The Lapps, or Laplanders, inhabit the most northern part of Europe. They belong to Sweden and Russia. Their number is estimated at 28,000. Their language has lately attracted much attention, and Castrén's travels give a description of their manners most interesting from its simplicity and faithfulness.

The Bulgaria branch comprises the Tcheremissians and Mordvinians, scattered in disconnected colonies along the Volga, and surrounded by Russian and Tataric dialects. Both languages are extremely artificial in their grammar, and allow an accumulation of pronominal affixes at the end of verbs, surpassed only by the Bask, the Caucasian, and those American dialects that have been called Polysynthetic.

The general name given to these tribes, Bulgaric, is not borrowed from Bulgaria, on the Danube; Bulgaria, on the contrary, received its name (replacing Moesia) from the Finnic armies by whom it was conquered in the seventh century. Bulgarian tribes advanced from the Volga to the Don, and after remaining for a time under the sovereignty of the Avars on the Don and Dnieper, they advanced to the Danube in 635, and founded the Bulgarian kingdom. This has retained its name to the present day, though the Finnic Bulgarians have long been absorbed by Slavonic inhabitants, and both brought under Turkish sway since 1392.

The third, or Permic branch, comprises the idioms of the Votiakes, the Sirianes, and the Permians, three dialects of one language. Perm was the ancient [pg 320] name for the country between 61°-76° e. lon. and 55°-65° n. lat. The Permic tribes were driven westward by their eastern neighbors, the Voguls, and thus pressed upon their western neighbors, the Bulgars of the Volga. The Votiakes are found between the rivers Vyatka and Kama. Northwards follow the Sirianes, inhabiting the country on the Upper Kâma, while the eastern portion is held by the Permians. These are surrounded on the south by the Tatars of Orenburg and the Bashkirs; on the north by the Samoyedes, and on the east by Voguls, who pressed on them from the Ural.

These Voguls, together with Hungarians and Ostiakes, form the fourth and last branch of the Finnic family, the Ugric. It was in 462, after the dismemberment of Attila's Hunnic empire that these Ugric tribes approached Europe. They were then called Onagurs, Saragurs, and Urogs; and in later times they occur in Russian chronicles as Ugry. They are the ancestors of the Hungarians, and should not be confounded with the Uigurs, an ancient Turkic tribe mentioned before.

The similarity between the Hungarian language and dialects of Finnic origin, spoken east of the Volga, is not a new discovery. In 1253, Wilhelm Ruysbroeck, a priest who travelled beyond the Volga, remarked that a race called Pascatir, who live on the Yaïk, spoke the same language as the Hungarians. They were then settled east of the old Bulgarian kingdom, the capital of which, the ancient Bolgari, on the left of the Volga, may still be traced in the ruins of Spask. If these Pascatir—the portion of the Ugric tribes that remained east of the Volga—are identical with the [pg 321] Bashkir, as Klaproth supposes, it would follow that, in later times, they gave up their language, for the present Bashkir no longer speak a Hungarian, but a Turkic, dialect. The affinity of the Hungarian and the Ugro-Finnic dialects was first proved philologically by Gyarmathi in 1799.

A few instances may suffice to show this connection:—

Hungarian.Tcheremissian.English.
Atya-m atya-m my father.
Atya-d atya-t thy father.
Atyaatya-se his father.
Atya-nkatya-ne our father.
Atya-tok atya-da your father.
Aty-ok atya-st their father.

Declension.

Hungarian.Esthonian.English.
Nom.vérwerriblood.
Gen.véréwerreof blood.
Datvérnekwerreleto blood.
Acc.vértwerd blood.
Abl.vérestölwerrist from blood.