Finno-Ugric languages

"Russia has a long history of repressing Finno-Ugric nations; but since Putin began his expanded war in Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin has intensified this effort to the point where one can now say Moscow is seeking to kill off these nations by depriving them of their languages and their contacts with Finno-Ugric countries abroad, [Estonian deputy] Juku-Kalle Raid says."

"The earliest layer of Indo-Iranian borrowing consists of common Indo-Iranian, Proto-Indo-Aryan and Proto-Iranian words relating to three cultural spheres: economic production, social relations and religious beliefs. Economic terms comprise words for domestic animals (sheep, ram, Bactrian camel, stallion, colt, piglet, calf), pastoral processes and products (udder, skin, wool, cloth, spinner), farming (grain, awn, beer, sickle), tools (awl, whip, horn, hammer or mace), metal (ore) and, probably, ladder (or bridge). A large group of loanwords reflects social relations (man, sister, orphan, name) and includes such important Indo-Iranian terms like dāsa ̳non- Aryan, alien, slave‘ and asura ̳god, master, hero‘. Finally a considerable number of the borrowed words reflect religious beliefs and practices: heaven, below (the nether world), god/happiness, vajra/ ̳Indra‘s weapon‘, dead/mortal, kidney (organ of the body used in the Aryan burial ceremony). There are also terms related to ecstatic drinks used by Indo-Iranian priests as well as Finno-Ugric shamans: honey, hemp and fly-agaric."

"The name and cult of the Bactrian camel were borrowed by the Finno-Ugric speakers from the Indo-Iranians in ancient times."

"Another problem is how to account for Indo-Iranian isolates which have been borrowed into Uralic [...which form part of...] the new vocabulary, which most probably was acquired by the Indo-Iranians in Central Asia."

"The case of Finno-Ugric deserves a separate treatment, but we can already say that the exchanges were hardly “mutual”: it was a one-way traffic with hundreds of words adopted by Finno-Ugric from Indo-Iranian, most of them from plain Iranian but some also from an earlier stage of Indo-Iranian development. If the early Indo-Iranians had traversed Finno-Ugric territory on their way southeast to Afghanistan and beyond, and had such an intimate contact with the natives as to impart that many words to them, one should expect them in turn also to have borrowed a lot from their hosts. In the extant lists proposing Indo-Iranian exchanges with Finno-Ugric, in all a few hundreds, we can hardly find a handful of attempts (notably Blažek 2005) to claim, let alone prove, an arrow from Finno-Ugric and into Indo-Iranian... Haarmann is aware that hundreds of IE, mainly Iranian words have entered the lexicon of the Uralic languages. He acknowledges that the Uralic tribe names in Russia are Iranian. But then he makes an observation that, while uncontroversial, upsets the whole steppe homeland theory: “Lexical borrowing was unidirectional, from Indo-European to Uralic.” This off-hand assertion summing up the professional communis opinio is actually strong proof against any East-European Homeland scenario. ... As I too have asserted in my book Update on the Aryan Invasion Theory, it “was a one-way traffic”. At the time, I still didn’t realize the straightforward simplicity of the only conclusion allowed by this one-way borrowing. The point was made at greater length and more forcefully by Shrikant Talageri... He concludes that an AIT scenario would have shown up as a string of Uralic loans into Indo-Iranian. By contrast, the present scenario of a one-way imparting of loans from Indo-Iranian to Uralic is only compatible with a wayward and peripheral section of the Indo-Iranians settled in Uralic-speaking areas imparting their vocabulary, and perhaps also borrowing some words but not communicating them back to their linguistic heartland."

"Misra draws attention to one rather significant feature regarding these loanwords, which he believes is decisive in determining the direction of language flow corresponding to Indo-Aryan movements: the loans are from Indo-Iranian into Finno-Ugric. There are no loans from Finno- Ugric into Indo-Iranian. This is a crucial point. Misra argues that had the Indo-Iranians been neighbors with the Finno-Ugrians in the regions to the north of the Caspian Sea for so many centuries, then both languages would have borrowed from each other. If the Indo-Iranians, as per the standard view of things, had, then, journeyed on toward their historic destinations in the East, they should have brought some Finno-Ugric loans with them in their lexicons, at least a few of which should reasonably be expected to have surfaced in the earliest textual sources of India and Iran. But, as Burrow noted some time ago, it is usually quite clear that these words have been borrowed by Finno- Ugric from Indo-Iranian and not vice versa (1973b, 26).10"

"What really matters is the fact that there are no proto-lndo-European loanwords in Uralic (or Finno-Ugric) and no Uralic or Finno-Ugric loans in Proto-Indo-European. It strongly suggests that there was no territorial vicinity between Proto-Indo-European and proto-Uralic or proto-Finno-Ugric, that is that Proto-Indo-European was not spoken in or near the Volga or Ural region, including the steppes to the North of the Caspian Sea (Gimbutas's "Indo- European homeland")."