The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics (Publications of the Philological Society)

In this detailed survey of Finnish, Hungarian, Lapp and the other Uralic Languages, Angela Marcantonio shows there is in fact no scientific evidence to support the belief that they form a genetic family. If this approach is accepted, this detailed analysis will have far-reaching consequences for other assumed language families. 1. Introduction -- 2. The Historical Foundation Of The Uralic Paradigm -- 3. Modern Interpretations Of The Uralic Paradigm -- 4. Reconstructing The Sound Structure And Lexicon Of The Uralic Family Tree -- 5. False Matches Or Genuine Linguistic Correlations? -- 6. Borrowed Or Inherited? -- 7. The Antiquity Of Proto-uralic -- 8. Morphology -- 9. Completing The Picture: Proper Names, Archaeology And Genetics -- 10. Summary And Conclusion -- Map: The Distribution Of Uralic Languages. Angela Marcantonio. Includes Bibliographical References And Indexes. It is often claimed (see, for example, Dixon 1997: 28) that the family-tree model of historical linguistics is realistically only applicable to a small number of language families, namely Indo-European, Semitic, Polynesian and Uralic.