I was recently asked on Twitter about the history and subclassification of Finnic. [1] Whipping up a full-length discussion paper or even a polished nice-looking family tree would be more work than I can produce on short notice or on…
Some things about comparative linguistics you might just take for granted in your own little corner of a particular language family, until you start looking at how they do things in others. In Uralic studies, we’ve known for 200+ years,…
In 1907, E. N. Setälä published one of his last comparative linguistic works: [1] “Finnisch-ugrisches pk (~ βk)” (in FUF 6; nominally dated to 1906), on a minor addition to the cluster canon of Proto-Finno-Ugric. This was a follow-up to…
The ethnonym and state name Russia(n) traces its origin back to older Rus’ (Русь). As the current standard etymology goes, this is thought to then derive, via the Varangian ruling class of pre-Slavic Russia, from Finnic *roocci ‘Sweden’, in derivatives…
Back in 2009, a very interesting paper was put out by Jaakko Häkkinen, then an early-stage PhD student: [1] “Kantauralin ajoitus ja paikannus: perustelut puntarissa“. While no longer especially up to date (I will probably follow up on this claim…
There are broadly two commonly seen ways of thinking about progress in science. The first is the “naive” Science Marches On narrative where we have ever-increasing aggregation of solid Results; the archetype is mathematics, where results indeed stay around as…
A recent open access paper by half a dozen Leiden Indo-Europeanists: Palmér, Jakob, Thorsø, van Sluis, Swanenvleugel & Kroonen, “Proto-Indo-European ‘fox’ and the reconstruction of an athematic ḱ-stem” presents a very thorough analysis of various core IE words for medium-sized…
While my blogging here has been firmly within historical linguistics, every once in a while I do go poking around self-styled formal linguistics blogs too. [1] This tends to be a frustrating exercise though. By now, supposedly deep problems discussed…
Freelance reconstruction 
Reviewing UraLex
Nerdsnipe of the day: the BEDLAN team, researching diversification of the Uralic languages interdisciplinarily, mentioned earlier today that they will be soon uploading version 3 of their UraLex dataset of basic vocabulary across Uralic. I thought this might be a…
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