In a footnote to my previous post I passingly speculated that Finnic *ä-backing: *ä-ä > *a-ə (> late Proto-Finnic *a-i : *a-ë-) should perhaps be split in two phases: stem vowel reduction leading to a split from *ä-ə as an…
Assigning meanings to Finnish derivational suffixes can be a pain. Plenty of them show a fairly scattershot selection of meanings. One example is -kko (-kkö); in modern Finnish, following Hakulinen in SKRK (54.15, 56.8 §§), six main functions can be…
Though I often enough blog here about issues of consonantism too, it is clear that the largest challenges remaining in Uralic historical phonology concern vocalism. Our current standard model of Uralic vowel history is mainly rooted in Samic, Finnic, and…
My earlier post ‘Swan’ in Uralic alluded to the possibility of reconstructing Proto-Uralic also *x in positions where it has not previously been considered to occur, particularly by reanalyzing some clusters with *k in them. This is not an idle…
Studia Etymologica Cracoviensia is one of those journals that kindly makes its back issues freely available online these days, currently up to 2013. Which is old news for many I’m sure… I think I’ve even been linked directly to one…
Over the last few years, one of the more interesting research topics in Uralic historical phonology and etymological phonology has been the Finnic sound change *ä-ä > *a-ə. Not only does this turn out to explain numerous other puzzles in…
The Finnish verb seistä ‘to stand’ has an interesting defective inflection. Only forms with the consonant stem seis- exist, including e.g. the citation form; some other infinite forms (e.g. seisty ‘having stood’, seisten ‘by standing’), and several imperative forms (seiskäämme…
Freelance reconstruction 
The phonetic vagueness of laryngeal theory
While I continue to be strictly speaking Not An Indo-Europeanist, I regularly keep reading about comparative Indo-European research just as well. Including not only matters with immediate relevance to Uralic studies, but also the usual controversy honeypots: interpretations of the…
Posted in Commentary, Methodology