The development of consonant gradation in Finnic (and why not, also elsewhere in Uralic) is one of those topics that really needs a new monograph-scale treatment one of these days. Not just for the sake of collecting the accumulated knowledge…
I’ve often seen the Finnic languages considered to demonstrate that vowel harmony acts a counterforce to the common tendency for second-syllable (“stem”) vowels to trigger various conditional developments (umlauts) of first-syllable (“root”) vowels. At least within the larger Uralic comparative…
During some casual investigation of Karjalan kielen sanakirja, I appear to have stumbled on something interesting. One of the more distinctive innovations among the Karelian dialects is the reflexation of Proto-Finnic *s. In Northern Karelian, and in the northernmost dialects…
One of the bigger open problems of Finnic historical phonology is the shift *o > õ in Southern Finnic. The non-front non-open illabial vowel õ found across Southern Finnic — the exact realization varies from /ɤ/ to /ɨ/ — most…
It occurred to me that there’s one concept I have never seen anyone else define or use, although I’ve been working with it in my own research for a while now: that of an inheritance phoneme. This is in effect…
I’ve sometimes remarked (but until now, not on this blog) that one interesting difference between Uralic and Indo-European studies is radically different approaches to lexical reconstruction. Uralic studies have for long hung on to the idea of a deeply stratified…
An interesting paper I’ve recently found, by Kirill Reshetnikov from 2011: “Новые этимологии для прибалтийско-финских слов”, Урало-алтайские исследования 2 (5): 109–112. A Russian-only journal is a slightly odd location for publishing research on Finnic etymology, but I suppose technically still…
Here is a somewhat speculative idea that recently occurred to me. I don’t think I will be able to deliberate on all the comparative implications just now, but it wouldn’t surprize me too much if something similar had already been…
Freelance reconstruction 
Errata for the Karelian dialectal atlas
A recent acquisition of mine has been the not long ago released dialectal atlas of Karelian: Диалектологический атлас карельского языка / Karjalan kielen murrekartasto, Helsinki 2007; based on data collected in the 1930s. Covering 209 traits — many of them…
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