Indo-Uralic
| Indo-Uralic | |
|---|---|
| (controversial) | |
| Geographic distribution: |
Europe, Russia |
| Linguistic classification: | Eurasiatic?? |
| Subdivisions: | |
| Glottolog: | None |
Indo-Uralic is a proposed language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic.
A genetic relationship between Indo-European and Uralic was first proposed by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in 1869 (Pedersen 1931:336) but was received with little enthusiasm. Since then, the predominant opinion in the linguistic community has remained that the evidence for such a relationship is insufficient. However, quite a few prominent linguists have always taken the contrary view (e.g. Henry Sweet, Holger Pedersen, Björn Collinder, Warren Cowgill, Jochem Schindler, Eugene Helimski and Gert Klingenschmitt).
There are two distinct questions here (cf. Greenberg 2005:325):
At the same time, most of the supporters of a relationship between Indo-European and Uralic have also supported their relationship to additional language families, leading some to regard Indo-Uralic as a subset of the larger Nostratic hypothesis.
This article focuses on the first question, genetic relationship, and only treats incidentally the second question, possible relation to other language families.
The Dutch linguist Frederik Kortlandt supports a model of Indo-Uralic in which the original Indo-Uralic speakers lived north of the Caspian Sea, and the Proto-Indo-European speakers began as a group that branched off westward from there to come into geographic proximity with the Northwest Caucasian languages, absorbing a Northwest Caucasian lexical blending before moving farther westward to a region north of the Black Sea where their language settled into canonical Proto-Indo-European (2002:1). Allan Bomhard suggests a similar schema in Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1996). Alternatively, the common protolanguage may have been located north of the Black Sea, with Proto-Uralic moving northwards with the climatic improvement of post-glacial times.
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