Migracijske i etničke teme (Jun 1999)
Language Reconstruction – Applied to the Uralic Languages
Abstract
After pointing out the shortcomings and methodological weakness of the general theory of linguistic reconstruction, the author disputes the alleged antiquity of Uralic. Proto-Uralic as reconstructed by the scholars seems to be the sum of a set of features belonging to several distinct language families. The paper examines a number of lexical concordances with historically attested languages and comes to the conclusion that the Proto-Uralic word-stock is the result of a sum of borrowings that took place from the most disparate languages: Balto-Slavic, Old Swedish, several Turkic dialects, Mongolic, Tunguz, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, late Middle Persian dialects, Byzantine Greek and Latin. Yet, other languages may also come into account: Chinese, Caucasian languages as well as languages unknown in present day are possible candidates. A large number of bases of the Uralic wordstock can be easily identified by following a few phonological constraints. The linguistic features of the Uralic daughter-languages seem to show that they originated from a pidgin language spoken along the merchant routes that connected the Silk Road to North- and East-European trade. It is a well-known phenomenon that sometimes, when groups of people speaking different languages come into contact for the first time, a new restricted language system (lingua franca or pidgin) comes into being in order to cater to essential common needs. For this reason, pidgins tend to arise along trade routes. Taking into account the characteristics of the original word-stock as well as the report of the Byzantine Emperor Constantinos Porphyrogennetos, according to which the Magyars learned the language they speak from the Xazars, the place of origin of the Proto-Uralic pidgin is to be identified with the Xazarian Qaγanate. The Xazarian Qaγanate succeeded in gaining full control over the trade in the Caspian and Black Sea regions during the three hundred years 650–950 of our era. The Xazars are known to have established their trade posts from the Talas Valley in Kazakhstan up to the very heart of Sweden. Xazaria was one of the main trade routes in the early Middle Ages, and the most likely place where a new language might have developed. The Uralic languages are very probably the creolised offspring of an ancient pidgin that developed around the Xazarian trade posts and along the trade routes controlled by the Xazars.
