Migracijske teme 15 (1999), 1-2: 63-153 UDK: 809.45-0 Izvorni znanstveni rad Primljeno: 17. 11. 1998. Paolo Agostini University of Padova
[email protected] LANGUAGE RECONSTRUCTION – APPLIED TO THE URALIC LANGUAGES* SUMMARY 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 recon- structed 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 lan- guages unknown in present day are possible candidates. A large number of bases of the Uralic word- stock 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.