Sahala, Aleksi; Koskenniemi, Kimmo (2013). Sumerin ja uralilaisten kielten sukulaishypoteesin testaus kieliteknologian menetelmin. Concluding report submitted to The Finnish Cultural Foundation
Type: Descriptive notes
Topics: Comparative linguistics
Language/dialect: Sumerian
Methods: Finite-state (Foma); TWOL
Abstract: This report presents (A) results on applying finite-state methods to test the consistency of S. Parpola's Proto-Sumerian reconstructions and their alleged relation to Uralic languages, and (B) a critical analysis of S. Parpola's etymologies. Of the 2624 suggested etymologies, 73 featured regular sound correspondeces with at least one minimal pair and had an alleged cognate in both, West and East Uralic. However, taking into account several other uncertainties such as possible borrowings, questionable semantic relations and the vocabulary that is traditionally not reconstructed beyond Proto-Finnic (i.e. not into Uralic or even Permic), at least 45 of these etymologies have to be likely discarded. Although the remaining 28 etymologies show varying degree plausibility, the report concludes that the hypothesis of genealogical relationship between Uralic and Sumerian languages cannot be reliably confirmed on basis of the lexical evidence presented at the time using computational models. Nonetheless, the study shows that finite-state machines as concatenated rewrite rules are very useful for modeling and evaluating phonological change between various development stages of languages, whereas the parallelly applied TWOL rules are significantly more difficult to implement unless the languages are closely related.