Christy DeSmith writes for Phys.org about a new DNA study:
Where did Europe’s distinct Uralic family of languages—which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian—come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought. The analysis, led by a pair of doctoral candidates working with ancient DNA expert David Reich, integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and about 11,000 years of human history. The results, published in the journal Nature, identify the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, spoken today by more than 25 million people.
The study finds the ancestors of present-day Uralic speakers living about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within an area now known as Yakutia. […]
Linguists and archaeologists have been split on the origins of Uralic languages. The mainstream school of thought put their homeland in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, a range running north to south about 860 miles due east of Moscow. A minority view, noting convergences with Turkic and Mongolic languages, theorized a more easterly emergence. “Our paper helps show that the latter scenario is more likely,” said co-lead author Tian Chen (T.C.) Zeng, who earned his Ph.D. this spring from the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. “We can see this genetic pulse coming from the east just as Uralic languages were expanding.”
The discovery was made possible by Kim’s long-term effort to gather ancient DNA data from some of Siberia’s under-sampled regions. As he helped establish, many modern-day Uralic-speaking populations carry the same genetic signature that first appeared, in unmixed form, in the 4,500-year-old samples from Yakutia. People from all other ethnolinguistic groups were found, by and large, to lack this distinct ancestry.
I look forward to the reactions of our resident language-and-DNA mavens. Thanks, Stephen!
During my few months in Finland as a teenager, back in the 1970s, I was told on occasion that the Finns were descendants of the Mongols. This seemed mainly to be folklore, along with a belief that Finnish people had an Asiatic look about them, so I can’t say how this idea came about.
I would imagine that this is traceable to the Ural-Altaic idea, which stubbornly refuses to die outside linguistically-knowledgeable circles. Also, Genghis Khan is cool. If you’re into that kind of thing.
I’ve known Hungarians who were pretty keen on being Mongols. (The truth, of course, is rather that the Mongols are Hungarians. Like so many others …)
A Turk I once co-authored a paper with took it for granted that Turks were related to Hungarians and Finns: accepted wisdom, it seemed, at least among Europhile Turks like him.
Well, of course we’re all Turks.
Which leads me to Goropius, of whom I hadn’t known.
If I beget a daughter, I shall name her Oath-Barrel. She’ll thank me some day.
Ed.: ‘Leibniz coined the French word goropiser, meaning “to come up with absurd etymologies”.’
(Foolish me. Of course Goropius has come up here before.)
Of course, Finns came from the east. But that doesn’t mean Mongols haven’t migrated to Mongolia from Portugal!
I haven’t had time to read anything closely for a while, but surely this is the same paper as Y linked to here a couple of weeks ago, and which we have discussed as a preprint more than once, starting here.
The paper identifies a Transbaikalian genetic component in the Bronze Age Seima-Turbino phenomenon that is also shared between the modern Uralic peoples. That certainly strengthens the hypothesis that Uralic spread through Seima-Turbino. It’s not so clear that the Uralic languages came all the way from Transbaikalia, or if Seima-Turbino took up Uralic from another source somewhere on the way, e.g. in the cradle of Seima-Turbino in or near the Minusinsk Basin.
Rats, I had a vague feeling it had come up here before…
i must remember to use “goropism” in conversation!
(The truth, of course, is rather that the Mongols are Hungarians. Like so many others …)
I had a Hungarian roommate in college, a refugee from the 1956 attempt by the Hungarians to send the Russians packing. He proudly stated that Hungarians were the only people who could
enter a revolving door after you and exit before you. I never understood whatever point he was trying to make. He became a physician and played the fiddle rather well.
No rats at all. It’s good to know that the final version is out and is getting some publicity. And it’s nice with a post that may become a catch-all thread on the prehistory of Uralic (or maybe North Eurasia in general).
We discussed this paper extensively in 2023 when it appeared as a preprint in the Son of Yamnaya thread
and more recently in the Old Bones thread too
https://languagehat.com/more-old-bones/#comment-4657208
I agree with Trond, an Uralic thread – or maybe one without too much focus on IE – sounds like a good idea.
@cuchuflete
1. Hungarians are resourceful
https://sustainocracy.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/prejudices-misconceptions-about-hungary-the-hungarians-by-andras-laszlo.pdf
Right, I didn’t notice in my quick scrolling through that Trond already linked to the two earlier discussions… and I agree that a dedicated thread is a great idea, but I also don’t like the thought that a quality discussion of essentially the same points would be completely left behind
Fortunately, you’ve highlighted the previous resource! Interlinked threads are an ancient tradition at the Hattery.
Yeah. Everything’s connected. The only solution is to make comprehensive links whenever there are parallel discussions. Preferably in both directions too. I usually try, but right now I’m too heatstruck to do anything of substance.
(Norwegian brains aren’t calibrated for sustained temperatures above 30°C!)
Or, to quote James Wood as quoted in this post: “The way Northerners say eee, as an exclamation: ‘Eee, it’s red-hot today!’ (Any temperature over about seventy-two degrees.)”
(72 Fahrenheit being 22.2222 Celsius.)
Yeah, I always blame my grandmother’s Arctic genes for my lack of tolerance of heat even in the 70s F 🙂
My Grandma Tanya used to tease me that I won’t ever become an Arctic explorer becomes my skin was too thin and my veins, too close to the surface, so I will just freeze up there. But, needless to say, my climate problems turned out to be exactly the opposite.
She’s my personal Uralic connection BTW, having been 50% Finnic-like in her DNA makeup (inherited from her mother who came from a fishermen’s clan up North – an ethnically Russian area but genetically completely Uralic)
Ural-Altaic is taken for granted by everyone with that level of education except just about every single specialist in the last hundred years. It was in my school atlas (1993) and everything.
However, as I said in one of the linked threads, Uralic from northeastern Yakutia looks rather Uralo-Siberian.
He proudly stated that Hungarians were the only people who could enter a revolving door after you and exit before you. I never understood whatever point he was trying to make.
A more comprehensible English version of that quip (once quoted by Archie Bunker) is “Hungarians are the only people who can enter a revolving door behind you and come out ahead.”
Dmitry: She’s my personal Uralic connection BTW, having been 50% Finnic-like in her DNA makeup (inherited from her mother who came from a fishermen’s clan up North – an ethnically Russian area but genetically completely Uralic)
See? Right back on topic. I remember seeing an interesting paper on variation in ancestry between neighboring communities on the southern coast of the White Sea. The formation of peoples and populations in the region is fascinating.
The revolving door reminds me of (the Norwegian politician) Einar Førde’s quip about people from Sunnmøre:
Proto-Uralic neighbored Proto-Indo-Iranian. So if you descend from speakers of either, you should be comfortable with temperatures between -50°C (which Samoyedic speakers endure) and +50°C (which Balochi speakers endure).
Whole Moscow is … how did Samatar call it? Delirious, when it is over 30°C for a long enough.
Which is a good thing, I mean, when it is not only you.
And some of my North African friends too, but here I’m less sure about “whole North Africa”.*
* a lady from Jordan says she always feels good during Ramadan fast, and Ramadan was in the summer when she told it. She scares me. It is reassuring when your freinds, even and especially in Africa moan with you rather than telling how they’re looking forward to the even hotter days when thier religious duty will prevent them from drinking water during the day.
Please, from there you need to heat the sauna at least an hour more before anyone wants anything to do with it </obligatory>
(It’s the humidity & also, direct radiative heat, not the bare air temperature.)
True. When I remember the weather in Japan (a couple of weeks 10 years ago) as almost unbearable, it’s not just for the air temperatures around +40°C (and +30°C at night) but the relative humidity of 100% and the sun shining relentlessly from almost right over my head.
A hot sauna is interspersed with – and followed by – cold baths, snow or otherwise.
I don’t have sun in my room, but more than enough humidity and heat:(
(I read in someone’s account of travels in Sahara that you can drink some 8 liters a day, and you don’t feel sweaty: the sweat dries out immediately)
Yay for a sauna and rolling in the snow!
variation in ancestry between neighboring communities on the southern coast of the White Sea. The formation of peoples and populations in the region is fascinating.
And the genetic hints I get from my own DNA really surprise me with a revelation of just how recent must have been the population flows spanning the areas from Finland to Siberia. Was it really a mere two centuries ago???
I don’t know where exactly my great grandmother Pelagea hailed from. The earliest unambiguous family memory links her family to the port of Arkhangelsk but they were supposedly displaced there from the ancestral village after losing fisheries rights to a monastery after the Peasant Reform of 1861, which emancipated the serfs but kept the land and its riches in the landlords’ hands. I used to interpret it as a story of White Sea shores origins (as I remember, my grandma herself told it that way, although she was a master of embellishment in her stories). But the Pomor fishermen of the White Sea weren’t subject to serfdom, and their fisheries didn’t belong to the monastery since Peter I restricted ecclesiastical possessions. So perhaps someplace else in the rural Arkhangel …
One of my best clues to this ancestral line is their mitochondrial DNA which I carry, of course. The haplogroup is H11a1i which, according to calculations based on its diversity, looks not older than 275 years. (That’s a 95% confidence interval boundary so there is a very small chance that it’s somewhat older). But look how wide it has spread geographically! https://www.yfull.com/mtree/H11a1/
Out of a handful of samples with full sequencing data, 3 are actually from Sweden (Norbottens), and several more from Western and occasionally Southern Finland. But most samples with known origins are from Russia. Two belong to Old Order families from Vyatka and Siberia. Until recently, mine was the only one marked with Arkhangelsk; now there is a second one. Did this maternal lineage spread so far, so recently in the aftermath of the violent crackdown on the Old Order Schism in Peter I times 300 years ago???
You mean Norrbotten (North Bothnia)?
Yes, Norrbotten of course. The vast region abutting Finnland.
A recent flow of genes from Russia to Sweden and Finland would be expected. I’m reminded of the relocation of people from Karelia to the remaining Finland during/after WW2, some of whom would eventually emigrate to the U.S. Finnish Karelia would have been receiving immigrants and political and religious refugees from the Russian side for a long time.
There were also people (in different layers of society) moving from Russia to Finland during the grand duchy between 1809 and 1917, and there have always been personal ties between Finland and Sweden, e.g. among the professional classes in the coastal towns and in the rural communities up north.
But more than single people moving, the paper as I remember it was about neighboring districts showing remarkably different ancestries without any apparent correspondence to ethnic groupings. That obviously reflects original settlement but also later processes – political, cultural, and economic.
In the case of your grandmother’s ancestors — ethnically Russian, genetically 100% Uralic, and with inherited rights to rich fishing grounds — we could concoct a story of Novgorod as a Finnic (or Finno-Permic) state as much as a Slavic. Of Novgorod’s northern reaches continuing Karelian* trade routes and trading posts with hardly any Slavic involvement at all. Of Novgorod’s defeat and strengthening of the central government opening for christianization and russification of the richer central settlements. Of incoming settlers being confined to poorer sites between and around the russified Karelians. Of settlers intermarrying with eachother and local Karelians where they belong to the same class. Of unrussified Karelians holding out off the major routes. This would yield an ethnic map where the backwaters are Karelian and the central areas Russian, corresponding to a genetic map where the central areas are on a cline from unamalgamated Russian to russified Karelian.
Or something along those lines. I imagine similar processes in the northern regions of Norway, Sweden, and Finland – with the strength and the direction of change shifting with politics, trade and cultural attraction.
* etc.
people moving
But since we are talking last 2 or 3 centuries and some very rural places with very rare instances of migrations, it totally make sense to try to root the picture in the historic specifics of these specific places – and to keep the generalities of the earlier centuries like the genesis of the Novgorod Republic and the Christianization of Karelia out of the picture.
In my own family obviously, there were many recent migrations obscuring the past, and I couldn’t trace great grandmother Pelageya beyond her 1898 marriage in Yaroslavl, hundreds kilometers to the South of her supposed ancestral lands.
But it turns out in two other families with the same mitochondrial DNA lineage, female ancestors stayed put for literally centuries. The more interesting of the two hailed from the same Arkhangelsk region as Pelageya – and is traceable back all the way until 1727, to the village with a very Finnic name Chukhchenema, later Russified as Chukhcherema (even my rudimentary Finnish instantly recognizes “niemi”, a cape of the land).
Chukhcherema is on Dvina’s right bank at the confluence with Pinega, and across the water from Kholmogory, the original power center of the region before the rise of Arkhangelsk. It housed an ancient Chukhchenema Monastery (later becoming a subsidiary of St. Sergius Trinity) and a country estate of the Bishop of Kholmogory with vast lands belonging to it (Kholmogory also being a transparent Russification of Kalmomäki). The location and its church property holdings totally fit my family narrative, but most importantly, the date of birth of this family’s matriarch (1727) almost certainly implies that she was my own direct ancestor too (remember that the DNA tells us that we are separated by approximately 175 years, but no more than 250 years, from the common ancestor).
The other family with the mtDNA H11a1i has an intriguing history too. Its genealogy is “only” traced to the mid-XIX century, but its earliest known matriarchs lived in an incredibly isolated hamlet, Kezhma on Angara river (flowing from Lake Baikal). Kezhma was settled in the mid-1600s with a handful of peasants recruited in places such as Pinega to grow grain for the Tsar’s Cossacks in Yakutia, but some pioneer families died out and some fled from hardships, making the authorities direct new settlers, until in the second half of the 1700s, with the construction of the overland road much further South, the shallow, treacherous Angara riverway was abandoned, and the Kezhma settlers were also abandoned to their own devices, stuck in isolation. Even the surnames of the villagers didn’t change an iota in the two centuries! So it appears that the mtDNA arrived to Kezhma very early, before the late 1700s, quite likely also from Pinega, and stayed put for many generations.
Kholmogory, the original power center of the region before the rise of Arkhangelsk
I remember visiting Kholmogory on an excursion when I was in Arkhangelsk in 1990. To us students it was advertised mainly as the birthplace of Lomonosov.
Hmm… not only does the “Commented on” function not work, now my comments go into moderation…. what’s going on?
Ok, now everything is working again… @LH: if it’s not too much trouble, can you delete my duplicated comment?
No problem! (We discussed Kholmogory in 2014.)
@Hans, that’s because this is how we Russians know it:-/
Some day Earthlings will be taught that Moscow is where I was born. No mention of its status as a capital of some country or even that it is a large city:(
Drasvigrad!
By the way…Kholmogory?!
“Hillmountains”?
Even ‘hillhills”?
See the earlier post I linked above.
Thanks! Yes, it was your mention of this post that made me think of the meaning.
And it is amazing how ONLY this mention made me notice that the name is totally strange:)
Still haven’t clicked it: first I expected to read there about history rather than etymology, and second IF it is about etymology, it is funnier to think first:)
Good discussion in the 2014 thread. I didn’t realize then, but I know now that even very recently, Kholmogory had the first syllable stressed, as befits a Finnic place-name.
I also didn’t remember that the Sura Heathens, just up the Pinega, were battling Novgorod troops as late as in the 1400s.
Another important tidbit from Janne Saarikivi’s paper is that the original Biarmians must have been Saami-related, and were being replaced by Finnic tribes (the Chud’) not long before the Slavic conquest (which may have been, largely, a migration of already-Slavicized Finnic people)
In my dialect of Russian that’s simply unpronunciable:/
test (posting comments was failing for me)
the original Biarmians must have been Saami-related, and were being replaced by Finnic tribes (the Chud’)
Case in point, this ancestral village Chukhcherema or Chukhchenema, “Wood-grouse river-bank”, but the first part is related to Saami, while the 2nd generic part is Finnic
Однако it sounds like Chukchi!
If chukhche “wood grouse” isn’t onomatopoetic, I don’t know what is.
Fun you should mention wood grouse. At Wednesday I got to see one (a hen) with 8(!) chicks on a small forest road north of Kongsberg. As we came around a bend, they were all about to cross the road. My wife saw her before me, just in time for me to stop the car.* Most of the chicks kept going, but a couple ran off in the other direction, so it took a few minutes before the mother had gathered all of them on the other side.
*I probably wouldn’t have hit them, but would have scared them off and missed the sight.
Wiktionary *čukčē
Yes. I know. I’m exaggerating the point, but I think one should consider onomatopoetry for this bird name.
It’s interesting that Sami and Permic have the same sibillants.
There are also a couple of other Sami words that might be good candidates for the first element.
Trond, no! I can of course pretend (pretend…) I meant something clever, but I only transferred here URL of the page I was reading:) because what if some other readers will want to click it too.
I did, of course think of your idea, but unless Saami forms are fully predictable, the question is whether it sounds so within Saami (to Saami). If it does, then I think it is an onomatopoeia.
To my surprise, I didn’t know most of the etymological confusion described in the section “Etymologies” of WP:Saami.
I didn’t even know about Finn and Kven in Norwegian. (Of course I instinctively read both as same Celtic word:))))
Indeed by now (since 2018) further proposed by Saarikivi that it’s an outright loan into Komi; probably mediated by Finnic, which definitely leaves a couple hundred loanwords into Komi, while loans direct from Sami seem to be not known. (He mentions also a northern Russian dialect term чухарь ~ чукарь that probably also belongs here). Natively we’d expect in Permic instead something like **śuć(-i); or indeed, **suć(-i), since Mordvinic points to unpalatalized *s- and we know *s…ć > *ć…ć is regular in Proto-Samic (cf. e.g. *ćəkćə ‘autumn’, Erzya dial. соксь /sokś/, Hungarian ősz etc.)
The Common Uralic protoform would still come out as *ćukćə ~ ćukəćə by current reconstructions (or maybe *-x- depending on how we want to account for *u not *o in Samic), so no real reason to rule out the onomatopoeia explanation either, it would just seem to be fairly old at that; since I do not think we can stretch the same explanation for the common Mordvinic or Mari forms.
(This note and much more about Finnic-to-Permic loanwords in Saarikivi’s lengthy paper in this edited volume.)
“чухарь” – (I’ll use to Roman transliteration because using diacritics is easier to me there – so čuxar’)
Literary Russian gluxár’ (glux “deaf”) and téterev. And čuxari also means “Veps”.
Remembered how a woman on the internet used a word počuxéni (with the root čux). I don’t remember, was it “scratching [what’s itching]” (почёсывания) or caresses.
Another lady from Moscow informed her that it’s a mistake and the first lady told that in her region they speak like this. What I liked is how the responce of the first lady was very friendly and happy and how she gave no hint on the hypothetical desire to change her usage. Such a contrast with silly internet quarrels….
Chukar is a partridge rather than grouse here in the Western US. Apparently of Sanskrit origin but without a given etymology
Chukar etymology and pronunciation, previously at Language Hat.
Just to have it stated, the Indic partridge name and the North Russian/Sami name for the wood grouse must be accidental homonyms.
@J Pystynen; Thanks!
Do we need to posit deaffricativization and reaffricativization in Sami, or could Sami rather have preserved the ancient state? That would makie deaffricativization in the other branches a shared innovation, but it’s rather trivial in languages that avoid initial clusters. We might perhaps claim that it was allophonic/phonological for a long time before it was lost in most branches.
Can we say anything about the age and the semantic field(s) of the Finnic loans in Komi?
A borrowing chain for the name of the capercaille sounds unlikely on the surface*. It’s rather a word that would be preserved from a local substrate. This might be the case of Sami -> Finnic, but surely not for Finnic > Komi. Was capercaille feathers a luxury item at the time when the Karelians established trading posts around the White Sea? It’s not uncommon that words for traded good float upstream and replace native names for species.
* but ref. capercaille. Though arguably, this reflects bird hunting as a tradable luxury good.
Kusaal proverb of the day:
Kɔdiŋ ye “Nyɔɔri an gɛl.”.
“Partridge says: “Life is an egg,'”
(What this actually means, is “your health is the most important thing.”)
Kɔdiŋ is in fact
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spurred_spurfowl
Apropos archaeolinguistics of Uralic, it’s touched upon by the two chapters of the newly-issued Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language (which also has chapters about many other topics)
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/60672
Chapter 20, by Outi Vesakoski, Elina Salmela, Henny Piezonka, is about Uralic:
This chapter considers the Uralic language family in connection with the genetic and cultural history of Northwest Eurasia. In the north and east, foraging economies have persisted among Uralic-speaking groups into modern times, partly combined with reindeer husbandry. Meanwhile, farming was only gradually introduced into the area from the west and south from the fourth/third millennia BC onwards, likely connected to Indo-European expansions. Today, the Uralic speaker populations and their neighbours form a genetic cline across the North Eurasian taiga and tundra. The time depth of this genetic landscape is unknown, whereas the Uralic language family likely emerged during the last five millennia. The current distribution of Uralic languages in the north is, instead, a consequence of secondary dispersals in the Iron Age and Medieval Era. We review the hypotheses of temporal and structural disintegration of the Uralic family as well as the hypotheses of its homeland and provide independent introductions to the formation of cultural and genetic landscapes of the area contemporaneous to Uralic family emergence and evolution. Our interdisciplinary qualitative inference supports the hypothesis that the family could have spread westwards as lingua franca within the Seima-Turbino Bronze Age network at the turn of third and second millennia BC. We further develop this scenario by identifying a distinct transregional communication space (‘flowerpot complex’) in Southern Siberia and promote the Uralic languages’ origin in the region of the Sayan mountains, wherefrom the languages would have spread west to their secondary and tertiary homelands in Western Siberia and Volga-Kama region.
Chapter 19 by Alexander Lubotsky, Tijmen Pronk is on Indo-European and mentions that “language contact places prehistoric stages of the Indo-Iranian and Tocharian languages in the vicinity of the Uralic languages”
Thanks for that, Dmitry. It looks full of interesting stuff. I note, with familiar frustration, that North America is not represented in the area chapters.
The Oxford book is, alas, entirely behind a paywall for me, but the Uralic chapter is available as a draft in
https://bedlan.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/OHAL_Uralic_Vesakoski-Salmela-Piezonka.pdf
Thanks for that, Dmitry. It looks full of interesting stuff.
Seconded, and let me just say that I love the phrase “flowerpot complex.”
Yeah, I kind of grimaced at first when I read the word “flowerpot”, like what a strange metaphor, but having read the text, I realized that it’s not metaphorical at all, that this is really how this subtype of ceramics looked like… and it’s described as colocalized with the sites with the earliest Seima-Turbino casting molds (not just S-T bronze wares which are spread so much more widely among their presumed buyers).
Another thing which surprised me is the extent of Southern Baltics / Southern Scandinavia penetration of Akozino-Mälar artifacts presumed to be the markers of the early waves of Uralic migrations
Indeed, why would we posit that? Samic having *ć is one the more straightforward arguments for the new *ć not *ś reconstruction, yes.
Any allophonic *ć ~ *ś distribution would probably have been disrupted already in the disintegrating Uralic period though, given the need to have “new” *ć vocabulary arriving from whatever source (but always into just a couple of branches).
Probably yes. They’re generally not even Proto-Komi but just in the western dialects, and have some suggestions of coming from something Karelian or Ludian-adjacent (moreso than Veps-adjacent). Around the turn of the 2nd millennium seems sufficiently old, and would explain why there’s ultimately Slavic loans among them (i.e. contact is broadly younger than Slavic expansion north but older than Slavic expansion east). I’ve not looked over semantic fields in totality but there’s maybe a particularly good number of crafts, tools, agriculture-related things like ‘harrow’, ‘grain’, ‘beer’, ‘mash’, ‘cat’, ‘braid’…
Dmitry: Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language (which also has chapters about many other topics)
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/60672
Chapter 20, by Outi Vesakoski, Elina Salmela, Henny Piezonka, is about Uralic:
Another thanks. I haven’t looked thoroughly at the draft yet, but it seems to owe much to Asko Parpola (2017i), which we have discussed before. He preferred to see Proto-Uralic as an element in Andronovo, but since then archaeo-genetics, especially the 2024 Harvard paper, has made it clear that there was an east to west population stream all the way through Seima-Turbino.
Parpola didn’t think that the current Finnic and Samic branches came to the Baltic with the first wave of Uralic ~1800 BCE. Rather, they spread west on an already Uralic substrate with the wave that brought the Akozina axes. The spread of the axes in southern Sweden is indeed remarkable. There’s also a number of tarand graves and a possible trading station under the hillfort of Darsgärde. I’m probably on record speculating that this Uralic settlement was Proto-Sami and the linguistic ancestor of the southern branches of Sami (a suggestion which Parpola also discusses but eventually turns down because Aikio) or perhaps of the people known in the Sagas as the Finns.
@J Pystynen: Thanks. I was obviously confused about the details of Uralic reconstruction.
Was there also an eastward spread of Karelian/Ludian-speaking groups so that they replaced (or assimilated) Komi speakers on the southern and eastern coasts of the White Sea? There’s a long tradition of explaining ON Bjarm- “(White Sea) Karelian” as a rendering of Perm-, but that would mean that Scandinavians at some point were in contact with people identifying as Permic.
Any evidence for formerly more western distribution of Komi is much more modest, mainly upwards along the Vychegda and Luza (also no evidence I know of Arctic Ocean coastal settlement until the 19th century). The etymology on “Perm” / “Bjarmia” remains unsettled I believe, but I find the Finnic proposal (⁽*⁾perämaa ‘back-country’, easily reconstructible for Proto-Finnic) to at least show easier problems than the Komi one (/parma/ ‘thick conifer woods, wooded hill’, no known etymology; doesn’t even look like a possible cognate, directly at least. (It would look a bit like what we’d expect of a cognate in Mansi borrowed into Komi; *pär ‘back’ + *mëëɣ ‘land’ could give Northern Mansi **par-maa; but no such thing is attested and I don’t think *pär- even gets used in toponyms.))
But there’s no doubt that the southern and eastern coasts of the White Sea were populated before the Karelian expansion. Was there a lost branch of Uralic between Finnic, Samic and Permic? How far southeast can we pull Samic? And where does the pre-Uralic substrate (the mythical Sikhirtya?) take over?
Another thought is that ON bjarm(i) could reflect NSa **bearm(i), which I think would be the regular outcome of PFS *perm(a/ä).
Yes probably, that’s been the usual conclusion from substrate toponym research, and maybe more than one; though these would’ve likely been simply been para-Samic and para-Finnic rather than novel branches entirely. Helimski has – in a 2006 paper that used to be online but which on a quick look no longer seems to be – suggested calling them respectively Lop’ (which is just the Russian rendition of “Lapp”) and Toima, some other people prefer to fold them under established lost-population titles like “Chud” or “Merya”. Sami proper has so much Germanic in it that the protolanguage cannot possibly be placed outside of the Baltic Sea orbit (a few people I’ve even seen insist on western rather than southeastern Finland), but there would’ve probably been a continuum of close relatives stretching eastward before the arrival/evolution of Karelian in ca. the 500s–800s.
The Sikhirtya specifically are remembered only from the coasts of Nenetsia (and perhaps surprizingly recently, I have not long ago learned that reports from Pierre Martin de La Martinière’s 1670s expedition mention reindeer-less hunter-fishers, including also on the thought-usually-unsettled Novaya Zemlya). Any presumable inland Paleoeuropean populations appear to be entirely lost aside from the possibility of working out archeological / paleogenetic traces.
That would certainly explain Bjarmaland.
That -a- would rather be a masculine genitive plural, one of the ancestors of the linking -e-. It’s found in a handful of country names, but I don’t know why it applies in some cases and not others, except that those that have it generally seem to be more distant and mythical.
@J Pystynen; Thanks once again. I know we have discussed the population around the White Sea before, but it’s good to have it repeated, or digested,
On the Sikhirtya, I found this piece of recent archaeological research:
Sidorova et al: First dendro-archaeological evidence of a completely excavated medieval settlement in the extreme north of Western Siberia, Dendrochronologia 44, 2017 (abstract)
From the final draft on Academia:
Trond, J. Pystynen: Perhaps there was/were no identifiable branch(es) of Uralic spoken between Fennic, Saamic and Permic, and instead what was to be found was a dialect continuum of Uralic varieties linking all three branches (well, they are clearly separate branches today, but would not have been back when they part of the continuum), shading into all three, without there having existed anywhere in the area a branch or indeed variety of Uralic sharply distinct from its neighbors.
J. Pystynen: do we have ANY linguistic evidence/data on the Sikhirtya? Because if not it seems premature (to put it mildly) to claim that the Sikhirtya were speakers of (a) pre-Uralic language(s). Being a marginalized/stigmatized group on a given territory does not guarantee that the language of said group was spoken on said territory before the spread of the dominant language(s).
An example of this which I recently gave to a very bright student of mine, and which seems relevant here, involves Romani speakers in Europe, whose social and linguistic marginalization is sadly similar to that of speakers of indigenous languages in North America. This despite the fact that in Europe Romani is the intrusive language and the various, dominant national languages the “indigenous” ones (and even in the Americas the post-Columbian expansion of many indigenous languages outside their original homeland -Cree, Quechua come to mind-makes the issue of linguistic “aboriginality” in many parts of the Americas tricky).
Actually, now that I think about it, the case for the Sikhirtya having been speakers of an…Indo-Iranian language is to my mind about as plausible as the case for their having been speakers of a pre-Uralic one.
Since I introduced “pre-Uralic”, I should say that I didn’t mean to imply anything about linguistic affinity except “arriving before Uralic” (and even that with a question mark, since they could certainly have been converted by an earlier wave of Uralic, though that just moves their pre-uralicity back in time). But “marginalized”.. They may have been marginalized at the time of their disappearance, but there would have been a time when they were specialists in exploitation of Arctic resources for the European market. I think that much is clear from the independent accounts of their material culture. We could speculate that they were cut off the trade routes by the Little Ice Age, or the population shifts in the White Sea, or both.
But whoever they were, they are a missing piece of the puzzle, and I really want to understand it.
Is there any reason to exclude that the Sikhirtya might have been from an earlier wave of Uralic speakers? If the proposition is that Uralic spread on the Seima-Turbino wave of metalworking and trading, the ancestors of the Sikhirtya, whose settlements seem to have featured metalworking sites prominently based on the passage Trond quoted, likely had some direct connection to Uralic, as its customers and students if not actually its speakers, right?
Trond posted while I was writing. I’ll add, is it also possible that these prominently metalworking settlements served the needs of the reindeer herdsmen as well, until trade networks brought cheaper items in from northeastern Europe? That far from being marginalized, they were actually central?
Interesting idea that they were smiths serving a larger population. There certainly could have been specialized smiths while other clans or settlements handled the subsistence and export oriented parts of the economy. Reindeer herding specifically was probably not a big part of it. The economy of scale in reindeer herding (and the resulting migrations into largely unsettled territories) is a recent development driven by the Russian expansion in Siberia and by the Swedish military state in Scandinavia.
I don’t think that an Arctic metalworking people must have learned the skill from their southern neighbours. If we go back to the explosive phase of the Bronze Age, there were copper mines at the Taimyr Peninsula, and metalworking Ymyyakhtakh people from Yakutia spread north and out and soon even reached Northern Scandinavia along the Arctic route. This is seen in archaeology as well as archaeo-genetics. It’s not a far stretch that they were a principal contributor to what would become the Sikhirtya. Or to the pre-Sami substrate in Scandinavia, for that matter.
But I also don’t think they were isolated. Specializing in marginal resources means that you need to trade with somebody else – or at least that there will be huge benefits from it.
Yes, good point — the least impressive hypothesis about the Sikhirtya that I could muster would be that they were a pre-Nenets western spread of the Nganasans, who are also in the Taimyr well known to have remained reindeer hunters and never taken up herding. Recent triangulation of archeology and dialectology has already proposed that the three of Nganasan, Enets and Nenets all arrived independently to the Arctic coast from the south (or didn’t, as in the case of the Neshang / Forest Nenets †), a few centuries apart from each other starting in the late 1st millennium. The one apparently attested word would seem to align with this: de La Martinière reports meeting natives at a place called “Boranday” near the Pechora; a locale somewhat east of the Pechora mouth is today known in Tundra Nenets as Wārəndāyə (Russicized as Варандей), which translates as ‘edgemost’ (though is not the actual western limit of the Nenets, that’s the Kanin peninsula); and it happens (Tundra) Nenets wā- indeed corresponds to Nganasan bo-. I’ve not checked if the superlative morphology continues to work in there too. This would, regardless, make the case somewhat similar to Northern Sami replacing a few groups of Eastern Sami (by native expansion) and Southern Sami (by the Swedish government transferring some groups south) after having found their way into the economically lucrative niche of mass reindeer herding.
† Who do not call themselves ‘Nenets’, making the term somewhat like, say, calling the Frisians “Continental English”. The name “Neshan” or as I’d prefer, “Neshang” (from their actual native name /nʲeɕaŋ/) was proposed in 2016 but hasn’t stuck much yet.
Etienne: a former dialect continuum between Samic and Finnic is very reasonable, but Permic is well apart from these; within the original common Uralic dialect chain it’s separated from these by at least Mordvinic(+Muromian?) and Mari(+Meryan?), for which it seems no one has found particularly northern extensions.
fossils of… Permian age, which is more or less named after Bjarmaland.
>>Is there any reason to exclude that the Sikhirtya might have been from an earlier wave of Uralic speakers?
>Yeah, good point — the least impressive hypothesis about the Sikhirtya that I could muster would be that they were a pre-Nenets western spread of the Nganasans
I hardly know this area at all, so I’m definitely not challenging you, but just trying to understand. I’m not sure how “good point” and “least impressive” work with each other.
I assume this is least impressive because there’s nothing but the relationship between wa- and bo- to support it?
What do you consider hypotheses with better evidence? Are there other ways of considering them Uralic that might be more impressive, but more complex to describe, so you wanted to quickly offer a lightly-evidenced but simple theory? Or is it that they were likely paleo-European? Or Indo-European, perhaps Indo-Iranic as Etienne suggested?
I took it as “least dramatic” – just another Samoyedic language, the opposite end of the scale from “not even Uralic”.
Same here.
Me too. And the toponymic evidence may be scarce, but really suggestive. It would be even stronger in my book if the internal morphology doesn’t work out in Nenets. That way it can’t be an independent coinage but would almost certainly be a semi-nativization from Nganasan – changing the transparent prefix and keeping the impenetrable stem (or vice versa)
But that might mean that there’s an even earlier Sikhirtya, perhaps one that disappeared after the Plague. It’s weird if Nenets folklore treated the Nganasan (who they had known forever and whose language they apparently at least half-understood) as mystical cave-dwellers.
Yes, that sense of “least impressive”, one that involves fewest “newly posited” entities. I might add that we know from toponymy that the Nganasan used to be distributed at least slightly more widely; a clear trace is the Popigay river at the east end of the Taimyr, which appears to be from a pre-Nganasan *po-bigaj ‘tree river’ (before the shift *p > f in all attested sources; I’d assume the name was transmitted into Russian via Evenki; no way to tell if 2nd -p- is dialectal devoicing or assimilation or what). If there are similar toponyms still in use westward, too, would need to be investigated though.
This does not really shake the broadly reasonable inference that there would’ve once been pre-Uralic speakers south of the White, Barents or Kara seas, but would mean no reason to expect there having been late survivals.
A few centuries after the fact, Finnish folklore treats even fellow Finnish Catholic remnants from areas reached late by the Reformation as mythical cave-dwellers (and first time I hear anything about the Nenets “half-understanding” Nganasan, there might be some late areally shared material but overall it’s as opaque as, say, Hindi is to speakers of Persian).
Sorry, it wasn’t clear, but I didn’t mean to suggest more than what follows from the hypothetical toponymic semi-nativization (of my own making). For that to work, there must have been some understanding of the relationship.
Manchu and at least some other Tungusic languages have an aspiration contrast and no voice contrast, so transmission of [b] through Evenki to Russian should result in a Russian /p/.
Ah, least impressive to the public as an astonishing new development. I thought least impressive was describing the impact of the hypothesis on him or another hypothetical educated reviewer. Thanks.
Me: I haven’t looked thoroughly at the draft [of Chapter 20, by Outi Vesakoski, Elina Salmela, Henny Piezonka, is about Uralic] yet, but it seems to owe much to Asko Parpola (2017i), which we have discussed before. He preferred to see Proto-Uralic as an element in Andronovo, but since then archaeo-genetics, especially the 2024 Harvard paper, has made it clear that there was an east to west population stream all the way through Seima-Turbino.
Now I have read it, and my first impression was wrong. It’s a completely independent assessment, though obviously incorporating Parpola’s work among the sources. Their conclusion should be quoted here:
It’s also a counterpoint from the world of merchants and metalworkers to the “conquest/language dispersal” hypothesis.
Bit of a strawman in that I’m pretty sure agriculture has never been reconstructed to Proto-Uralic or been thought to have played a role in its initial geographic expansion.
I read that more as “a reminder that languages can spread by other means than farming”. The strawman is that the farming/language hypothesis has been dominating, which it certainly hasn’t been since … years before the genetic revolution, since before Anthony 2008 maybe.