Re: A dialogue in Old Urianian.

Jeff Rolin wrote--
>
> A linguistic map of the Uralic speaking areas on Wikipedia seems to
> indicate
> patches of Uralic along the northern and shores of Russia, (and of course
> in
> the Urals), extending into Estonia and Finland with Hungarian as an
> outlier.
> ......This suggests a
> map somewhat like that of the Celtic languages before the Anglo-Saxon
> invasion of Britain, with retreating areas of Celtic in France, Q-Celtic
> in
> Ireland and Western Scotland, and P-Celtic in Wales and (what later
> became)
> England - and we know that the Celts were pushed westward by the Germans
> and
> other groups before being "wiped" out, linguistically, in France by the
> Romans and Britain and Ireland by the Anglo-Normans/English. So it's
> possible the Uralic-speaking areas were much once larger in a time before
> the onslaughts of Germanic and Balto-Slavic peoples.
>
That seems most plausible to me, too. These groups in the far north of their
respective countries show signs of being relict groups, who've retreated or
been pushed into areas that can be considered undesirable of "difficult" in
the face of an invading people who were likely (at least in some sense) more
"advanced". The Basques are probably another example, in Europe. There are
many exs. in Asia/mainland and insular SE Asia.

The alternative, for the Saami, is that they're fairly recent arrivals in an
environment that was relatively empty and to which they were already
adapted; thus they might never have been present in more southerly regions
of Scandinavia. Some Eskimo groups in N.Amer. are an example of this, I'm
told.