basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics)

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

Ante Aikio <anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote:

>What is likely to be borrowed and what is not in a given
>circumstance depends on many factors. In U languages, the numerals are
>largely cognate and there are no known borrowings except for 'seven',
>'hundred' and 'thousand'.

It has been claimed, though, that the affix -deksan (etc.) found
in Finnic words for 8 and 9 is also of IE origin.  (I doubt this
is true).  Permic *das "ten" is obviously of Iranian origin.  I
can't remeber what the story is on Hungarian <ti:z>.

>But even numerals can become cultural
>items; e.g. the loan origin of Ob-Ugric/Hungarian *sdptd '7' (< Aryan /
>Iranian) and Samoyed *sejpti (< Tocharian?)

Tocharian A has <s.pa"t> and B has <s.ukt>.  We would expect
*septm. to give PToch *s^IptI (*s.a"pta"), which leads to the
Toch. A form without much problems (*s^IptI > *s^IpIt > s^pIt).
If the Toch. B form went through a stage *s^Iw(I)tI (*-p- >
*-w-?, with -kt later by analogy from <okt> "8"), that might
explain Nenets <s'i?~iv>, Enets <sew>.  But I can't see how
*sejpti (based, I guess, on Nganasan <s'ayb@> etc.) might derive
from Tocharian.  The /b/ in the Samoyed forms rather reminds one
of Germanic *sibum.

>, replacing PU *s4exs4imi '7',

As in Permic <sizim>, Mordvin <sisem>.  Is this also agreed to be
the prototype of Finnish <seitsema"n>?

>(A note on the U numerals: Samoyedic has curiously replaced the U numerals
>3-6 with roots of unknown origin; this is perhaps connected with the
>strong lexical substrate from an unknown source that seems to be present
>in Samoyedic. The U word *wixti '5' is generally considered to survive in
>Samoyedic in the meaning '10', but the semantics seem peculiar to me. Does
>anyone know any parallels?)

You can try to find them at Mark Rosenfelder's numbers list
<http://zompist.com/numbers.shtml>.  Without having done that,
I'd say that a shift 5 (e.g. "hand [sg.]") ~ 10 (e.g. "hands
[du.]") doesn't look semantically very peculiar.  Cf. PIE
*ok^toh3 as the dual of Avestan <as^ti-> "width of four fingers",
and the Proto-Kartvelian forms *os1txwo- "4" (< PIE *ok^toh3 "8")
and *arwa- "8" (< Akk. arba "4").

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl