Across Finnic and Samic, one of the more characteristic adjective endings is *-əta ~ *-ətä; yielding e.g. Finnish -ea ~ -eä, Estonian -e, Northern Sami -at. The Permic cognate *-i̮t is also at least relatively common. Because Of Reasons I…
I have been having a simmering discussion with commentator “M.” under the post on what’s important for what in historical Uralistics. One general topic there that I keep pushing hard back at is the idea of “etymology unknown” as anything…
Recently when tracking a variety of citations back into early literature, I was directed to Zsigmond Simonyi, 1901: “Az Ábel-féle szójegyzék” (Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 31: 225–227), an article reporting the corpus of a small Hungarian–Italian phrasebook from 1438. One point that…
In the UEW we find a rough Proto-Ugric reconstruction *pukkɜ ‘blunt end of a tool’, with divergent later semantic development: ‘eye of needle’ in Ob-Ugric, ‘back of hammer/ax/knife/…’ in Hungarian fok. There is reason to suspect though that if related,…
I have a principle that applies quite often when working with quantity-over-quality mass comparative dictionaries (papers, databases, etc.): what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. The UEW is, unfortunately, a repeat offender on assertions without evidence. This…
One minor phonological innovation in Finnish is mentioned in historical overviews far more often than could be expected from its lexical frequency: the loss of a palatal semivowel *j when preceding its vocalic counterpart *i. This is probably because the shift…
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…
Several bits of additional evidence in favor of (or, if you will, additional bits of data explainable by) Aikio’s new model of the Proto-Uralic root type *a-ə seem to be found in word derivation. 1. In the appendix of his…
Freelance reconstruction 
Revisiting Setälä’s *pk
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…
Posted in Commentary, Reconstruction