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…
I find it interesting how modern advances in Uralic historical phonology can occasionally turn out to vindicate old sketchy etymological proposals, dating from the earliest phases of scientific comparison of the word stocks of the Uralic languages. One of these…
The Finnic verb root *püütä- (Fi. pyytää, etc.) has two distinct senses: ‘to ask for’ on one hand, ‘to hunt’ on the other. These could plausibly be considered connected, with the former as the original sense, the latter developing as…
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…
I claimed in my post “Two Lemmata” that the reconstruction of Proto-Uralic *ë rests on quite firm ground by now. Regardless, it is still not too rare to see studies which fail to recognize the idea. [1] Apparently the existence…
A recent volume (1/2013) of Acta Linguistica Hungarica sports an interesting article from longtime Ugricist László Honti, “Comments on Uralic historical phonology”. I’m tempted to add some thoughts of my own. (Who knows, maybe I’ll make a habit out of…
Freelance reconstruction 
Details of some vulpine words in Uralic
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…
Posted in Commentary, Reconstruction