The Proto-Finnic word for ‘birch bark’ was *toohi (consonant stem: *toohë-, partitive *tooh-ta), continued directly in Finnish and Karelian tuohi, Veps toh’. The southern Finnic languages mainly show derivatives: Votic toho, standard Estonian toht(u-), Võro tohk(o-), Livonian tū’oigõz (however EES…
Currently I’m looking a bit into older research on Mansi. Coverage on the language has not been optimal in the past, mainly due to most of the existing field research materials being rather slow to be released. The main sources…
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…
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…
Not “lemma” in the usual linguistic “citation form” sense, but in the mathematical “intermediate result” sense. I’ve noticed having to clarify these topics at quite a few points, so here’s a single post for the purpose. I’ll keep it brief…
A long-standing mystery of Uralic historical linguistics is a split representation of Proto-Uralic *ś in Mansi. Aside from confusion between *ś and *ć (widespread across the entire Uralic family), there are also two plain sibilant reflexes: *s and *š. What…
I find the development of *ü in Mansi fairly strange. This vowel is supposedly retained from Proto-Uralic in Proto-Mansi (e.g. *künčə → *künš “nail”) — but would after that only have been retained in Southern Mansi (/künš/), while Core Mansi…
Freelance reconstruction 
Some Recent Vogulology
(By current standards this perhaps should be “Mansilogy” or “Mansi Studies”, but “Vogulology” just has a good sound to my ear.) 1. Word-final vowels This summer has seen the publication of the Festschrift Ёмас сымыӈ нэ̄кве во̄ртур э̄тпост самын патум…
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