Re: A dialogue in Old Urianian.

>On 22/02/07, Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...> wrote:
> >
> > Well, Samic belongs to the Uralic group, and historically it's been
> > spoken at least as far south as Gudbandsdalen. I don't think the
> > timing of these migrations or disseminations are so well-established
> > yet. None of them are just one big vawe, there are several.
>
>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.
>(The rest of the Ugric subgroup, which Hungarian belongs to, is on the
>other
>side of the Finnic subgroup, between that and Samoyedic.) 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.
>Jeff
Interesting Uralic / Celtic comparision... yes, there used to be many Uralic
tribes living in central Russia who merged into Slavs around 1000-1500 AD
(the Meryans, the Muromans, and the Chudes are a few names that have been
recorded.) But IIRC the western expansion of the Samis is a recent
phenomenon; they were gradually pushed north from what's present central
Finland by expansion of Fennic tribes during the 1st millenia AD and the 1st
half of the 2nd, altho WP suggest Lapland having been "always" inhabited by
them...
The theories of Germanic having Uralic substratum influence would seem to
suggest there having been Uralic population as far southwest as Denmark in
the past, but they probably weren't Samic - but I don't think that's the
crucial point here, is it?

Oh, and while /B D G/ are pretty fitting for western Uralic, the aspiration
isn't; AIUI no Uralic language has any (post)aspirates whatsoever. It might
be fitting here to postulate some yet older population; and the presence of
another language with voiced spirants there might also explain why Samic is
the only (I think) Uralic branch to preserve PU /D/...

John Vertical

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