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updated 2009

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 SUPPLEMENTARY  ARTICLE 

    
      The main article   THE ORIGINS AND EXPANSIONS OF  BOAT-ORIENTED WAYS OF LIFE : Basic Introduction to the Theory presented the  illustration  shown below, in which I introduce (in light blue) suggested names - UINI, UENE, UENETI, UINU. These are not arbitrary words, but words that can be argued to a)have originated from the same original word, and b)evolved into modern words for peoples with boat-traditions such as "Finnic", "Inuit", "Khanti", "Venedi".
         This article is by way of elaborating on this map and my choices for names.

      This study proposes that the names for boat peoples originated from a word stem that sounded like the still-existing Finnic stem UI-. It is written in Finnish with ui- as in uima- (prefix indicating 'swimming-, floating-'). In Estonian it is written with uj- as in ujumis- (prefix 'swimming-, floating-'). 
       In the beginning humans only moved around on land, on foot. But then, as described in   THE ORIGINS AND EXPANSIONS OF  BOAT-ORIENTED WAYS OF LIFE : Basic Introduction to the Theory,  some broke away and began to develop a new way of life in emerging wetland regions that required travelling around in boats on water. It then became necessary around 6000BC to distinguish between people who walked - like the reindeer people - and people who glided on water.  It is interesting that the word "Samoyed" used for the peoples of the European arctic who tend to reindeer and who probably developed from reindeer hunters, resonates with the Estonian word sammujad  'those who step, pace'.  It follows that the original word for the boat people would have meant 'those who glide on water', which could be formed from  UI- plus a possessive ending giving UI-NE  'of the swimming/floating'.
        In the evolution of languages, words with fluid (many) meanings, differentiated into narrower meaning; but this did not cause the older word to be abandoned. For example the Estonian/Finnish stem vee- 'water-", could have been derived from UI-.  That is to say the original word UI- would have had a wide range of meanings, the listener determining the meaning from the context in which it was used. It could have meant 'travel by water', 'float', 'swim', 'carry-by-boat',  'connected with water', and so on.  The first step in creating narrower meanings would be to vary the I as in producing UE-  or UAI-  A change to VE- or VAI- was easy because whenever a vowel begins a word, it has a tendency to become a consonant (and lose its pure vowel quality). Another change would have been from "UE" to "WHE". We will discuss the directions of change later.
        What we are interesting right now, is in arguing that the UI-stem was the ORIGINAL one. This seems to be supported by the appearance of the same stem in the Inuit language in the North American arctic. The Inuit, a skin-boat people, have lived in great isolation, and their language has characteristics so primitive, that we can expect it to also retain older, simpler forms, of words. From the Inuit we can look further south too, to the Algonquians.
       In arctic Canada, the name of the arctic people of boat traditions there, Inuit,  is plural of innuk 'person'. Among the Algonquians to their south, the word inini means 'man, person'.  The connection of the name for 'water' is not found in this word. But then, the same is true of the word "Finnic" and its source words. Ever since it began to be recorded it has named a people, and no further meaning has been associated with it. But this should not be surprising. Even if the name of a people had an original descriptive meaning, like "water people", in a general sense it meant "people" expecially if there were no other kind of people ("farming people", "walking people", etc) to create a contrast making the descriptive element necessary.  If the ancestors of the Inuit moved into arctic waters and lost contact with people-on-foot for a long time, an original word that may have meant 'people of the water' would have simplified to simply 'people'.
      Still, it seems that in Inuit the UI- stem did survive elsewhere. (As I said above, old stems do not die when new ones develop out of them.)The Inuit language has words with the word element ui-  which appears to relate to water  as for example in uijjaqtuq 'water spins' or uimajuq 'dissipated' which interestingly parallels Estonian ujumis-, Finnish uima- ('swimming-, floating-') and even Estonian uimane 'dazed'.  The Estonian uimane is interesting in that it seems to suggest that the original meaning UI- described water as a dynamic thing - moving, swirling, etc. Although Estonian and Finnish now use the stem vee- for 'water' presumably it is because over the millenia, among those in contact with southern civilizations,  there has been a development in the derivation of new words that substituted v for u, and e for i. 
     It is possible that this adjustment from I to E began with trade contact with southern civilizations. Sumeria is one of the very few ancient languages that has been preserved as a result of their habit of doing everyday writing in cunieform on wet clay tablets, and scholars have determined that the Sumerian  word for 'water' was simply "EE".  Having the original word for 'water' expressed by stressing a high vowel is  natural, just like the eternal word for 'mother', "(M)AMA".  Languages do not use every sound that can be made, but only those sounds that linguists call phonemes. It is significant that the Inuit language still shows only the most basic sounds (as a baby produces them) and recognizes only three vowels - a high, medium and low. Thus originally  E was interpreted the same as an I, or O was interpreted the same as an U.  In the development of new words, the easiest way to do so was to recognize new sounds. For example by recognizing the E, suddenly UI produced two stems  UI and UE.
     Although we cannot directly prove that the North American INNI words meaning 'person' might originally have meant '(people) of the water' (in contrast to other people who did not use boats), it is a reasonable hypothesis because we can make the connections with the Finnic languages. This speaks towards the idea of circumpolar movement of skin-boat using sea-harvesters passively migrating throughout northern waters ever since the earliest arctic skin boats which, according to the age of arctic rock carvings showing them, suggests somewhere around 4000BC.
     Having established that the original words - when the language was simple and had only the simple vowels and consonants of a baby - were based on UI-, let's explore how an original word like UINI or UINU would have evolved into later words like  Finni, Phinnoi, Fenni, etc  in the north and the Veneti (Eneti, Henetoi, Uenedi, etc) in the Black Sea and southern Europe.


     The Scandinavians of centuries ago called the native peoples throughout Scandinavia by the name "Finns".  That must have been a real name used by the natives, since it is unlikely the Scandinavians would have borrowed the use of the same name by the Roman Tacitus and  Greeks like Ptolemy, with reference to primitive peoples in the wilderness behind the southeast Baltic. (See Tacitus Germania 98AD, ch 46). The Greeks wrote Phinnoi, and Tacitus  used Fenni.  But Finnic languages did not originally have the "F, PH" sound; therefore it must have been a sound that somewhat resembled an "F".  We note that there are historical records which speak about Indu peoples in the Gulf of Finland as well, and of course there exist the Finno-Ugrians called Khanti at the Ob River, who Estonians call Handid. 
      But we noted above, that  a language uses only certain sounds from all the sounds humans make. If the speakers of a language had peculiarities in their manner of speaking - what linguists call paralinguistics features - they could have made sounds that were not relevant to the language, but foreign observers found the sounds relevant and put them in. For example, let us say that the Finnic languages did not have the "F" sound (and they still don't), but when speaking words beginning with emphasized vowels, they gave the first vowel an explosiveness, then they could have sounded like they added something like an "F" sound at the front.  For longer words, a language like English puts emphasis on the second syllable, but Finnic languages put it on the first regardless of the word.  As a result the English media today consistently pronounces Finnish words wrong, for example Helsinki as hel-SINK-i when it should be HEL-sinki. If the aboriginal peoples across Scandinavia called themselves by UINU, it would have sounded like UI-nu.  The English speaking person who has been reading this has probably been pronouncing UINU differently in their mind up to this point. You have probably been thinking something sounding like "whee-NEW". Indeed the Finnic way of pronouncing UI- has no correspondence in English at all. Best approximation is  "ooo- yeee" (UUU-YIII) spoken very fast.
      My intention here is not to investigate in detail the matter of how the orignal sounded or how the biases of the foreign language interpreted the word, but to proceed to my conclusion: the foreign languages that wrote Phinnoi, Fenni, Finni,  were merely interpreting an explosive beginning on the intial vowel, and a sound that did not exist in their own language.  This initial feature may have had "H" in it, and it may have varied dialectically from place to place, even though it was not phonemic. One tribe may have made an initial sound that was close to "KH" and another may have put in a "BH" and another a "WH". But as far as the language was concerned, the presumed initial consonants were simply not there. In fact it can be argued that even the initial H in Helsinki, was not really phonemic originally, and that the initial H in Finnic languages is an artificiality. (For example as spoken by a Finn, removing the initial H to produce Elsinki, would not change how it sounds compared to Helsinki. Initial H's in Finnish and Estonian languages seem to appear spontanously as a paralinguistic feature to strengthen the initial vowel, and really do not have to be there.(The speaker introduces it only when talking loudly) Take Estonian haruldane. If it were written aruldane, it would sound the same, when speaking in normal voice. H makes an appearance AUTOMATICALLY if it is necessary to shout it. It shows that if we dropped most of the H's at the start of Finnish and Estonian words, the H will be added automatically as needed, and really does not have to be there. It all arises from the need to emphasize the first syllable. A weak initial vowel, thus, needing strengthening, invites the addition of the consonantal sound that intensifies it.
    The original word could indeed have been "UINNI", but was spoken by the people themselves so it sounded like "WHINNI" or "BHINNI" or "HINNI" or.....The foreign listeners wrote down what the bias of their own language observed, whether the sound was in the language or not.
     It is important to always bear in mind that when Latin writers wrote the F-character, they may have been describing the "V" sound, whereas when they wrote the V-character they always meant the "W" sound. Thus Latin Fenni may have actually been "VENNI", while Latin Venni was actually "WENNI"
        It is interesting that the name for the ancient people called Veneti by the Romans, were called Eneti or Henetoi, by Greeks.  The difference is not that great if we rewrite the Roman version properly as Weneti. What both versions have in common is the ENETI part. It shows that the Roman ear and the Greek ear interpreted the initial peculiarity in different ways. A third language may have interpreted it yet differently still like say "KHENETI"  (which reminds us of the people popularly called Khanti, but which Estonian language calls Handid.)
       The proof of this explanation for the origins of the name of the Eneti/Veneti seems to be found in inscriptions left by the Eneti/Veneti themselves in North Italy. They left behind short pieces of writing that have been the subject of investigation (of little success) over the years. Of interest are words that could be interpreted as their own words for Eneti/Veneti. In their own phonetic writing modelled after Etruscan writing, they wrote their own name as follows (transcribed to Roman alphabet, but keeping the dots used)  .e..n.no --   Note the dots around the initial E. The dots in their inscriptions appear, in my analysis, to signify some kind of special linguistic feature. Scholars have solidly established that in some situations  .i.  distorts the "I" sound to resemble an "H".  It can therefore be assumed that  the E with dots on both sides, similarly represents dome kind of H-like quality. We conclude therefore, the Venetic inscription placing dots around the initial E  confirms the theory of the actual speech introducing an aspirant consonantal feature in front, but one that was not clear enough to define as a letter. We can speculate that maybe the sound was similar to "WH" since the Romans interpreted it as "WENETI". 
        

      Homer in his Iliad, first wrote about a people named Eneti or Henetoi who were located at Paphlagonia on the southwest coast of the Black Sea, who came to the aid of Troy (around 1200 BC).  This name Eneti continued to appear in Greek texts, for more than a millenium, describing a people who appear to have been, to the Greeks, a source of tin and amber.
      Because archeology shows that Baltic amber came down to the civilizations in Asia Minor and Egypt, even before the rise of Mycenian Greece, even if clear evidence of people called Eneti being handlers of northern amber comes from the colonies of Eneti in northern Italy, we are justified in assuming amber was also handled earlier by Eneti at the Black Sea, since river routes from the east Baltic sources of amber reached the Black Sea easily.
      Archeology shows an abundance of early trade amber in the Gulf of Riga, and apparently travelling down the Dneiper River to the Black Sea; thus we can assume that the original Black Sea  Eneti were a southern colony of  Dneiper traders who carried amber and other goods south from the Baltic. It's possible there was a major source of amber in the Gulf of Riga, which became used up.
     Since the culture of the east Baltic region at the time, the archeological "Comb Ceramic" culture, has been associated with the Finnic peoples, we can conclude that the Eneti were Finnic, and that their name came from the same origins - the northern boat peoples, reaching back to the UINI, UINU.
      Let's take the name UINI, which is singlar. Ptolemy and other Greek writers would have called these people Phinnoi. If we now pluralize UINI and produce UINIT  (By the way the Inuit language creates the plural with the -T just like Finnic), then we can see that the Greeks would then have called them Phinnitoi . Note how close this is to Henetoi.  The only major difference is the use of the E instead of I; but as we said above, if the original UINI language did not distinguish between an I and an E, then Henetoi can describe UINIT who just happened to speak with a lower dialect. (Their high vowel sounding more like an E, their middle vowel more like an O, and their lower vowel sounding like a U) In other words for the ancient period E and I are the same for the people described, even if Greek was by then discriminating between E and I and hence writing down whatever the source person's dialect was producing.
      It seems therefore that the amber gatherers travelled south with the very same UINI name,  in plural UINIT.  (Possibly there were several clans involved in the trading activity, calling for pluralization).  Under the influences of languages at the Black Sea, they lowered their vowels or began to distinguish between E and I, given that the peoples down there were doing so. (Sumerian, for example distinguished between E and I)
          
     

      The above section, and the map, imply that the peoples called Eneti or Veneti (Weneti) by Greeks and Romans, originated in the north, originally as amber traders bringing Baltic amber south. While few people will argue that the original boat-using hunting peoples across Northern Europe are the ultimate source of Finno-Ugric languages, some may question identifying these Veneti peoples of southern ancient civilizations as boat peoples derived from the northern aboriginals.  This idea is strongly opposed by scholars of various other nationalities close to the regions in which these people were established, who have other ideas which connect their nationalities to these ancient peoples. There is no basis for the opposition other than citing the old Finno-Ugric origins theory (see background:FINNO-UGRIC LANGUAGES:  Origins in the Aboriginal Languages of Prehistoric Europe   for more about the new understandings on the languages originating from the UINI boat-peoples.) which placed the Finno-Ugric peoples in the east, thereby excluding them from participation in Europe's evolution. While new thinking on the subject (see   THE ORIGINS AND EXPANSIONS OF  BOAT-ORIENTED WAYS OF LIFE : Basic Introduction to the Theory, ) strengthen the arguments based on archeology and linguistics, the most significant hurdle is represented by the inscriptions made by the Eneti/Veneti of northern Italy between 500-0 BC. So far  the inscriptions have been approached as if the language was Indo-European. To clinch the UINI origins theory, it is necessary to investigate the inscriptions from the point of view of the language  being Finnic. For my investigation of the Venetic languages, proving it was Finnic, see  the section on the VENETIC LANGUAGE. 


        Evidence to argue theories about boat people and their movements as early as 6000 years ago, is very vague, and so we cannot rely on any one field for supporting data. Our ability to tie together many of the boat peoples through the stem UI- is one of the ways in which the theory introduced in   THE ORIGINS AND EXPANSIONS OF  BOAT-ORIENTED WAYS OF LIFE : Basic Introduction to the Theory,, can find support. While sometimes there are coincidences that have occurred by random chance, the methodology used here is based on the scientific principle that  if very many coincidences all seem to point to one conclusion, the chances - by laws of statistics and probability -  are that they are not random coincidences, but coincidences that are not random, but generated from the reality represented by that conclusion. (This is like saying that while a man in a crowd can coincidentally be wearing a raincoat even if it is not raining - since people wear raincoats even if it is not raining -, if he is also wearing, hat, and galoshes, and holding up an umbrella, then the chances are high that it is raining. The more coincidences we can find supporting the same conclusion, the greater the probability of correctness in the conclusion)