High-frequency contrastive grammar features of the Uralic languages
Vladimir N. Polyakov – Elena A. Makarova– Ekaterina S. Paramoshko
DOI: 10.18355/XL.2018.11.01.15
Abstract. The present article is dedicated to the detection of the ancestral homeland of the Uralic languages and their relevant features. Linguistic geophylogeny used within the framework of the research allowed proving the “Eastern” hypothesis on their ancestral homeland. The method of contrastive queries based on the LangFam program and the database “Languages of the World” defined a set of relevant features of the Uralic languages. Their dominating word order “subject-verb-object” was proved to be non-genealogic. The research found a high correlation between the word order and the number of cases in the Uralic languages. The possible ways of the Uralic people’s migration and the linguistic contacts appearing during their settlement were studied.
Keywords: Uralic languages, contrastive queries, word order, linguistic geophylogeny, “Languages of the World” database, LangFam