The State of the Art of Uralic Studies: Tradition Vs Innovation
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41 Convegni Studi umanistici – Philologica The state of the art of Uralic studies: tradition vs innovation edited by Angela Marcantonio University Press Collana Convegni 41 Studi umanistici Serie Philologica The state of the art of Uralic studies: tradition vs innovation Proceedings of the ‘Padua Uralic seminar’ University of Padua, November 11-12, 2016 edited by Angela Marcantonio 2018 Studi umanistici Serie Philologica The state of the art of Uralic studies: tradition vs innovation Proceedings of the ‘Padua Uralic seminar’ University of Padua, November 11-12, 2016 edited by Angela Marcantonio 2018 Copyright © 2018 Sapienza Università Editrice Piazzale Aldo Moro 5 – 00185 Roma www.editricesapienza.it [email protected] Iscrizione Registro Operatori Comunicazione n. 11420 ISBN 978-88-9377-066-8 Pubblicato ad aprile 2018 Quest’opera è distribuita con licenza Creative Commons 3.0 diffusa in modalità open access. In copertina: The Uralic Languages Map. Index Preface vii Introduction (Angela Marcantonio) 1 A ‘steppe nomadic culture’ vs a ‘forest language’: Modern identity dissonance in the history of the Magyars 21 Giuseppe Cossuto Information Structuring and typology: Finnic and Samic word order revisited through the prism of orality 33 M.M. Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest Issues of comparative Uralic and Altaic Studies (4): On the origin of the Uralic comparative marker 49 Juha Janhunen Revisiting the theory of the Hungarian vs Chuvash lexical parallels 59 László Marácz Are the Hungarians Ugric? 87 Borbála Obrusánszky The impossibility of the evolutionary metaphor: Neogrammarians, family trees and linguistic affinity 107 Péter Pomozi Differential Object marking in Eastern Mari and Permic: A look from the field 129 Natalia Serdobolskaya vi The state of the art of Uralic studies: tradition vs innovation The ‘impossible’ Comparison between the Creatures and Figures of the Hungarian Folklore and the Finnish Mythology 157 Elisa Zanchetta Contributors and abstracts 167 Preface This volume contains the Proceedings of the ‘Uralic Studies’ Seminar, titled: The State of the Art of Uralic Studies: Tradition vs Innovation, held in Padua (~ Padova, Italy), November 12-13, 2016. The seminar was part of an ongoing series of seminars, conferences and workshops, or- ganized by the Department of ‘Studi Linguistici e Letterari (DiSLL)’ of Padua University, precisely by the ‘Chair of Hungarian Language and Literature’, directed by Professor Cinzia Franchi. The topics of the various past (and future) seminars always revolve, obviously, around ‘Hungarian’ as a pivotal theme, however much diverse they may be. The 2016 Seminar has been organized by Cinzia Franchi – support- ed by her Department, Head Department Professor Anna Bettoni – in cooperation with Angela Marcantonio, Professor of ‘Linguistics, Fin- no-Ugric & Hungarian Studies’ at Sapienza University of Rome – with the support of her Department of ‘Scienze Documentarie, Linguisti- co-filologiche e Geografiche’, under the direction of Professor Giovan- ni Solimine, as well as the ‘Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia’, under the direction of the ‘Preside’, Professor Stefano Asperti. We wish to thank the speakers, who have willingly and generously accepted our invitation, as well as the various institutions that have offered us this great opportunity, supporting and sponsoring our ‘joint venture’, that is, as mentioned, the University of Padua and Rome ‘La Sapienza’ (and related Departments / Faculties), as well as CISUECO, that is: ‘Centro Internazionale di Studi Ungheresi e sulla Europa Cen- tro Orientale’. To give a detailed and precise record of the time, the venue, and the talks that took place, and other relevant items of information, we include the original program of the seminar itself. viii The state of the art of Uralic studies: tradition vs innovation We hope that the topics and related debates of our Seminar will raise much interest and further stimulating debates and research re- garding Hungarian and the other Uralic languages. We also hope that this series of seminars and conferences may continue (perhaps by or- ganizing, again as a joint venture, another Uralic seminar in the near future), with the purpose of bringing together scholars approaching Uralic studies from different angles and perspectives, against the back- ground of a fully interdisciplinary approach. Cinzia Franchi Program of the seminar FRIDAY 11 I SESSION – 10.00‐13.30 Welcoming notes SERGIO BOZZOLA (Deputy) Head Department, University of Padua CINZIA FRANCHI University of Padua Introduction: overview and purpose of the conference ANGELA MARCANTONIO University of Rome “La Sapienza” The state of the art of Uralic studies: tradition vs innovation (an overview) BORBÁLA OBRUSÁNZKY Budapest: Károli Gáspár University Are the Hungarians Ugrians? GIUSEPPE COSSUTO Cluj/Kolozsvár: The Institute of Turkish and Central Asian Studies - Babeș- Bolyai University A ‘steppe nomadic culture’ vs a ‘forest language’: a modern identity dissonance in the history of the magyars 12.45 QUESTION TIME 13.30 LUNCH BREAK Preface ix II SESSION – 15.00‐19.00 ELISA ZANCHETTA PhD, University of Florence The impossible comparison between the creatures and figures of the Hungarian folklore and the Finnish mythology NATALIA SERDOBOLSKAYA Moscow: Russian State University for the Humanities Differential Object marking in Permic, Mari and Erzya-Mordvin 16.15‐16.45 QUESTION TIME M.M. JOCELYNE FERNANDEZ‐VEST Paris: CNRS; Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Information Structuring and typology: Finnic and Samic word order revisited through the prism of orality 17.15‐17.30 COFFEE BREAK TAPANI SALMINEN University of Helsinki The background of grammatical parallels between Finnic and Samoyed 18.15‐19.00 QUESTION TIME SATURDAY 12 III SESSION – 10.00‐13.30 LÁSZLÓ MARÁCZ University of Amsterdam; L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University West Old Turkic as a phantom-category: the Hungarian substrate of Chuvash JUHA JANHUNEN University of Helsinki Proto-Uralic derivational issues PÉTER POMOZI Budapest: Eötvös Loránd University The impossibility of the evolutionary metaphor: Newgrammarians, family trees and linguistic affinity 12.15‐13.00 QUESTION TIME THE ORGANIZERS Cinzia Franchi Angela Marcantonio x The state of the art of Uralic studies: tradition vs innovation Introduction 1. The state of the art 1.1. Nowadays there is plenty of interesting (mainly synchronic) studies on the Uralic (U) languages, based on modern linguistic theories and approaches, including: the sounds of the U languages from the point of view of modern phonological and prosodic stud- ies; new approaches to morphology and morpho-phonology; argu- ment structure, word order and information structuring; differential object marking; U languages and linguistic universals; U languag- es from a cognitive perspective; U languages and ‘Tense, Mood & Aspect’ structure (so-called TAM); ‘corpus linguistics’ approach, non-finite subordinate construction (NFC) / patterns and ‘sententi- ality’ (a set of characteristic features possessed by NFCs), etc. Not to mention the recent results obtained in the field of ‘language-in-con- tact’, through the adoption of new methods of analysis (see below), etc. It is certainly the case that several linguistic phenomena (be- lieved to be specifically U) have become of general, theoretical inter- est, and one could apply to the U languages (and related research) what Helasvuo & Campbell (2006: 2 ff.) have stated with regard spe- cifically to Finnish: … we find numerous instances of Finnish examples playing significant roles in theoretical discussions of vowel harmony, gemination, meter, codeswitching, child language acquisition, language contact, loan- words, language change, word order, theoretical morphology, com- putational linguistics, morphological processing, case […], posses- sion, anaphora, metaphor […], null subjects, and typological issues of many sorts 2 The state of the art of Uralic studies: tradition vs innovation There are also recent volumes addressing the historico-political and socio-economical status of the U languages and people, such as Taagepera (1999): The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State, or Nanovfszky (ed. 2004): The Finno-Ugric World, volumes that also pro- vide geographical information about the U languages / peoples and related contact with U and non-U people. However, this recent waves of exciting research do not typically relate to, or touch upon, the topic of the origin and classification of the U languages, topic that, in fact, has remained on a much more ‘traditional’ footing: the conventional U family tree model – whose validity is generally taken for granted – keeps being re-proposed and promoted both within specialistic stud- ies and on the world stage, essentially unchanged, as if it were more of a ‘dogma’, than a model of analysis. As a matter of fact, the U theory is now about 200 years old, and alternative models (be they just more or less deep revisions, or rejection of the model altogether) have sprung up numerously through the years, as shown in the following article by Salminen (1999): Problems in the taxonomy of the U languages in the light of modern comparative studies (see also Marcantonio (2002; chapter 2.) for an outline of various, alternative models). However, regrettably, these ‘dissonant voices’ do not appear to have had much of an impact on more traditional views. 1.2. A similar situation can be found in the field of ‘language-in-con- tact’, including ‘diachronic contact and change’. There are many studies that