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Posted on 07/19/2025 9:46:08 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Where did... Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian -- come from? ...
The analysis, led by a pair of recent graduates with oversight from 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 this month 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...
Uralic-speaking cultures vary in how much Yakutia ancestry they carry.
Estonians retain about 2 percent, Finns about 10. At the eastern end of the distribution, the Nganasan people -- clustered at the northernmost tip of Russia -- have close to 100 percent Yakutia ancestry. At the other extreme, modern-day Hungarians have lost nearly all of theirs...
A separate finding concerns another group of Siberian-spawned languages, once widely spoken across the region. The Yeniseian language family may be contracting today, with the last survivor being central Siberia's critically endangered Ket, now spoken by just a handful of the culture's elders. But Yeniseian's influence was long evident to linguists and archaeologists alike...
The study locates the first speakers of the Yeniseian family some 5,400 years ago near the deep waters of Lake Baikal, its southern shores just a few hours by car from the current border with Mongolia.
The genetic findings also provide the first genetic signal -- albeit a tentative one -- for Western Washington University linguist Edward Vajda's Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, which proposed genealogical connections between Yeniseian and the Na-Dene family of North American Indigenous languages.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.harvard.edu ...
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The other GGG topics added since the previous digest ping, alpha:
The weekly digest listing is up top. Thanks for the link, C!
A junior high school joke to be read aloud.
On the way to the rest room you’re Russian.
There, European.
And finally Finnish.
The level of incomprehensibility between Finnish, Estonian, and Magyar is quite interesting, suggesting a divergence dating back probably millennia
Agglutinative languages (Proto-Uralic is believed to have been) tend to wander off like a road in no time, which has led to a lot of reclassications, changing the branches of agglutinative language trees, and the like.
The extinct ancient agglutinative languages (Sumerian, Elamite, Kassite, and probably the Indus Valley/Harappan tongue) appear to be isolates, but as they’re only known from scripts, and their possibly unknown contemporary related tongues were never recorded, they may have managed to survive.
That could happen again, any bidet now.
A gluten native better watch his steppe...
How old is this David Reich anyway?!!
If the Harvard Gazette had decent writers or editors, the phrase would read:
"... with oversight from David Reich, expert in ancient DNA...."
—unless he really is an ancient expert, of course.
Interesting article, though. I am a bit suspicious of the claim that this unites Hungarian with Finnish and Estonian, since modern-day Hungarians apparently have virtually no Yakutia genes (it says that Finns have 10% and Estonians have 2%).
Very interesting since I lived in Budapest twice and learned Hungarian. I’m not surprised that Hungarians carry little trace of the genetic markers the Magyars originally had when they migrated into Central Europe 1100 years ago. There is not only the matter of them settling into an area nestled between much larger Slavic and Germanic populations and all the mixing that would normally occur over more than a thousand years. At least twice, the population of Hungary was severely depleted by wars and diseases and they invited people in to resettle the land. Those people were eventually absorbed into the population so that today while their distinct language has been preserved, they are ethnically not very distinguishable from the surrounding population.
When I first went there I was expecting a lot of brunettes. I was surprised by how many blondes there are in Hungary (and no its not all or even mostly hair dye).
Correct. I speak Magyarul. If I hear Finnish or Estonian in the next room behind a closed door, the sounds do sound like Hungarian.....but if I hear those languages spoken, I don't understand a word of it. Hungarian is so totally different from any of the Indo European languages. It was a real surprise to me when I first went there in the early 90s and could not understand one single word. I was used to going all over Western Europe and understanding a lot of the words even if I didn't speak the language.
I hope next they figure out where Basque comes from.
Yeah, but if you are Hungary, you need some Greece to make Turkey
Probably enjoys bread more than most.
Well, if I found myself in Siberia, I might find Estonia or Hungary far more inviting. Not sure about Finland ... maybe the coast.
Ha.
Together, think of how much we have raised the sophistication level of this forum.
[singing] Suomi, how we love ya, how we love ya, my dear old Suomi...
I strongly believe the Sumerian, Elamite, Harappan languages were interreoand they were related to Dravidian languages. So this Alamo Dravidian language tree spread along the sea shore from south India to Sumeria
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