Stockholm university
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Merlijn de Smit

About me

I work with secure and open research data management at the Research Data Management Team at Stockholm University Library. The Research Data Management Team offers support and services with data management during various phases of a research project, such as Data Management Plans, storage of data as well as publishing data, in accordance with Open Science and the FAIR principles.

More information: https://su.se/researchdata

Research

I have previously done research at Stockholm university as well as the University of Turku on subjects such as Old Finnish grammar, Finnish and Finnic etymology, Uralic typology and the reconstruction of Uralic syntax, and the metascientific background of historical linguistics.

Publications

Some of my publications in the area of (Finnish and Finno-Ugric) linguistics:

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Contact-induced change in the languages of Europe: The rise and development of partitive cases and determiners in Finnic and Basque

    2020. Silvia Luraghi, Merlijn De Smit, Ivan Igartua. Linguistics 58 (3), 869-903

    Article

    This paper explores the hypothesis of contact-induced change for the rise of the partitive case in Finnic languages and of the partitive case/determiner in Basque. On the basis of the well-established Indo-European partitive-genitive case and taking into account the lack of such a basis on the Uralic side, we argue that the partitive case in Finnic languages has arisen as a result of Balto-Slavic influence. Concerning the Basque partitive determiner, we likewise suggest a contact scenario (with Romance languages) as being responsible for the development of an entire system of determiners, including the definite and possibly the indefinite article as well as the partitive marker, which originates in an old ablative ending but crucially lacks the morphological properties characteristic of Basque inflectional markers.

    Read more about Contact-induced change in the languages of Europe

  • Fishing in troubled waters: on the origin of Finnic saima-stems

    2019. Merlijn De Smit. Finnisch-ugrische Mitteilungen 42, 33-56

    Article

    This paper deals with the etymology of four phonologically identical and semantically related terms in Finnish: Saimaa, the name of a lake; saima, saimasiika, a species of whitefish, saima, saimaverkko, a kind of net, and saima, a kind of boat. Below, I will advance a tentative Indo-Iranian etymology for the hydronym and possibly the fish as well, whereas I believe the word for ‘net’ to be ultimately based on an internal, Finnic instrumental derivation obscured by back-and-forth borrowing between Finnish and Saami. The word for ‘boat’ I will argue to be a borrowing from a Saami term for ‘quant-pole’ which itself is an Indo-Iranian borrowing. In the course of dealing with these terms, I will also suggest a new Baltic etymology for Finnish hämärä ‘dark’ as well as a Indo-European origin for a thinly spread Uralic term for ‘black’.

    Read more about Fishing in troubled waters

Show all publications by Merlijn de Smit at Stockholm University

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