(Part ca. 3 of n in my irregularly scheduled series of Introducing Named Soundlaws in Uralic Studies. [0]) The issue, as I see it Most of the vowel correspondences we now think to be regular between Samoyedic and the rest…
Another word of previously notably unknown etymology recently has a new lead for it: Finnic *sana ‘word’, suggested by one Otso A. Bjartalíð (in a draft that was briefly posted on Academia.edu but seems to be currently down) to have…
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…
The following is, currently, more of a hypothesis I wish to record than an actual result. Out of the two Mordvinic languages, Erzya shows the simple vowel inventory /i e a o u/ (plus a recent marginal /ɨ/ phonemicized by…
I recently read “Deconstructing ‘height dissimilation’ in Modern Greek” (Journal of Greek Linguistics 3, 2002) by Julián Méndez Dosuna. I don’t really dabble in Modern Greek dialectology, but this struck me as an interesting paper for its methodology regardless, and…
According to usual understanding, the Proto-Uralic stem vowel contrast *-A | *-ə is still continued in the Mordvinic languages in nominals of the shape CVCV: word-finally *-A survives as a vowel (mostly *-ə, in some cases *-a), while *-ə is…
As noted in my previous post, I have by now nailed down as my next professional milestone a hunt for previously unnoticed innovative features within the Finnic vowel system. Besides individual surface questions about how the vowel system of Proto-Uralic…
For a language family mostly made up of minority languages, Uralic is really quite well documented by any standards. Most of the smaller languages have received decent descriptions already in the 19th century, and many also theoretically updated reflections later…
Freelance reconstruction 
The origin of the Finnic long vowels: An outline
Continued from my thesis release post, as is perhaps appropriate now that I finally have wrapped up my graduation as well. To make it a bit more convenient for readers, I provide here an English outline of the specific topics…
Posted in Commentary, Reconstruction