work in progress
My research blog Freelance Reconstruction was started in 2012, already as a longtime hobbyist of linguistics, about a year before shifting my university studies from mathematics to linguistics entirely. I had already received at this point some encouragement by email and other online correspondence with Uralistics scholars at Helsinki (my thanks to Petri Kallio and Jaakko Häkkinen in particular). Despite fairly little advertisement, the blog quickly accrued a highly informed readership. I believe e.g. both Ante Aikio / Luobbal Sámmol Sámmol Ánte and Mikhail Zhivlov have been among the readership at least since 2013, and many helpful comments from them, among others, led to my quick induction into the relatively small ranks of people working seriously on the reconstruction of Proto-Uralic and related topics.
It was a pleasant surprize for me to find that already in early 2015, an article appered in Linguistica Uralica taking one of my ideas sketched online into further treatment, with full citation back to the blog — long before I had had the opportunity to publish a single article in traditional scientific media (my first one of these appearing in 2019, itself simply upcycled from the blog). A trickle of others followed over the next several years, and by now a few posts even appear to have reached the status of the current "locus classicus" for particular ideas. Full-size paper versions of most of these ideas are in the works. These, too will be linked here once any are finished. My main interest on this page, however, is to document which blog posts have been deemed by my colleagues worthy of citation (and where).
This page is not a fully formal bibliography: I will generally stick to basic identifying information of the citing publications plus hyperlinks.
By chronological order of publication, followed by chronological order of citations and any possible notes concerning my blog posts (if necessary beyond what appears in the blog post itself).
The first case as mentioned above, published already on the early lite version of the blog, on reconstructing *je- for a number of etyma where *i- or *ji- has been usually formerly assumed on the basis of Finnic. I have treated the topic further also in a 2015 presentation Semivowel losses and assimilations, in Finnic and beyond given at the XII International Congress for Finno-Ugric Studies at Oulu.
A blog post draft for Part 2 exists, but any future work of mine on this topic will likely come out first of all in print.
I coin here the term "Lehtinen's Law" for a sound change proposed for Finnic by Meri Lehtinen in 1967, which name seems to have been taken into general acceptance by now. Much more detailed treatment of this can be found in my Master's thesis: Pystynen 2018, Itämerensuomen pitkien vokaalien alkuperä (going much ahead of this blog post in number of citations, too).
I have treated this topic also in my 2022 presentation The Sources of Proto-Samoyedic *ə.
Only a shoutout to a passing idea of mine that Ylikoski shows has been proposed also before, as I had suspected.
A stray footnote reference (p. 136) not included in the thesis' bibliography.
A few notes on this topic appear also in __.
Though correctly linked, citing me as "Pystenen" :)