Hasil untuk "Finnic. Baltic-Finnic"

Helina Harend

The diversity and distribution patterns of kinship vocabulary in Estonian runosongs This article examines the core kinship vocabulary found in Estonian runosongs, focusing on the distribution of stems and stem variants of four key kinship terms: mother, father, sister, and brother. The kinship vocabulary in Estonian runosongs displays remarkable diversity, particularly in the terms denoting female and male parents. Among the analyzed terms, those referring to mother are the most frequent. In contrast, terms for sister and brother exhibit limited variation, represented by only two or three distinct stems. The regional distribution pattern reveals clear differences between the North and South Estonian language areas. The coastal regions of western and northern Estonia stand out – the terms eit (mother) and taat (father) occur more frequently in runosongs from these areas. The analysis highlights a consistent differentiation between North and South Estonian across all the studied terms. However, in the case of eit/ema and taat/isa, this division does not align with the current main dialect boundary but lies further north. The distribution of õde/sõsar (sister) and vend/veli (brother), on the other hand, corresponds more closely to the historical North and South Estonian dialect boundary observed in contemporary dialects. Kinship terms with a broader Finnic distribution have been better preserved in South Estonian runosongs.

V. Napolskikh

This article addresses key methodological issues in the study of ethnonymy, focusing on new hypotheses on the origins of Finno-Ugric ethnonyms. The singular nature of ethnonyms, and the apparent lack of opportunity for statistical validation of etymologies — as is more common in toponymy — has led, on the one hand, to a proliferation of speculative and arbitrary explanations, and on the other, to a reliance on the availability of historically verifiable data to support or reject such proposals. Despite widespread acknowledgement of this challenge, the article argues that ethnonymic analysis can function as a methodologically distinct branch of historical and philological research. It demonstrates that conclusions in this field can be systematically verified, provided four key conditions are met. These are as follows: 1) Linguistic accuracy in the proposed etymology, with close attention to both phonological and semantic detail, and to historical plausibility, including the need to identify the etymon as precisely as possible within a specific source language, rather than settling for generalized solutions. 2) Consideration of ethnonymic “universals” and the support of etymological proposals through typological analogies — while recognizing that such parallels are always shaped by specific ethnohistorical circumstances. 3) Awareness of the distinctive naming conventions present in the ethnonymic tradition under study, which themselves reflect particular historical conditions. 4) An understanding that both the application of universals and the functioning of naming traditions are context-dependent, and that any proposed etymology must either align with or help to revise the reconstructed ethnohistorical setting in which the ethnonym likely emerged. The article illustrates this approach through examples from Balto-Finnic, Sámi, Mordvin, Mari-Meryan, Permic, and Ugric ethnonymy. In comparative historical and typological terms, it also draws on ethnonymic material from Samoyedic, Siberian, European, and Amerindian languages.

A. Jürgenson, Marleen Metslaid

This article treats the life of the ethnologist and historian of religion Ivar Paulson (1922–1966) and his contributions to research. After he graduated from upper secondary school in Estonia, the Second World War cut short his studies in ethnology, archaeology and history at the University of Tartu. In 1944, he fled the second Soviet wave to Germany, where he received a PhD in 1946 from the University of Hamburg for his work on the economic ethnology of the Khanty people. In 1950, he moved to Sweden where he studied ethnology at Stockholm University. Starting in 1952, Paulson studied comparative history of religions at the same school. His supervisor there was the well-regarded Swedish religious historian Ernst Arbman (1891–1959), who exerted a significant influence on Paulson’s development into a scholar. Under Arbman, Paulson began studying spirituality among northern Eurasian peoples, defending his second PhD on that topic in 1958. Paulson would continue to study shamanism and animism of northern European peoples as his main research field. In 1958, Paulson was given tenure as associate professor in the history of religions at Stockholm University. In the 1950s and 1960s, Paulson published many studies analysing how various northern Eurasian peoples conceived of the soul, using Arbman’s dualistic pluralism model. One of Paulson’s favourite topics was religious ideas related to the forest and hunting, and he published numerous specific works devoted to this. Throughout his works, he proceeded from the thesis that a lifestyle shaped in a specific ecological niche influenced the development of the type of religion. Of the peoples of northern Eurasia, he was most interested in Finno-Ugric peoples, publishing thematic and general treatments of their religions. He saw the peoples as a cultural bridge between Siberian and northern European cultures. He was especially intrigued by Permian peoples – the Komi and Udmurts – where he emphasized the importance of large forests and rivers and the relatively weighty role of hunting and fishing in their life up until recently, which is also reflected in their religion. In Paulson’s view, Baltic-Finnic peoples were not well-suited to play the role of such a cultural intermediary due to their early adoption of agriculture and Christianity and other Western (especially Germanic) influences, and he wrote about them mainly in regional religious overviews or comparative religious phenomenology studies. Before his death, he also managed to compete a manuscript on the old Estonian folk religion, which was published in book form in 1966. In it, he builds on his principle, emphasized in previous studies, that religion cannot be separated from culture as a whole. His many comparisons with other Finno-Ugric cultures seem like a breath of fresh air on the backdrop of Estonia’s previous religious studies. Paulson is considered a leading authority and specialist on northern Eurasian religions. At his untimely death, Paulson was also working on a larger work on comparative religious studies, which was not published.

L. Vaba

This article presents a new or more elaborate etymological interpretation for the words kurn ‘a clutch of eggs; brood’, pugi ‘gust of wind’, putitama ‘to repair, to put (something in working order’, riis ‘net bag; fishing gear’, and ruhimik ‘a cupped handful, gathered hands’. kurn : kurn ‘brood; clutch of eggs; (in dialects) group, gang’. kurn is a South Estonian word but has also been reported from Virumaa and the shores of Lake Peipus. It is assumed that kurn derives from the Russian dialect word гу́рма meaning ‘crowd, throng, gang, herd’, comparable to Ukrainian and Belorussian гурма́ id. This East Slavic word is considered a borrowing from Polish hurm, hurma ‘crowd, large number, pile’. The word kurn is characterized by a sporadic alternation rm ~ rn within the root, which, as a cross-borrowing via Estonian appears in Latvian dialects: kùrms, kur̃miņa ‘crowd, herd’. pugi : pugi ‘strong gust of wind’. The word is recorded only in Western Saaremaa. It is assumed that this word for wind either came directly from Livonian (cf. Livonian pū’gə̑: tūĺ pū’gub ‘the wind blows’) or through Latvian (cf. Latvian dialect pūga ‘gusty wind’) as a cross-borrowing, or that it was phonetically influenced by these corresponding terms in the mentioned languages. putitama : putitada ‘to repair, to set in order’. It is presumed to be a Soviet-era borrowing from the Russian polysemous verb бу́ти́ть ‘to beat, pound, thump, to sound dully’. The Estonian dialect verb put́tima ‘to fill gaps between masonry stones with mortar’ also derives from the Russian verb бути́ть ‘to fill a hole, trench with stones and earth’, representing an earlier loan into Estonian dialects. riis : riisi ‘net bag; manually operated fishing net’. This word is widespread in Saaremaa, Mulgimaa, and the eastern part of the Võru dialect area, and has close equivalents in Votic riisi ‘(net) wing’ and Finnish dialect riisi ‘coastal seine’. It is assumed that riis is a re-borrowing from the Estonian rüsa word via the Russian dialect (Pskov region) loan base ри́са, ри́сы (plural) or риз‘fish trap’. ruhimik : ruhimik ‘cupped handful’ is a South Estonian word, marked by considerable variability both in the root (ruhi) and in suffixes. There are no etymological counterparts in other Finnic languages. I assume that ruhi- and related forms (< *ruhi < *rukše̮) are cognates of the Erzya word rukšna, rušna, rušńa ‘palm, cupped hand’ < rukšǝ, with -na (-ńa) being a nominal suffix. Artiklis esitatakse uus või täpsustatud etümoloogiline tõlgendus sõnadele kurn ’haudumise jagu mune; pesakond’, pugi ’tuulepuhang’, putitama ’remontima, (töö)korda seadma’, riis ’võrkkott; kalapüügivahend’ ja ruhimik ’kamal, kokkupandud peod’.

V. Morozov, V. Stavitsky, A.L. Smirnov et al.

In 2022—2024, research in the Eastern Cross-Kama area in the territory of the Novoye Biksenteevo village revealed two hoards of bronze items from the Lomovatovskaya culture: 54 items in the first hoard and 12 in the second, a significant portion of which consisted of composite rattling jewelry. X-ray fluorescence analysis of these finds was carried out at the Collective Use Centre of IA RAS. Most of the items were made of tin-lead and tin bronze; in several items, the increased content of aluminum and zinc was recorded. A considerable variation in the percentage of the main impurities indicates that a significant part of the items were subjected to repeated remelting after their breakage. Most of the items were made of tin-lead and tin bronze, with the increased content of aluminum and zinc documented in a number of items. A considerable variation in the percentage of the main impurities indicates that a significant part of the items was subjected to repeated remelting after their breakage. Most of the jewelry items date back to the 7th century and find close analogies in female ornaments of the Permian Finnic cultures. The latest finds allow dating these hoards to the turn of the 7th—8th centuries or the first quarter of the 8th century.

P. Rahkonen

The present article is meant to describe the West Uralic linguistic situation before the final slavicization of the ancient Novgorodian pjatinas of Dereva and Bežeck which were located mainly in modern Novgorod and Tver oblasts. The method has been to analyse linguistically limnonyms (names of lakes) which contain shortened generics jädra > -dra,-dro and jär(i)/jer(i) > -er,-ar ‘lake’ and the topoformant -(V)mlja. Stems of the selected names have been compared with hydronyms, which are located in the ancient Meryan, Mordvin and Vepsian territories and with the modern Mordvin and Vepsian languages. In addition, relevant Russian dialectal words have been studied. As a main result can be presented that the area of Dereva pjatina was populated by so called West Čudes whose language had several features common with Mordvin. The territory of Bežeck pjatina was inhabited by so called East Čudes whose language has been linked at least to some extent to the Meryan language according to the hydronyms. Finally, a brief discussion of the possible influence of West Čudic on Finnic languages is presented. Both of those ancient West Uralic Čudic languages became extinct in the 16th century, at the latest.

N. Patroeva, T. Pashkova

In the period of revitalization of the Karelian language, which belongs to the group of small languages of Russia, the study of various aspects of its grammatical and lexical structure is relevant. The novelty of the scientific research is due to the lack of studies that consider the issues of the functioning and semantics of relative pronouns in the context of a complex sentence. In this regard, this article is aimed at describing the composition and semantic spectrum of relative pronouns functioning in complex sentences of the Livvik dialect of the Karelian language. In conducting the study, the authors used various methods: general scientific (deductions and inductions, comparisons), comparative, typological, comparative-historical, the method of functional-semantic description. Dictionaries, textbooks and teaching aids in the Livvik dialect of the newly written Karelian language became the basis for collecting linguistic units. The results of the conducted research indicate that the history, composition, meanings and conditions of use of deictic words that connect parts of a complex sentence require a special comprehensive historical and grammatical study: the currently available dictionary, corpus and educational materials are insufficient for conclusions concerning the functional distinction between synonyms such as mittuine ‘what’ and kudai ‘which’, the semantic shades of connectors in the main and subordinate parts, as well as the evolution of discourse pairs (relates and correlates) in the syntactic structure from the Proto-Uralic through the Proto-Finnic era to the modern system of individual Finno-Ugric languages, including the dialects of the Karelian newly written language.

I. Kipyatkova, I. Kagirov, Mikhail Dolgushin

This paper presents an experimental study aimed at solving the problem of training speech recognition models under conditions of limited available speech and text data. Current approaches to this issue are discussed in detail, particularly the use of pre-trained multilingual models and data augmentation techniques. As part of this study, multilingual models based on Wav2Vec and Whisper were adapted to the Livvi dialect of the Karelian language, and an investigation into the use of an external language model to enhance recognition accuracy was conducted. The paper also describes a specially collected and prepared speech database and a basic recognition system developed using the Kaldi toolkit. Quantitative test results are provided as well, demonstrating the effectiveness of the chosen methods. For instance, Transformer-based models, particularly Wav2Vec, outperformed the baseline models trained using Kaldi software tools. Fine-tuning the Wav2Vec models reduced the word error rate to 24.73% on the validation set and 25.25% on the test set, while a combination of the Wav2Vec-BERT 2.0-based model with an external language model further reduced errors to 17.12% and 17.72%, respectively. This paper is primarily aimed at specialists in the field of automatic speech recognition for low-resource and Balto-Finnic languages. Additionally, the results of this work can be practically applied in field research involving Karelian text transcription. Future work includes expanding the database to improve model adaptation and enhance performance in real-world scenarios.

Sirkku Pihlman

I. Finnic, W. Cheng

Felix J. Oinas

Sarah Thomason

N. V. Shlygina

Veljo Tormis

Erik Plovpenning

T. Nilsson

The first attempts to relate Balto-Finnic (BF.) loan words to IE. prototypes with retained laryngeals can be traced back to work by Björn Collinder and above all to Tryggve Sköld (1960), and thanks to the work by Koivulehto (1991) we have now arrived at a sufficiently extensive set of equations to make it likely that we have here a coherent system of correspondences and not just isolated, and thus a priori questionable, instances. Although one cannot escape the feeling that some of the novel equations adduced by Koivulehto fail to convince, this is not true for his set of words with an IE. laryngeal in the anlaut, reflected in BF. loan words by an anlauting k(op.cit, pp. 23-51). The cases are 1) Fi. kasa 'spike, protruding object; corner ~ IE. *h2aKo-, Gmc. agjo, e.g. in OHG. ekka 'spike; cutting edge of sword, 2) Fi, kallis 'expensive; dear ~ IE. *h2alye/o-s, Gmc. *alja, e.g in OHG. ella 'Nebenbuhler, 3) Fi. kaski 'Schwende, burn-beaten land ~ IE. *h2azg-, Gmc. *askon, e.g. in OHG. aska 'ash, 4) Fi. kasva'to grow ~ IE. *h2awg-s, e.g. Lithuanian augti 'to grow, Gothic aukan 'to propagate, breed, 5) Fi. kesä 'summer ~ IE. *hies-en-/*hiosene.g. in Slavic *jesenb, 'autumn, Gothic asans 'harvest, crop; summer, 6) Fi. kesy 'tame; amenable, compliant ~ IE. *h\esu-/*h\sue.g. in Sanskrit su 'good, Slavic sb[a verbal prefix], 7) Fi. koke'to look after nets and other hunting equipment devices ~ IE. h3okye/o'to see, Slavic aciti, e.g. in Polish zobaczyc 'to see [prefixed perfective verb], 8) Fi. kuto'to weave ~ ./Pre-Baltic *h2udah2 as in Lith. austi/audziu 'to weave. Six of these are immediately striking, at least to me, and even the less convincing Nr. l and Nr. 6 are not unthinkable. While the realistic possibility of IE. laryngeal reflexes in some BF. words can therefore no longer be denied, the proposed instances naturally still need to be refined, and the set may perhaps be further extended. Here I report on four new possible ancient IE. loan words in BF. in which I suggest

A. Marcantonio

Introduction Indreko's most relevant thesis from the perspective of the Uralic theory is that there appears to be no evidence of migrations from the area of the Ural Mountains, the traditional Uralic homeland, towards the West. On the contrary, it appears to Indreko that populations moved in the opposite direction, basically northwards, in concomitance with the receding ice-sheets. In particular, the first post-Ice Age inhabitants in the area extending from the Baltic Sea up to the Urals were "Finno Ugrian" populations of the Europoid type, who moved there from southern and western Europe. These results have been basically confirmed by later research, for example, by Nunez (1987), who claims that there is not "any concrete evidence for a major immigration of potential carriers of Finnish language ... No settlement interruption can be detected; and culture appears to have evolved smoothly, each phase always inheriting a number of traits from preceding ones" (compare also Niskanen 1997). Indreko and the Uralic theory Before continuing with this review, I have to alert the reader to my personal convictions that must inevitably colour it. I am a linguist. Alongside the widely prevailing, official position, there has always been a debate among scholars as to whether there is really a privileged connection between the Finnic, the Ugric and the Samoyed peoples, and therefore whether there was a Proto-Uralic language and community, especially if interpreted in the traditional, Darwinian sense of the term. This debate has intensified in recent years (see for example Tauli 1966; Kiinnap 1997 & 1998; Sutrop 2000; Wiik 1995 & 1999; Taagepera 2000; Suhonen 1999:248). The generally accepted view, and the one which is reported in most encyclopaedias and textbooks (Hajdu 1975; Hajdu and Domokos 1978; Abondolo (ed.) 1998; Laakso 1999, to quote just some recent publications), is that there was such a language / community, and it originated in the area of the Ural Mountains. However, my personal convictions differ from this (Marcantonio 2000 & 2001). I belong to that minority of scholars who argue that there is not enough linguistic evidence to establish a privileged relationship between the Finnic, the Ugric and the Samoyed languages. The supporters of the Uralic family who also acknowledge this fact justify it by assuming that the origin of the family dates so far back in time that most traces of the original common language (Janhunen 2000)--as well as of common culture, physical features and genes (Laakso 1999: 48-49)--have been lost. In order to make sense of the small amount of ambiguous data at their disposal, linguists had to analyse them on the assumption of a powerful model, and the prevailing accepted model was that of an original Uralic community living in the area of the Ural Mountains 8,000 to 6,000 years ago. In reading Indreko's paper, the most striking thing for me is that he was so much out of tune with his time, in challenging one of the basic tenets of the Uralic theory. Had he been a linguist, he would have needed to be brave to submit a paper that was so much at odds with the received knowledge of the time, and lucky or influential enough for it to pass peer review and to be published. Indreko reports his data accurately and impartially, and separately he discusses the relationship between his data and the received linguistic models of the time. It is easy, reading his paper, to see the distinction between the archaeological data and the interpretations. This is in stark contrast to the prevailing style of other archaeologists (and linguists) at the time who put forward many fanciful theories in order to square the archaeological data with the received model. For example, at some point from the 19th century onward it was assumed that the Finnic area was populated, and then emptied of people during the pre-Roman period (between 500 BC and early Christian times), perhaps because of worsening weather conditions, and then re-populated by immigrants from the Ural Mountains (the so-called 'autioitumisteoria'). …

I. Finnic, W.Cheng

I. Finnic, D. Dolev

Virginia Finnic