11.] THE PLACE OP THE SAMOYEDS IN ETHNOGRAPHY. 103 
‘relations to other races have been much discussed. On this 
subject I have received from my learned friend, the renowned 
philologist Professor Ahlquist of Helsingfors the following 
communication :— 
The Samoyeds are reckoned, along with the Tungoose, the 
Mongolian, the Turkish and the Finnish-Ugrian races, to belong 
to the so-called Altaic or Ural-Altaic stem. What is mainly 
characteristic of this stem, is that all the languages occurring 
within it belong to the so-called agglutinating type. For in 
these languages the relations of ideas are expressed exclusively 
by terminations or suffixes—inflections, preflxes and pre¬ 
positions, as expressive of relations, being completely unknown 
to them. Other peculiaxities characteristic of the Altaic 
languages are the vocal harmony occurring in many of them, 
the inability to have more than one consonant in the beginning 
of a word, and the expression of the piural by a peculiar affix, 
the case terminations being the same in the plural as in the 
singular. The affinity between the different branches of the 
Altaic stem is thus founded mainly on analogy or resemblance 
in the construction of the languages, while the different tongues 
in the material of language (both in the words themselves 
and in the expression of relations) show a very limited affinity 
or none at all. The circumstance that the Samoyeds for the 
present have as their nearest neighbours several Finnish-Ugrian 
races (Lapps, Syrjaeni, Ostjaks, and Voguls), and that these 
to a great extent carry on the same modes of life as themselves, 
has led some authors to assume a close affinity between the 
Samoyeds and the Fins and the Finnish races in general. The 
speech of the two neighbouring tribes however affords no 
ground for such a supposition. Even the language of the 
Ostjak, which is the most closely related to that of the . 
Samoyeds, is separated heaven-wide from it and has nothing 
in common with it, except a small number of borrowed words 
Delle navigationi e viaggi^ ii. 1583, leaf 236). At another place in the 
same work it is said that “ the land Comania has on the north immediately 
after Russia, the Mordvini and Bileri, i.e. the Great Bulgarians, the 
Bascarti, i.e. the Great Hungarians, then the Parositi and Samogedi, who 
are said to have the faces of dogs ” {Relation des Mongols^ p. 351. 
Ramusio, ii., leaf 239). 
