IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

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

>On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote:
>[snip]
>>    We need very specific evidence to tell whether Anatolian had separated
>> from the rest or not by the time of the oldest loans in Uralic
>[snip]

>This popped into my mind. The PU word for 'name', *nimi-, shows curious
>variation: the Mordvin and Mari forms show and irregular *l- (< PU
>*limi-). *nimi has been considered an IE loan (< PIE *nmen-). Now as far
>as I know, Hittite shows irregular initial l- in the word for 'name', but
>the other IE languages have uniformy *n-. This might be pure speculation,
>but do you think there is any chance of Mordvin-Mari *limi- instead of
>regular *nimi- resulting from Pre-Anatolian influence or even being a
>separate loan from Pre-Anatolian? (If I recall correclty, Koivulehto may
>have suggested something like this, but I can't recall the exact source
>right now.) Of course, the changes might be coincidental, but this would
>seem a bit weird since both of them are irregular, as far as I
>understand. But then again, there are a couple of words in Mordvin with a
>dialectal alteration between initial n- and l-, but these seem to be
>relatively late descriptive formations.

This word is sometimes seen as supportive of a PIE ~ Uralic
genetic link, but it rather looks like a borrowing from IE into
Uralic.  The IE prototype contains two laryngeals (*h1neh3- or
*h3neh3-) and the abstract suffix *-men [*], none of which finds
expression in the Uralic word.

Hittite <lamaan> has been dissimilated, as is not totally
unexpected in a word containg only nasal consonants.  Uralic
*nimi has only two of them, but I believe (my Proto-Uralic is not
that good) that the genitive case would add another -n-.
Dissimilation would be a natural thing to happen.  I don't think
Mordvin-Mari necessarily offers any evidence of Uralic-Anatolian
contacts.

[*] <Content-type="Nostratic", Content-Encoding="rot13"> Zhpu
zber sha gb qrevir *u1abu3-zra < *?nan:xh-zra "gung juvpu vf zr"
</rot13>.

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