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Ural–Altaic Languages
Ural-Altaic, Uralo-Altaic, Uraltaic, or Turanic is a linguistic convergence zone and abandoned language-family proposal uniting the Uralic and the Altaic (in the narrow sense) languages. It is now generally agreed that even the Altaic languages do not share a common descent: the similarities between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic are better explained by diffusion and borrowing. Just as in Altaic, the internal structure of the Uralic family has been debated since the family was first proposed. Doubts about the validity of most or all of the proposed higher-order Uralic branchings (grouping the nine undisputed families) are becoming more common. The term continues to be used for the central Eurasian typological, grammatical and lexical convergence zone. Indeed, "Ural-Altaic" may be preferable to "Altaic" in this sense. For example, J. Janhunen states that "speaking of 'Altaic' instead of 'Ural-Altaic' is a misconception, for there are no areal or typological features that are ...
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Eurasia
Eurasia ( , ) is a continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. According to some geographers, Physical geography, physiographically, Eurasia is a single supercontinent. The concept of Europe and Asia as distinct continents dates back to classical antiquity, antiquity, but their borders have historically been subject to change. For example, the ancient Greeks originally included Africa in Asia but classified Europe as separate land. Eurasia is connected to Africa at the Suez Canal, and the two are sometimes combined to describe the largest contiguous landmass on Earth, Afro-Eurasia. History Eurasia has been the host of many ancient civilizations, including those based in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley and China. In the Axial Age (mid-first millennium BCE), a continuous belt of civilizations stretched through the Eurasian Subtropics, subtropical zone from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This belt became the mainstream of world history for two millennia. ...
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Scythian
The Scythians ( or ) or Scyths (, but note Scytho- () in composition) and sometimes also referred to as the Pontic Scythians, were an ancient Eastern Iranian equestrian nomadic people who had migrated during the 9th to 8th centuries BC from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe in modern-day Ukraine and Southern Russia, where they remained established from the 7th century BC until the 3rd century BC. Skilled in mounted warfare, the Scythians replaced the Agathyrsi and the Cimmerians as the dominant power on the western Eurasian Steppe in the 8th century BC. In the 7th century BC, the Scythians crossed the Caucasus Mountains and frequently raided West Asia along with the Cimmerians. After being expelled from West Asia by the Medes, the Scythians retreated back into the Pontic Steppe in the 6th century BC, and were later conquered by the Sarmatians in the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC. By the 3rd century AD, last remnants of the Scythians were overwhelmed by the Goths, and by th ...
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Hungary
Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and Slovenia to the southwest, and Austria to the west. Hungary lies within the drainage basin of the Danube, Danube River and is dominated by great lowland plains. It has a population of 9.6 million, consisting mostly of ethnic Hungarians, Hungarians (Magyars) and a significant Romani people in Hungary, Romani minority. Hungarian language, Hungarian is the Languages of Hungary, official language, and among Languages of Europe, the few in Europe outside the Indo-European languages, Indo-European family. Budapest is the country's capital and List of cities and towns of Hungary, largest city, and the dominant cultural and economic centre. Prior to the foundation of the Hungarian state, various peoples settled in the territory of present-day Hun ...
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Turanian Languages
Turanian is an obsolete language-family proposal subsuming most of the languages of Eurasia not included in Indo-European, Semitic and Chinese. During the 19th century, inspired by the establishment of the Indo-European family, scholars looked for similarly widespread families elsewhere. Building on the work of predecessors such as Rasmus Rask and Matthias Castrén, Max Müller proposed the Turanian grouping primarily on the basis of the incidence of agglutinative morphology, naming it after Turan, an ancient Persian term for the lands of Central Asia. The languages he included are now generally assigned to nine separate language families. Classification In 1730, von Strahlenberg, relying on structural similarities of languages, proposed a group of "Tatar languages" spanning northern and central Eurasia and the languages of the Caucasus. In 1832, Rask added Basque and languages of Greenland and North America to von Strahlenberg's grouping, labelling the resulting group the " ...
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Friedrich Max Müller
Friedrich may refer to: Names *Friedrich (given name), people with the given name ''Friedrich'' *Friedrich (surname), people with the surname ''Friedrich'' Other *Friedrich (board game), a board game about Frederick the Great and the Seven Years' War * ''Friedrich'' (novel), a novel about anti-semitism written by Hans Peter Richter *Friedrich Air Conditioning, a company manufacturing air conditioning and purifying products *, a German cargo ship in service 1941-45 See also *Friedrichs (other) *Frederick (other) *Nikolaus Friedreich Nikolaus Friedreich (1 July 1825 in Würzburg – 6 July 1882 in Heidelberg) was a German pathologist and neurologist, and a third generation physician in the Friedreich family. His father was psychiatrist Johann Baptist Friedreich (1796–18 ... {{disambig ja:フリードリヒ ...
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Samoyedic Languages
The Samoyedic () or Samoyed languages () are spoken around the Ural Mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by approximately 25,000 people altogether, accordingly called the Samoyedic peoples. They derive from a common ancestral language called Proto-Samoyedic, and form a branch of the Uralic languages. Having separated perhaps in the last centuries BC, they are not a diverse group of languages, and are traditionally considered to be an outgroup, branching off first from the other Uralic languages. Etymology The term ''Samoyedic'' is derived from the Russian term ''samoyed'' () originally applied only to the Nenets people and later extended to other related peoples. One of the theories supposes that the term is interpreted by some ethnologists as originating somewhat derogatorily from Russian ''samo-yed'', literally meaning "self-eater" (the word has been interpreted by foreign travelers as an allegation of cannibalism). Another suggestion for the term's origin is a corrup ...
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Finno-Ugric Languages
Finno-Ugric () is a traditional linguistic grouping of all languages in the Uralic language family except for the Samoyedic languages. Its once commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is based on criteria formulated in the 19th century and is criticized by contemporary linguists such as Tapani Salminen and Ante Aikio. The three most spoken Uralic languages, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, are all included in Finno-Ugric. The term ''Finno-Ugric'', which originally referred to the entire family, is occasionally used as a synonym for the term ''Uralic'', which includes the Samoyedic languages, as commonly happens when a language family is expanded with further discoveries. Before the 20th century, the language family might be referred to as ''Finnish'', ''Ugric'', ''Finno-Hungarian'' or with a variety of other names. The name ''Finno-Ugric'' came into general use in the late 19th or early 20th century. Status The validity of Finno-Ugric as a phylogenic grouping is ...
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Matthias Castrén
Matthias Alexander Castrén (2 December 1813 – 7 May 1852) was a Finnish Swedish ethnologist and philologist who was a pioneer in the study of the Uralic languages. He was an educator, author and linguist at the University of Helsinki. Castrén is known for his research in the linguistics and ethnography of the Northern Eurasian peoples. Early life Castrén was born at Tervola, in northern Finland. His father, Christian Castrén, the parish priest and vicar in Rovaniemi, died in 1825. Castrén passed under the protection of his uncle, Matthias Castrén. At the age of twelve, he was sent to school at Oulu. On entering the Alexander University in Helsinki (now the University of Helsinki) in 1828, he first devoted himself to Greek and Hebrew with the intention of entering the church, but his interest was soon excited by the Finnish language, and even before his course was completed, he began to lay the foundations of a work on Finnish mythology. He received his bachelor's degr ...
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Rasmus Christian Rask
Rasmus Kristian Rask (; born Rasmus Christian Nielsen Rasch; 22 November 1787 – 14 November 1832) was a Danish linguist and philologist. He wrote several grammars and worked on comparative phonology and morphology. Rask traveled extensively to study languages, first to Iceland, where he wrote the first grammar of Icelandic, and later to Russia, Persia, India, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Shortly before his death, he was hired as professor of Eastern languages at the University of Copenhagen. Rask is especially known for his contributions to comparative linguistics, including an early formulation of what would later be known as Grimm's Law. He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1829. Early life Rask was born to Niels Hansen Rasch and Birthe Rasmusdatter in the village of Brændekilde near Odense on the Danish island of Funen. His father, a smallholder and tailor, was well-read and had a decently-sized book collection. As a child, Rask's scholastic a ...
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Merritt Ruhlen
Merritt Ruhlen (May 10, 1944 – January 29, 2021) was an American linguist who worked on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. Amongst other linguists, Ruhlen's work was recognized as standing outside the mainstream of comparative-historical linguistics. He was the principal advocate and defender of Joseph Greenberg's approach to language classification. Biography Born Frank Merritt Ruhlen, 1944, Ruhlen studied at Rice University, the University of Paris, the University of Illinois and the University of Bucharest. He received his PhD in 1973 from Stanford University with a dissertation on the generative analysis of Romanian morphology. Subsequently, Ruhlen worked for several years as a research assistant on the Stanford Universals Project, directed by Joseph Greenberg and Charles Ferguson. From 1994, he was a lecturer in Anthropological Sciences and Human Biology at Stanford and co-director, along with Murray ...
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Nicholas Poppe
Nicholas Poppe (; 8 August 18978 June 1991) was a Russian linguist and Nazi collaborator. He is also known as Nikolaus Poppe, with his first name in its German form. He is often cited as N.N. Poppe in academic publications. Poppe was a leading specialist in the Mongolic languages and the hypothetical (and controversial) Altaic language family to which the Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic languages are supposed to belong. Poppe was open-minded toward the inclusion of Korean in Altaic, but regarded the evidence for the inclusion of Korean as weaker than that for the inclusion of Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic. Life Poppe was born on in Yantai, Shandong, China. Poppe's father was stationed in China as a consular officer in the Russian diplomatic service. Poppe's boyhood and youth were marked by wars: the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, and the Russian Civil War, which was followed by the establishment of the Soviet regime. Later, he experienced Stalin ...
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Otto Donner
Otto Donner (15 December 1835, Kokkola – 17 September 1909, Helsinki) was a Finnish linguist and politician. Biography He was professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Indo-European linguistics at the University of Helsinki, but also studied the Finno-Ugric languages. He was a member of the Diet of Finland 1877–1905, and minister of education 1905–1908. He was also influential in the founding of the Finno-Ugrian Society in 1883. He was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1886. His mother tongue was Swedish, but he was a fennoman by conviction. He had many children: Ossian, Otto Jr., Uno, Kai, Harry and Eva Louise. He is buried in the Hietaniemi Cemetery in Helsinki. See also *Donner family The Donner family is one of the renowned and wealthy Swedish-speaking Finns, Finland-Swedish families that grew in importance during the times of the Grand Duchy of Finland. Family members have been influential in Finland, Finnish politics and cul ... * Ott ...
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