Geographical location of the Ural-speaking populations. A variety of Uralic languages and linguistic tree of their relationship. The color on the map corresponds to the color of the language group. [Credit: Kristiina Tambets et al.]
Posted on 10/18/2018 10:45:13 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The Ural family languages are the third after Indo-European and Turkic most common in Northern Eurasia. According to linguists, the Ural family languages were built from a single proto-language 6000-4000 years old, which was divided into two large branches: Finno-Ugric and Samoyed languages. Ural-speaking peoples live on giant territories from Baltics to West Syberia and include Finns and Estonians, Karelians and Hungarians, Mordovian Erzya and Moksha, West Siberian Khanty and Mansi, Nenets and others. Do this different peoples share common roots and biological history? And how did these related languages spread over such a wide territory? This questions are addressed to genetics...
The researchers also applied another standard analysis method for decomposing the genome into components derived from ancestors. It showed that the majority of the Ural-speaking populations except for Hungarians have a small genetic component in common. Scientists associate its origin with Western Siberia. If such fragments are found in people from different populations, they are likely to have a common ancestor, and if two populations have many common fragments, the are relatives. This way it turned out that many Ural-speaking populations are closer to other Ural-speaking populations, even geographically distant, than to their geographical neighbors who speak other languages.
Thus, Mari and Udmurts were closer to the Khanty and Mansi, living on the other side of the Urals, than to the neighboring Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvash. At the same time, Finns and Sámi showed greater commonality with the Volga Mari, Komi and Udmurts, and even with West Siberian Khanty and Mansi, than with geographically close Swedes, Latvians, Lithuanians and northern Russians. However, there are exceptions such as Hungarians and Mordovian peoples.
(Excerpt) Read more at eurekalert.org ...
Geographical location of the Ural-speaking populations. A variety of Uralic languages and linguistic tree of their relationship. The color on the map corresponds to the color of the language group. [Credit: Kristiina Tambets et al.]
Hold on....I see Lizzy Warren’s family tree in there.
What language was spoken 7000 years ago? Back then, did humans speak or did they just grunt? If they spoke, what happened to their language, that is was replaced by the "Ural family of languages?"
What, exactly, is a proto-language?
7000 years ago was the day before yesterday.
Since I lived here n Budapest twice and learned the language, I’m somewhat familiar with this topic. Of the original Magyar tribes which migrated westward and settled on the Hungarian plains in 1100, not that much remains of their genetic stock even though the language and culture survived. They became pretty intermixed with the Slavs and Germans in the area. A couple times the population was devastated by plagues and they invited in Swabians (southwestern Germans) as well as some neighboring Slavic people (Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, etc)to help repopulate.
About the language.....if I hear Finnish in the next room behind a closed door for example so it’s a little muffled,then it does sound like Hungarian a bit. Some of the sounds are similar. I can’t understand a damn word of Finnish though even though the languages are related. Its not like say English/Dutch/German which share many words and many more which are extremely close ifnot exactly the same.
First of all, there are two rather distinctive groups, who make up the territory of Hungary and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire; one group is blonde and the other has dark hair; for starters.
Unlike Finland, or other groupings that they talked about, Hungary was invaded by many others, starting off with the Ancient Romans. Then the Huns, etc.; however, they managed to still all speak Hungarian and ore or less share the same culture!
At one time, parts of Poland, what is now Romania, the Czech Republic,Wallachia, etc. ( damned French & Brits that broke apart one nation, in 1919, in Paris! ) were HUNGARIAN! So now testing modern day Hungarians ( I'd really like to know how big or small their testing group was ! ), forgetting all about all of those Hungarian descendants now living in other places, such as the USA, squashes the genetic pool.
For some Hungarians/descendants of Hungarians, the whole Siberian origin actually does make a lot of sense!
I've never heard anyone speak Finnish, which is why I'm asking you, since you have heard it spoken.
A hypothetucal language ancestral to others.
E.G. proto-Germanic gave rise to German, Old Norse, Gothic. Frisian, etc
Proto-Indo-European gave rise to Proto-Germanic, etc.
You are right, and here is more info “The relationship between the Finnish and the Hungarian languages” https://histdoc.net/sounds/hungary.html
Fascinating! Great post!
Me Tarzan
About Finnish.....it has a similar tone. The stresses on the vowels and certain syllables sounds similar - not that I can understand a word of it.
As BenLurkin and ZULU said, proto-languages are figured out from existing languages which have common roots, as the Indo-European languages do. They either went unrecorded, thus were prehistoric, or, possibly, they did have existence in written form, but whatever was used to write on has disappeared. Various writing systems that existed as late as the Middle Ages use an overlapping symbol set and can be found among the cave paintings, but obviously there's very little likelihood something as old and rare as that will ever be figured out.
Old English sounds like modern spoken German to our ears, but isn't modern spoken German -- English and German have a fairly recent (<2000 year old) common root, yet that common root is no longer spoken.
Thanks!
As I said, having never heard Finnish spoken, I was curious about how it sounded re tonally.
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![Geographical location of the Ural-speaking populations. A variety of Uralic languages and linguistic tree of their relationship. The color on the map corresponds to the color of the language group. [Credit: Kristiina Tambets et al.]](https://media.eurekalert.org/multimedia_prod/pub/web/183152_web.jpg)
