Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE)

[Ante Aikio]

[I wrote:]

>The Slavic borrowings seem to be mostly quite late, and evidence of
>contacts between Proto-Slavic any branch of U is very scarce. But as
>for Baltic, it seems to have always been in contact with Uralic, as
>you say. And the same holds for Germanic, too.

[Rick Mc Callister:]

>Can you elaborate on Germanic-Uralic contacts?
>Are you only talking about Scandinavian or all Germanic?

Proto-Germanic and Pre-Germanic. Both Finnish and Saami have Germanic loan
words borrowed before e.g. PGerm. *ee > NWGerm. *aa. There are also Germ. loan
words predating e.g. the Proto-Finnic changes *ti > *si and *c´c´ > *ts,
which took place very early, probably 3000+ years BP (see below). Saami and
Finnish also have shared PG loan words, which must thus be at least about 3000
years old, e.g.

Finn. kärsi- 'suffer', Saami gierda- 'sustain' < *kärti- < PG *xardhia-
'harden'
Finn. kats-o- 'look', kaitse- 'look after', Saami geahc^c^a- 'look' <
*kac´c´i- < PG *gaatja- 'look after etc.'

As for Pre-Germanic, there are loan words which point to retained
laryngals and the derivative in question appears only in Germanic, e.g.

Finn. rehto 'row' < *reSto < Pre-G *rH1-tó- (> PG *radha-)
Finn. lehti, Saami lasta 'leaf' < *leSti < Pre-G *blH1-tó- (> PG *bladha-)
Finn. rohto 'herb' < *roSto < Pre-G *ghróH-to- (> PG *grootha-)

For more on the subject, I recommend Jorma Koivulehto's book "Verba
Mutuata" (Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne #237), which contains 16
articles (some 450 pages in total) by him, dealing with IE-U contacts and
focusing mostly on Finnic and Germanic.

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Ante Aikio