Indo-Uralic Languages - History of The Indo-Uralic Hypothesis

History of The Indo-Uralic Hypothesis

An authoritative if brief and sketchy history of early Indo-Uralic studies can be found in Holger Pedersen’s Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century (1931:336-338). Although Vilhelm Thomsen first raised the possibility of a connection between Indo-European and Finno-Ugric in 1869 (336), "he did not pursue the subject very far" (337). The next important statement in this area was that of Nikolai Anderson in 1879. However, Pedersen reports, the value of Anderson’s work was "impaired by its many errors" (337). The great English phonetician Henry Sweet argued for kinship between Indo-European and Finno-Ugric in his semi-popular book The History of Language in 1900 (see especially Sweet 1900:112-121). Sweet’s treatment awakened "reat interest" in the question, but "his space was too limited to permit of actual proof" (Pedersen 1931:337). A somewhat longer study by K.B. Wiklund appeared in 1906 and another by H. Paasonen in 1908 (i.e. 1907) (ib.). Pedersen considered that these two studies sufficed to settle the question and that, after them, "it seems unnecessary to doubt the relationship further" (ib.).

Sweet considered the relationship to be securely established, stating (1900:120; "Aryan" = Indo-European, "Ugrian" = Finno-Ugric):

If all these and many other resemblances that might be adduced do not prove the common origin of Aryan and Ugrian, and if we assume that the Ugrians borrowed not only a great part of their vocabulary, but also many of their derivative syllables, together with at least the personal endings of their verbs from Aryan, then the whole fabric of comparative philology falls to the ground, and we are no longer justified in inferring from the similarity of the inflections in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit that these languages have a common origin.

Björn Collinder, author of the path-breaking Comparative Grammar of the Uralic Languages (1960), a standard work in the field of Uralic studies, argued for the kinship of Uralic and Indo-European (1934, 1954, 1965).

Alwin Kloekhorst, author of the Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon, and student of Frederik Kortlandt, endorses his teacher's Indo-Uralic grouping (2008b). He argues that, when features differ between the Anatolian languages (including Hittite) and the other Indo-European languages, comparisons with Uralic can help to establish which group has the more archaic forms (2008b: 88) and that, conversely, the success of such comparisons helps to establish the Indo-Uralic thesis (2008b: 94). For example, in Anatolian the nominative singular of the second person pronoun comes from *ti(H), whereas in the non-Anatolian languages it comes from *tu(H); in Proto-Uralic it was *ti, which agrees with evidence from internal reconstruction that Anatolian has the more archaic form (2008b: 93).

The most extensive attempt to establish sound correspondences between Indo-European and Uralic to date is that of the late Slovenian linguist Bojan Čop. It was published as a series of articles in various academic journals from 1970 to 1989 under the collective title Indouralica. The topics to be covered by each article were sketched out at the beginning of "Indouralica II". Of the projected 18 articles only 11 appeared. These articles have not been collected into a single volume and thereby remain difficult to access.