, 2008
In 1983 the Finno-Ugrian Society celebrated its 100th anniversary and released this collection for the occasion. SYMPOSIUM SAECULARE SOCIETATIS FENNO-UGRICAE contains 17 papers all dealing with contacts between the Uralic languages and other language families. If you are interested in this sort of thing, this collection should not be seen as some minor publication, but as a necessary addition to your library.
With so many papers here, I cannot describe them all in this review, but I shall point out my favourites. M. Adamovic's "Das Tschuwashische im Lichte der Substrattheorie" connects Chuvash evolutions to the Uralic languages already present in the Volga-Kama area. Juha Janhunen's "On early Indo-European-Samoyed contacts" looks at several words which may have entered Proto-Samoyed from a Tocharian-type language. Gabor Bereczki's "A torok nylevek hatasa a magyarra" gives the Turkic origins of a number of common Hungarian words.
In terms of linking Hungarian genetically to the Altaic languages, this collection sees a renowned "splitter" face off against an equally renowned "lumper". Nicholas Poppe contribues "The Ural-Altaic affinity", where he puts forth a number of lexical items which are very similar in the Uralic and Alatic languages. Andras Rona-Tas, on the other hand, argues in his paper "De hypotesi Uralo-Altaica" that that of all the words which the late Bjorn Collinder claimed were present in Uralic and Altaic, only a case can only be made for four, and these are probably Wanderwort-type words instead of proof of genetic relationship. Aside from those two papers, Robert Austerlitz blasts the Uralic-Altaic group in his paper "Genetic affiliation among proto-languages" because Altaic itself is so doubtful a grouping.
These are the papers that I was interested in because they touch up my field of specialization. However, there are also some papers contact between Sami and the Nordic languages and Baltic Finnic and German contacts.
With so many papers here, I cannot describe them all in this review, but I shall point out my favourites. M. Adamovic's "Das Tschuwashische im Lichte der Substrattheorie" connects Chuvash evolutions to the Uralic languages already present in the Volga-Kama area. Juha Janhunen's "On early Indo-European-Samoyed contacts" looks at several words which may have entered Proto-Samoyed from a Tocharian-type language. Gabor Bereczki's "A torok nylevek hatasa a magyarra" gives the Turkic origins of a number of common Hungarian words.
In terms of linking Hungarian genetically to the Altaic languages, this collection sees a renowned "splitter" face off against an equally renowned "lumper". Nicholas Poppe contribues "The Ural-Altaic affinity", where he puts forth a number of lexical items which are very similar in the Uralic and Alatic languages. Andras Rona-Tas, on the other hand, argues in his paper "De hypotesi Uralo-Altaica" that that of all the words which the late Bjorn Collinder claimed were present in Uralic and Altaic, only a case can only be made for four, and these are probably Wanderwort-type words instead of proof of genetic relationship. Aside from those two papers, Robert Austerlitz blasts the Uralic-Altaic group in his paper "Genetic affiliation among proto-languages" because Altaic itself is so doubtful a grouping.
These are the papers that I was interested in because they touch up my field of specialization. However, there are also some papers contact between Sami and the Nordic languages and Baltic Finnic and German contacts.
Displaying 1 of 1 review