The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics

In this detailed survey of Finnish, Hungarian, Lapp and the other Uralic languages, Angela Marcantonio demonstrates that there is on fact no scientific evidence to support the belief that they form a genetic family. Aimed a general linguists as well as Uralic specialists, this book examines the history, phonology, morphology, lexicon and onomastics of the Uralic language. Her detailed analysis contributes to the ongoing debate surrounding the suitability of the Comparative Methods and its alternatives to establish language relations, and will have far–reaching consequences for other assumed language families.

Acknowledgements.

List of Tables.

List of Figures.

Abbreviations.

Grammatical Abbreviations.

Abbreviations of Mjor Journals and Dictionaries.

Transcription and References.

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.

Appendices.

Notes.

References.

Indexes.

Angela Marcantonio is lecturer in General Linguistics specialising in Uralic studies, at the University of Rome ′La Sapienza′.

" The Handbook of contemporary syntactic theology is an outstanding reference book and I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in theoretical syntax." Journal of Linguistics