No Uralic Family? No Hungarian-Finnish relationship?
We are taught that there is a Uralic language
family. We are taught that Hungarian and Finnish are genetically related
languages. This is false!
But why is false information taught to us? We
can learn the reasons why textbooks teach this falsity as well-established
facts from Professor Angela Marcantonio’s book: The Uralic language family.
Facts, myths and statistics. There is a historical explanation: it’s the
Darwinian model’s effects on linguistics in the 19th century. But
there is more! Did you know that the Uralic-Hungarian genetic relationship
theory was promoted by the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy? The author wants to
draw attention to the term ‘theory’. As it is a theory, it’s not veritable nor
falsifiable, it implies that it’s not based on ‘scientific evidence’. She tells
us why linguists believe in the validity of the theory. They simply assume that
the Uralic paradigm was established scientifically and nobody questioned it
ever again.
She criticizes the method as well. The Uralic
language family is established by means of the Comparative Method, however
there are many problems with its application. First of all, comparing random
words, it ‘fails to distinguish whether the corpus is the result of a true
linguistic connection or chance resemblances.’ Second, the reconstructions of
the Proto-Uralic node contain more sound-rules than regular etymologies. Third,
it’s impossible to distinguish inherited elements from borrowings because
borrowed elements assimilate to the sound system of the language in a short
time, if not the very time of the borrowing. It means, that it’s impossible to
claim whether a linguistic connection is a result of common ancestor,
borrowings or chance resemblances.
Well, if the linguistics don’t help us to
collect evidence for the Uralic theory, let’s search for evidence from other
fields! She examines the historical sources and proves, archeological findings
and genetic evidence, but at the end she draws the conclusion: neither
linguistic, nor historical, archeological or genetic evidence exists. The whole
Uralic language family and the Uralic-Hungarian relatedness are just theory
without any evidence.
The final conclusion is that ‘the correlation
among the Uralic languages and between the Uralic languages and their
neighbours are better described in terms of intersecting isoglosses. These
languages form a dialectal continuum.’ The author sees a connection among the
so-called Altaic and Uralic languages. Hungarian has a particular importance as
it has an extremely poor correlation with Ugric and Finnic languages. If it’s
really needed to classify this language, it would be better to categorize it as
an ‘Inner Asian’ language as the historical sources testify to this view.
To sum up, the biggest matter is the lack of
scientific evidence which if not available means any theory remain only a
theory.
It’s not only extremely good and comprehensive
book about the foundation of the Uralic theory, but you can also acquire more and
other very useful knowledge about linguistics and the issues in the field.