Introduction

Uralo-Siberian is still considered to be a hypothetical language family consisting of Uralic, Yukagir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut and being a part of the highly hypothetical Nostratic macrofamily. Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Yukagir are part of the Paleosiberian languages to which also Yenisean (Ket) and Gilyak (Nivkh) belong. The relation of the latter languages both to the Tibeto-Burman and to the Caucasian language families is controversial. The literature about possible linguistic connections both as genetical relationships and Sprachbünde is galore. Especially unclear is also the position of Ainu and Burushaski to the Paleosiberian languages. Recently, Heinrich Werner suggested a Yenisean-North American-Indian Urverwandtschaft (Werner 2004) in the bigger frame of Greenberg's Na-Dene macrofamily (Greenberg 1987).

But like in all recent theories, also in our case, there have been the pioneers. In 1746, the Danish theologian Marcus Woldike compared Greenlandic to Hungarian (Woldike 1746a, b). In 1818, Rasmus Rask considered Greenlandic to be related to the Uralic languages (Rask 1818). In 1924, Aurélien Sauvageot compared Eskimo and Uralic morphology (Sauvageot 1924). In 1959, Knut Bergsland published his "Eskimo-Uralic Hypothesis" (Bergsland 1959), and in 1962, Morris Swadesh proposed a relationship between the Eskimo-Aleut and Chukotko-Kamchatkan language families (Swadesh 1962). An Uralo-Yukagir family was especially supported by Angere (1956) and Collinder (1940, 1965). Several hundreds of word- equations were established especially in the works of Karl Bouda, René Bonnerjea and Oliver Guy Tailleur (cf. bibliography). Even more confusing are the attempts to connect all or parts of the mentioned languages and language families with Indo-European (cf. the synopsis of Kortlandt 2005).

In our study we therefore want to find out: 1. Is there a genetic relationship between Hungarian and the Eskimo-Aleut and/or the Paleosiberian languages? 2. And if there is one: Are Eskimo-Aleut and/or the Paleosiberian languages closer to the Finno-Ugric, the Uralic or the Altaic languages? We therefore base our present study on the one side on Tóth's "Hungarian-Mesopotamian Dictionary" (Tóth 2007) in which 1317 Hungarian root-words have been traced back to Sumerian and/or Akkadian and Rhaetic always considering the traditional reconstructions of proto-forms by classical Finno-Ugristics, Uralistics and Altaistics and on Fortescue-Jacobson-Kaplan (1994) on the other side.