Studying the Uralic proto-language

[Current article is a free translation of my recent Finnish article "Uralilaisen kantakielen tutkiminen", published in Tieteessä tapahtuu 1 / 2006. Unfortunately all my sources are not available in English.]

In Tieteessä tapahtuu 7 / 2005 Kalevi Wiik presented a fresh study about the genes of English population. At the end of his text Wiik repeated his belief in the theory according to which the very first post-Glacial population in England spoke Uralic proto-language. I would like to clarify a few points about Proto-Uralic and the means of studying it for the readers (nowadays also "Finno-Ugric" often points to the Uralic language family as a whole). I try to keep my presentation as clear and understandable as possible, so that even the readers unaware of the discipline concerned could follow my argumentation.

One of the basic principles of science is that every object is studied by the methods proper and relevant for that particular object. Consequently, language is studied by linguistics, material culture is studied by archaeology and genes are studied by genetics. Because language, for example, is not connected to any particular gene, we cannot study the language by the methods of genetics: there is no gene that would determine the language we speak.

This is probably not a surprise. And still there are scholars who think they can act differently. Kalevi Wiik, for example, thinks that because we can't reach the most distant times by the methods of linguistics, we must turn to the methods of other disciplines - such as genetics and archaeology - in order to study the linguistic situation in the distant past (Wiik 2002: 23). Later in this paper we will see that material culture and genes have a few similarities in the mechanism of their heritage, so I bundle them up together under the one and same method, just like Wiik himself does.

Now the elementary question is, is it possible to get reliable information about the linguistic past by the method used by Wiik, namely by following the genetic and/or archaeological continuity back in time.

Reliability of the method

This sounds logical so far, doesn't it? Even though the conclusions about language has been made by the means of other disciplines than linguistics. But let's see what other results has been gained with the similar method.

By pleading the archaeological and/or genetic continuity, the original area of Proto-Indo-European has been "proved" to locate in India, Caucasus, Middle-Asia, Anatolia, Ukraine and Central Europe (see Mallory 1989: 143-185). Respectively the same method has been used to "prove" that the original Proto-Uralic area must be located in Siberia (Kosinskaja 2001), Upper Volga (Carpelan 2000) and Central Europe (Wiik 2002).

Naturally all these testimonies cannot be true, because the original area of every proto-language has been narrow (I'll return to this later). Not only the place, but also the time concerned is contradictory: Indo-European continuity in Central Europe has been "proved" to reach Neolithic (Renfrew 1987) and Palaeolithic Age (Makkay 2001), and Uralic continuity in Finland has been "proved" to reach Neolithic (Meinander 1984) and Mesolithic Age (Nuñez 1987).

And above all, the results gained by this method are contradictory also concerning the linguistic identity: the Late Palaeolithic inhabitation of Central Europe has been "proved" both as Indo-European (Makkay 2001) and Uralic (Wiik 2002).

In short: this method (making conclusions about language by the means of other disciplines than linguistics) is most unreliable and thus totally worthless. But why the method is so unreliable?

Explanation

Genetic continuity is also evident everywhere; the only exception would be an area, where the earlier people would have been disappeared totally before the arrival of new inhabitants. Only then there would be a clear discontinuity in archaeological and genetic data (if only there were any remains later to compare to).

One archaeological culture can be multi-rooted, so that influences have flown from the different directions (one item type from here, another from there), and similarly the genetic roots of a person is in theory doubled in every generation (with the exception of paternal and maternal lineage, which I shall discuss later on).

Language is, however, a different case: language is always one-rooted. This means that a child adopts one of the languages spoken around him as his mother tongue. This language has always only one root: the root of Finnish leads to Proto-Uralic, and the root of Swedish leads to Proto-Indo-European. Later alien features cannot change the genetic identity of language. Even though Finnish has a plenty of common words and structures with Swedish, it is still a Uralic language. (Laakso 1995.)

A language is "born" so that at the certain area there occurs enough changes, which differentiate a vernacular from the other, spoken by neighbours. It seldom happens that the result is a sharp boundary between two areally close vernaculars - because people are in contact with each other and might adopt certain features from their neighbours. The "languagezation" rather occurs via the disappearance of intermediary dialects. If, for example, dialects 1 and 2 unite (adopt from each other all the features which used to separate them), the process results the growing difference and thus sharpening of the linguistic boundary between dialects 2 and 3. (Salminen 1999: 14; 2001: 385)

It follows, that a language is always "born" in a narrow area: the wider the area is, the more improbable is the occurring of a sharp boundary, because the distribution of the features does not match each other as easily as in a narrow area. Those who suggest, that the Proto-Uralic area has been wide, ignore this linguistic law: Proto-Uralic must have been "born" in a narrow area (Janhunen 1999: 34). And those who suggest, that Proto-Uralic was a mixed language born as a result of intensive areal contacts, ignore this very same law: also the contact languages are born in a narrow area.

The prehistory of Finland is full of influences from different directions at different times. All these have left traces in local cultures: some more, some less. And still the Finnish language has only one root, which leads to Proto-Uralic.

Thus it follows that when we try to solve with which cultural or genetic wave of influence the Uralic language could be connected, we are merely in the lap of Fortune. As we have seen, one scholar thinks the Uralic language has spread to Finland along with the original inhabitants, while the other thinks it is connected with the Neolithic Combed Ware. It is simply impossible to get any reliable information about language merely by the methods of archaeology or genetics.

Even the one-rooted genetic father and mother lineages cannot help us. There are no single Finnish lineages - all the Finns do not descent from the same foreparents. The Finnish father lineages point to a different directions, and so do the mother lineages. There is no way to find out with which lineage the Uralic language has spread here, so the name of the game here is, again, lottery.

Probability of success

Let's suppose that the Uralic language family consists of about 30 speech areas. Proto-Uralic was spoken in one of these areas (unless it was located outside of present-day Uralic area) - to all the other areas Uralic language has spread later. Because Proto-Uralic is a much later language than the end of Ice Age and it surely didn't spread to empty areas, in all these other 29 presently Uralic areas there must have occurred a language shift: the earlier inhabitants have abandoned their original languages and adopted Uralic language.

In all these 30 areas the archaeologically perceivable continuity is evident: it has also been used as an argument for locating the original Uralic area, as we saw in the beginning of this article. It follows that archaeological continuity corresponds with linguistic continuity only in one area, when in all the other 29 areas archaeological continuity corresponds with linguistic discontinuity and language shift. So the probability of success, when trying to locate the original Proto-Uralic area by the results of archaeology is 1/30, that is 3.33 %. So there is 96.67 % chance to fail.

No wonder then, that the results gained by this method are contradictory. And in the case of Wiik, who is searching the Proto-Uralic area even outside the known Uralic area, the chance of failing is even bigger.

Solution

Because Wiik wants to reach Proto-Uralic and because Proto-Uralic can be reached by the methods of comparative linguistics, it is evident that we take the linguistic results into consideration. After all, it seems reasonable that the linguistic past is best reached by the methods of linguistics - at least the object and the methods would now correspond each other. We surely wouldn't study a Neolithic remains by the linguistic methods, any more than the atmosphere of Venus by the methods of dentistry.

For example, linguistics can tell us what kind of language was spoken in the Central Europe before the Indo-Europeanization of the area. It has been found features, both phonological and lexical, from the aboriginal languages, which point to influence of non-Indo-European languages.

Wiik has also presented such substrate features in Proto-Germanic, Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic; he assumes that these features are due to Uralic influence originating from the process when the originally Uralic-speaking inhabitants learned Proto-Indo-European through the filter of their own language system (Wiik 1999).

However, such phonetic, prosodic and structural features may well be due to the internal development of language; and even if they were substrate features, nothing could prove that they were due to Uralic influence. Furthermore, many of the features presented by Wiik are too late to be Uralic. The hypothesis about the Uralic substrates features in Germanic has been disproved years ago (Kallio 1997b; Kallio, Koivulehto & Parpola 1998).

The lexical evidence is more reliable indicator of the identity of the substrate language: if those non-Indo-European words would be similar to Uralic words, this would truly be a strong proof for the Uralic identity of the language(s). Especially so, because some words are always very stable and the relation would be perceivable even after a very long divergence: for example, Finnish word "kala" 'fish' has cognate in the Samoyedic Forest Nenets language spoken in Siberia: "kal'a" 'fish' - although the languages concerned separated several thousands of years ago.

This is to say, that if the aboriginal languages of Central Europe would have been Uralic-related, these substrate words would be identifiable when compared to the present-day Uralic languages and the Proto-Uralic reconstructed via them.

It has been found out, that in a language-shift situation like the one Wiik supposes, particularly the vocabulary concerning local nature and geographical features is exposed to loaning (Saarikivi 2000). Accidentally, it has become clear that these ancient languages in Central Europe do not resemble Proto-Uralic the least - neither phonologically nor lexically (Kallio 1997a; 1997b; Schrijver 2001).

Thus linguistics has proved that Uralic-related languages were not present in Central Europe before Indo-European expansion; the local aboriginal languages were totally distinct. The original area of Proto-Uralic was not in Central Europe, nor it ever even reached there. Linguistics can also help us to solve the original Proto-Uralic temporal and spatial location more accurately; very comprehensive and clear guide to such a subject is "Suomalaisten esihistoria kielitieteen valossa" by Kaisa Häkkinen (Häkkinen 1996).

However, this is not a place to sport with the subject concerned - those interested in the question may study it by themselves. It is adequate to sum up that the linguistic evidence clearly points to eastern origin. Scholars are only arguing if the original area was west or east of Ural-mountains (Salminen 2001: 391; Janhunen 2000: 63). In addition, both Proto-Uralic and Proto-Indo-European seem to be much later languages than Wiik supposes, dated no earlier than fourth millennium BC (Kallio 1997a; Carpelan & Parpola 2001).

On the studies for origin

The method adopted by Wiik and many other scholars - to ignore the best argued linguistic evidence and instead rely on archaeology and/or genetics - has been revealed most unreliable. In scientific studies for origin we must always respect the autonomy of disciplines: if we study material culture, the results of archaeology must form the very basis; if we study language, the results of linguistics must form the basis.

In practice, applied in the Uralic studies, this means that when we have located the Proto-Uralic in time and space by linguistic methods, we may take archaeology along. This is done by finding such an archaeological culture, which happens to match the proto-language concerned by its time, place and direction of expansion. In short, we won't prefer lottery-method any more in search of the matching culture. This way Proto-Indo-European has been managed to locate in the Pontic steppes at the fourth millennium BC (Carpelan & Parpola 2001 with further references).

If it isn't done this way, but conclusions about language are made while ignoring the results of linguistics, we are not talking about scientific studies of origin. Then there remains two further options: if the results of linguistics even couldn't tell anything about the particular question, it is just a matter of guessing, probability of which being no more than a few percents. If, on the other hand, the results of linguistics would tell a lot about the subject (like in the Proto-Uralic case) but they are still ignored, it is merely a leap outside of science, to the world of fantasy (Saarikivi 2003).

There is no single interdisciplinary method, which could magically solve the problems of linguistic, genetic and cultural origin all by one. Every component of the origin must be studied by the methods matching the object, and only after this all the independent results can be connected as an interdisciplinary summary.

Consequently, the origin of Finns is not a coherent entity where we could proclaim, after finding the origin of one or two components, that the Origin is now resolved. Such a case would be possible only in the world where genes, culture and language were always inherited from one and same "homeland". There populations would have been born as "ready" packages in their original homeland, and they wouldn't receive any genetic, cultural or linguistic influence during their migration. Populations would all live in the vacuum of their own, inbreeding and lacking contacts with other populations. Naturally this is not the case in our world.

The origin of people is rather a multileveled and constantly changing puzzle, where the object of study is not identical neither in genetic, cultural nor linguistic level with the "same" people thousand years ago. The genetic roots of Finns lead to many differing directions, and the same goes with cultural roots. Yet our language is quite a late newcomer from east.

There is no contradiction in such a view, because the components of the origin are not interdependent: they function at totally different levels and thus even cannot contradict with each other. That someone has dark skin, does not automatically mean that his mother tongue could not be Finnish. Language, genes and culture do not actually meet at any level - they meet only in the artificial concept of "people" we use.

This is the very reason why every scholar who understands the origin of certain people as a one coherent object of study is automatically misled. There are many origins and they are totally independent. There is no way to solve the absolute origin of people, because there is no absolute origin at all. By linguistic study we reach only the linguistic origin, by genetic study only the origin of certain genetic feature and by archaeological study only the origin of certain feature of material culture.

Conclusion

Wiik sees the key question to be: "How has occurred such a situation, that some of the peoples linguistically related to Finns are not genetically related to them? How has occurred such a situation, that some of the peoples genetically related to Finns yet speak a language not related to Finnish?" (Wiik 2002: 28; my translation.)

Wiik answers, leaning to the method which has no match in unreliability and which ignores all the plausible results of linguistics, that all those peoples in Central Europe which are genetically related to Finns have earlier spoken Uralic language but later changed it for Indo-European one.

I, on the other hand, can answer just like anyone else scientifically studying for origin would answer: the first inhabitants of Finland after the last Ice Age arrived mainly from south, but later they shifted their language to the Uralic one, spreading from east. Traces of Palaeo-European languages earlier spoken in Central Europe have been reached, and those languages were definitely not Uralic.

I believe the reader is now, after this article, able to assess, which one of these answers is based on more reliable method and is thus scientifically more plausible.

[The arguments concerning the unreliability of "continuity"-method are of course relevant in Indo-European studies also; thus we can consider erroneous any urheimat-theory based on archaeological and/or genetic continuity and contradicting the most plausible linguistic evidence. This includes such recent theories like those of Colin Renfrew (1987), János Makkay (2001) and Mario Alinei (http://www.continuitas.com/intro.html). I'm sure the list would finally become very long, if someone was patient enough to collect all such theories.

I also recommend for all interested in the subject a critical article by J. P. Mallory concerning the "continuity card" argumentation (Mallory 2001) - it has been a major inspiration for this text.]

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Janhunen, Juha 1999: "Euraasian alkukodit". Pohjan poluilla. Suomalaisten juuret nykytutkimuksen mukaan. Toim. Paul Fogelberg. Bidrag till kännedom av Finlands natur och folk, 153. Helsinki 1999.
Janhunen, Juha 2000: "Reconstructing Pre-Proto-Uralic typology spanning the millennia of linguistic evolution". Congressus Nonus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum 7.-13.8.2000 Tartto.
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Mallory, J. P. 1989: In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Language, Archaeology and Myth. Thames and Hudson, London / England 1989.
Mallory, J. P. 2001: "Uralics and Indo-Europeans: Problems of time and space". Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations (toim. Carpelan et al.) SUST 242, Helsinki 2001.
Meinander, C. F. 1984: "Kivikautemme väestöhistoria". Suomen väestön esihistorialliset juuret. Bidrag till kännedom av Finlands natur och folk, 131. Helsinki 1984.
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Renfrew, Colin 1987: Archaeology and Language. The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England 1987.
Saarikivi, Janne 2000: "Kontaktilähtöinen kielenmuutos, substraatti ja substraattinimistö". Virittäjä 104, Helsinki 2000.
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Wiik, Kalevi 2002: Eurooppalaisten juuret. Atena, Jyväskylä 2002.

SUSA = Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran aikakauskirja
SUST = Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran toimituksia