Studies in Uralic vocalism II: Reflexes of Proto-Uralic *a in Samoyed, Mansi and Permic

Kirill Reshetnikov (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), cyrilreshe@yandex.ru); Mikhail Zhivlov (Russian State University for the Humanities, zhivlov@gmail.com)

Journal of Language Relationship, № 5, 2011 - p.96-109

Abstract: The paper presents a set of rules that explain the complementary distribution of the reflexes of alleged Proto-Uralic vowels *i̮ and *å in Proto-Samoyed, Proto-Mansi and Proto-Permic. Our aim is to show that the reconstruction of one vowel *a instead of these two phonemes is sufficient for the explanation of all the reflexes in the languages under consideration.

Keywords: Uralic languages, Finno-Ugric languages, Samoyed languages, Mansi language, Komi language, Udmurt language, comparative phonology, linguistic reconstruction, Proto-Uralic vocalism

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