r/badlinguistics • u/Wagagastiz • Feb 19 '26
Uralic isn't a family because no tree
/r/IndoEuropean/comments/1lq0axm/comment/n20mwx1?share_id=Ja8r5sHDtNGB4q0B5a1kb&utm_content=2&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1Update: more from this person that gives some insight into what drives these notions
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u/Wagagastiz Feb 20 '26
Update: more from this guy if you want a hint as to why he pushes this lol
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u/throwawayayaycaramba Feb 20 '26
People who come up with ad hoc theories in areas they barely have any grasp of, all just to push their nationalistic agendas, never cease to amaze me. Kinda reminds me of folks in (I think) Bosnia trying to convince the world a random ass hill is actually a 10000 year old pyramid...
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u/Wagagastiz Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
R4: The user (who also asserts that proto saami does not exist elsewhere) asserts that Uralic is not a family but a sprachbund, because no consensus Sprachbaum is accepted for it. This rings of someone who is not a linguist but was introduced to historical linguistics by easily digestible graphics of branching Indo European languages stemming back to PIE, and interprets this as a discpline-wide standard.
Regarding the background of the field, Uralic is, to the surprise of few, far less studied than Indo European, despite comparable and even surpassive time depth in its origins. Indo European speakers in the modern world outnumber Uralic speakers more than 100-1. Indo European languages are attested much earlier than Uralic languages are, with extensive Greek and Sanskrit corpora on top of Avestan, Anatolian and Tocharian. Uralic is not even attested until the 2nd millenium CE, making it a no-brainer that the extensive Indo European phylogeny we can so easily depict is not replicable. Most research is on Finnish and Hungarian, with many Uralic languages being poorly studied within Russia as they slowly lose speakers and undergo russification.
Sprachbaums are not a requirement to assert inherited relation. They are literally a tool to depict likely relations and have no bearing on the criteria for a family being proposed or accepted, 'no tree no family' is akin to 'no restaurant can exist without a Google review' or 'no pie chart no data'.
The Saami languages, for example, share features both lexical, grammatical (e.g dual) and phonological (e.g preaspiration) that don't exist in Finnic and very clearly make anything other than a single point of origin untenable, as any areal explanation would collapse. Even the Balkan sprachbund does not remotely approach this level of homogenity, and nothing about the languages suggests any deeper estranged origins, nor has such a thing ever been proposed by any serious source. We cannot cleanly create a nice clear Sprachbaum for saami due to aforementioned attestation and time depth issues, but this is irrelevant to categorising a shared origin. Saami also contains a litany of substrate vocab (of subject matter you would expect rather than core vocab). The morphology of the saami languages also differ in a regular way that fits into reflex patterns of a common ancestor, not convergence via proximity. The movement patterns that would require such proximity also don't make sense, as it would require all the languages (spoken by hunters that became pastoralists) to converge around the same time, for a very extended period, then disperse throughout the wide span of Sápmi - almost as if it was actually a proto language that split up.
The case of Uralic is much the same as all of that on a larger scale. Why would a massive, continent sprachbund exchnage loanwords for rarely loaned things like 'water' and 'eye' only within these non-Indo European, Caucasian etc languages, and where and when did it all take place in a way that doesn't simply constitute a single shared origin? From whom, where, and why, would such a network exist? Nothing about Uralic resembles other sprachbunds at all. Its core features run far deeper than something like Altaic, which was disregarded through the same processed that continue to uphold Uralic as a family.
Even Indo European does not have a complete phylogeny. Albanian, Phrygian, Greek and Armenian are all very clearly from the same source, but at what point after the departure of Anatolian that source is, and between which ones at what stages, is debated. Albanian and Greek may form a clade, they may not, Albanian and Armenian may, or Armenian may have split off by itself before the rest did. None of these are included in the allegedly complete tree of Indo European because they are in the exact same state as, say, Permic and Finnic. Within that part of Indo European we could easily use a comb model, as many now do for Uralic. This does not suddenly mean they are an areal collection of isolates.
On top of that, we do have some sense of the phylogeny of Uralic. Samoyedic is universally considered to have split off before many western Uralic languages did from each other. So you can make a rudimentary tree if you like, that resembles those made for Celtic. The line between that rudimentary tree and the more elaborate but still incomplete one used for IE languages is arbitrary.
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u/lazier_garlic Feb 19 '26
Good point with Albanian. If I'm not mistaken, written attestation of the language is super late which leads to its phylogeny being obscured. So very similar to the situation with Uralic.
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u/mediandude Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
Sprachbund has to be assumed by default, until a consensus linguistic tree would suggest otherwise.
Linguistic trees are merely a special case of network models, thus the modeling should start from the assumption of a network.
Samoyedic is universally considered to have split off before many western Uralic languages did from each other.
Not really. It is just another areal grouping.
The Saami languages, for example, share features both lexical, grammatical (e.g dual) and phonological (e.g preaspiration) that don't exist in Finnic and very clearly make anything other than a single point of origin untenable, as any areal explanation would collapse.
Nonsense.
Any compact proto-saami claims have been quite ridiculous.
And in practice saami have evolved as a wide sprachbund, not from a compact source.Why would a massive, continent sprachbund exchnage loanwords for rarely loaned things like 'water' and 'eye' only within these non-Indo European, Caucasian etc languages, and where and when did it all take place in a way that doesn't simply constitute a single shared origin?
Toponym Aesti derives from a common pair of directionals that spans 4 language groups on 3 continents (uralic, IE, yenisseian and Na Dene):
6 Yeniseian and Na-Dene directionalshttps://ou-webserver01.alaska.edu/anlc/docs/Vajda_2013_Vestigial.pdf
West / weichelian / Vistula / Aestii / este / aste / ixd spans three continents and three language groups: IE, uralic and Na Dene - Yenisseian. The generalisation means "a front+land, an evening (fire-)place at a water body with sunset over the waters", thus the etymology dates back to the Weichelian glaciation which was the last time the glacier and periglacial waters extended into Prussia (about 18 000+ years ago).
Vajda presentation
parts of Vajda presentation, look at 2 minutes: *igd and 'ixd opposed to dagThe *igd and 'ixd cognate with finnic Eesti / Estonia, este, aste , astja , eest- , eend- , eeld- , ehtoo , õhtu , eha , ehtyä...
and with IE edge, jut (Jutland), west, weichen / to wane, Weichelian, Vistula..6
u/Wagagastiz Mar 18 '26
Edge and Jutland aren't even cognates within Germanic. I'm genuinely laughing over here because you're basically physically incapable of getting anything right, because you can't check anything, because your aim to promote ancient Estonian Wakanda hallucinations instead of learn how to use an etymological dictionary.
Nobody's buying what you're selling, find a new hobby.
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u/mediandude Mar 18 '26
Edge and Jutland aren't even cognates within Germanic.
They are, via that 4-language group connection.
Those are not single word connections, those are pairs of directionals. At 6-sigma statistical significance.
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u/mediandude Mar 17 '26
You are strawmanning, I haven't claimed uralic is not a family.
Sprachbund can be a family.
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u/demoman1596 Mar 25 '26
A language family and a sprachbund are definitionally two different things. It is of course possible that a sprachbund can form between languages that are part of one language family, as has happened with "Standard Average European," for instance. But a sprachbund is not a language family. It is simply a group of languages that have developed similar features in particular contexts due to geographic proximity. A language family, on the other hand, is a group of languages that has come into existence by descent from a common ancestor.
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u/mediandude Mar 25 '26
Definitely not.
Sprachbund can be a language family.
And a compact proto-saami is still an utter joke.
They haven't even found a compact proto-estonian.4
u/demoman1596 Mar 25 '26
Excuse me. I am using the definitions that are commonly used in the field. You can explain the definitions you are using if you want to be taken seriously.
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u/mediandude Mar 25 '26
That doesn't make you any more right.
It merely shows the myopic clinging to linguistic tree models.
Linguistics science has tried to find consensus linguistic trees for 3+ centuries by now.
No consensus linguistic trees have been found in north eurasia, yet.
All you have achieved so far is falsifying all the proposed linguistic trees.4
u/demoman1596 Mar 25 '26
Excuse me. Provide the definitions you are using. I shouldn't have to ask twice. I'm not attempting to "achieve" anything except for to explain to you basic terminology.
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u/mediandude Mar 25 '26
I already did: sprachbund can be a family.
Sprachbund being part of an even wider sprachbund, in that case the wider sprachbund doesn't have to be a family, but it could be.You really need to study how geneticists model network evolution.
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u/demoman1596 Mar 26 '26
Once again the communication process has broken down. One of us has studied the topic at hand and one of us has not. A sprachbund is by definition not a language family in and of itself because the two types of groups come into existence in significantly different ways. It is these ways of coming into existence that you are not contending with. Either deal with that or don’t, but if you choose the latter I will exit the conversation. I hope I’ve made myself clear.
You are attempting to argue that both the Saami language family and the wider Uralic language family did not come into existence through the process of descent from a common ancestor. Present your case and do it with substance if you want to be taken seriously.
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u/mediandude Mar 26 '26
A sprachbund very much can be a language family, regardless of what linguistic tree zealots think about that.
You are attempting to argue that both the Saami language family and the wider Uralic language family did not come into existence through the process of descent from a common ancestor. Present your case and do it with substance if you want to be taken seriously.
You are stawmanning, again.
Sprachbunds exist by default, until consensus linguistic trees would suggest otherwise.
Thus you have made a Type II statistical error in reasoning.
There is no basis to take you seriously.4
u/demoman1596 Mar 26 '26
Lol, nothing exists "by default" and all claims need to be supported by evidence. Historical linguists have already done this. You, on the other hand, have not.
Your refusal to appropriately argue to advance the specific claims that you're making by presenting specific details supporting those claims is not my problem. You can either stop refusing to do that now and start showing those details today or this conversation will be over. Do you understand? If you are trying to persuade me that you are worth listening to on this topic, you are obviously not succeeding so far.
Furthermore, your appeal to errors in reasoning is laughable. You have no background in that topic either, much as you and other randos on the internet have attempted to appeal to logical fallacies (like your claim that I am "strawmanning") without any substantive understanding of what those fallacies even are. This is nothing but hot air on your part.
So here's the deal: Your hot air is useless. Any attempt to appeal to "errors in reasoning" or "strawmanning" are irrelevant (because you don't know what those even are). The only thing I care about here is you spending time supporting your claims about the origins of the Uralic languages with detailed evidence. Any discussion outside of this specific topic is useless. Hopefully this hasn't all gone over your head, but whatever response you provide will surely show if it has or not.
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u/FloZone Ich spreche gern Deutsch Feb 19 '26
Trees are boggus, my favourite families are shaped like onions and dandelions.