Samoyed-Tungusic contacts: etymological re-evaluation
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
Dated to ~0 AD, Proto-Samoyed (a sub-family of Uralic) and Proto-Tungusic are both two millennia old. While Proto-Samoyed was spoken near the Minusinsk Basin (Хелимский [1989] 2000), Proto-Tungusic can be placed in southern Manchuria and northern Korea (Janhunen 2023: 529), their homelands affixed by Turkic and Amuric loanwords, respectively. This would put them at about 3500-kilometer distance, excluding the possibility of direct contact. Thus, there is a need to re-evaluate the entire corpus of loans by (Аникин & Хелимский 2007).
The emerging picture of Samoyed-Tungusic contacts gives insights into the linguistic map of northern Eurasia during the last millennium. Evenki expanded into western Siberia at a marvelling speed, while Samoyed languages had by then already reached their peak expansion. Samoyed and Tungusic possess a number of common traits due to, in chronological order, 1) areal inheritance, 2) loanwords between individual Samoyed languages and Siberian Evenki, and 3) shared sociolinguistic context as minority languages encompassed by very large ‘superpowers.’
Out of the three ‘core Altaic’ language families, only Turkic can be demonstrated to have had direct contacts with Samoyed on the proto-language level. However, there are a few Proto-Samoyed items that have a conspicuously wide spread in Eurasia but lack a clear etymology, such as *moә̑ ‘branch’ and *t[i/ü]rämä ‘fish roe.’ These may represent parallel loans from an unknown language family, a promising topic in Altaic language history.
References
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- Аникин, А. Е. & Хелимский, Е. А. 2007. Самодийско-тунгусо-маньчжурские лексические связы. Москва: Языки славянской культуры.
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