Languages

The accent varies in position and quality. Finnish and Hun garian stress regularly the first syllable and Turkish the last. In Samoyedic and other idioms such as Ostyak it varies.

Morphology.

In the first place, no language of the group uses prefixes ; all the grammatical modifications expressed in Eng lish by prepositions (viz., to, on, of, for, etc.) are effected by means of suffixes. "I enter the house," is, in Hungarian, belepek a hciz-ba (hdz, "house"—ba, suffix meaning "into"). In a tale writ ten in Kazan Turkish we find: ber kes'e urmanya banyan dej, "a man went into the forest" (urman, "forest"-7a, "into"). The majority of the grammatical relations affecting words are there fore expressed by suffixes, which differ in form from language to language, but play the same role throughout. These suffixes are strengthened by post-positions: thus (Hungarian), egy fa alatt, "under a tree" (egy, "one, a," fa, "tree," alatt, "below").

The possessive case is formed by suffixes except in Mongolian and Tungus. Hungarian szem-e-m, "my eye" (stem, "eye" m, "my," with euphonic e) szemed, "thine eye" (-d, "thy, thine") ; szeme, "his eye" (-e, "his") ; szemfink, "our eye" (-fink, "our"), etc. Osmanli Turkish also has this form, ev-im, "my house" (ev "house," irn, "my") ; ev-in, "thy house" (-in, "thy") ; ev-i, "his house" (i, "his") ; evimiz, "our house" (-imiz, "our"), etc. This use of the possessive prefix is, however, comparatively modern, since it does not exist in Mongolian and Tungus and, further, since in Hungarian as in Turkish these suffixes are added directly to the root before other suffixes, while in other tongues (Finnish, Lapp, etc.) they follow all other suffixes. Compare Hungarian a hcizam ban, "in my house" and Turkish (Osmanli), evimde (idem) with Finnish kodassa-ni (-ni="my").

The Uralian languages, Turkish, Mongolian and Tungus appear to have developed their system of word-building as we know it to-day at a date which, if not recent, was well after the time when the languages were closely related. Only a few suffixes can be restored throughout the family; it may be suggested tentatively that one method of forming the plural was to suffix a -t to substan tives, as in modern Mongolian, Tungus and Uralian, a process of which Turkish has conserved a few traces. The main character

istic of the Ural-Altaic tongues is the difficulty, even in modern speech, of distinguishing between nouns and verbs by their out ward forms. The conjugation of the verb is reminiscent of the possessive-suffix system of the noun and many verbal suffixes are identical in form with those which are used to construct new nouns. The adjective has no proper declension.

Vocabulary.—All words dealing with rudimentary civilization are common to all the languages, such as those expressing relation ship (father, mother, uncle, aunt, etc.), certain elements, animals and plants, primitive occupations and simple movement and ges ture words. The comparative philology of these languages demon strates a neolithic civilization of the type of which traces have been found in different parts of the Urals. This primitive vocabu lary, the common patrimony of all the tongues, is augmented by words of very diverse origin. Mongolian and Turkish have bor rowed much from Chinese and Indian languages. Uralian lan guages have drawn largely on Indo-European stocks and in modern times many Iranian terms have been admitted. In modern days Hungarian, Wogul, Ostyak, Cheremiss and Wotjak have taken many words from Turkish lexicography. Tungus has a large per centage of Mongolian words ; Osmanli Turkish has adopted much from Arabic and Persian. Mongolian and Turkish have lent to, and borrowed from, each other, and Palaeo-Asiatic elements have enriched and varied the vocabularies of the Ural-altaic languages spoken in Asia. In Europe, Finnish, Lapp and Estonian have bor rowed much from Germanic, Baltic and Slav languages, Hungarian from Ossetian, Slav tongues and German. The vocabularies of the Finno-Ugrian and Turkish languages spoken on Russian territory are rapidly becoming Russianized.

Numerals.—The Ural-Altaic numeral system is decimal throughout. The names of the numbers in the different languages differ widely, because the primitive Ural-Altaic speech had not developed a proper numerical system before the dispersion.