IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes:

>I'm interested in knowing how widely accepted is the theory that the
>Indo-European "Urheimat" was located in Eastern Europe.

-- that depends on what you mean by "Eastern Europe".  The consensus
location, insofar as there is one, is the Ukraine -- the area north of the
Black Sea.

>And how much support do such theories as e.g. Colin Renfrew's idea of the
>Anatolian origin of IE languages have?

-- very little, among linguists, because of the weird contortions in
linguistic development he assumes.

Some, among archaeologists in Britain and the US (where extreme
anti-diffusionist and anti-migrationist positions are common, essentially for
ideological reasons).

>I ask this beacause one central piece of evidence in support for the
>East-European origin comes from outside the field of IE studies, namely
>Uralic linguistics. But it seems to me (correct me if I'm wrong!) that among
>many IE-ists, there's a tradition of uninterest in diachronic linguistics
>done outside the IE language family.

-- actually, early IE (and Indo-Iranian) loanwords in the Uralic languages
have been known for some time, and are commonly cited (eg., by Mallory).

>It is undeniable that the contacts between speakers of U and IE languages
>date back to the earliest stages recovered by the comparative method. Thus
>the speakers of proto-U and proto-IE must have been geographical
>neighbors. As a result, theories such as Renfrew's Anatolian "Urheimat"
>must obviously be discarded (it is of course impossible to assume that
>proto-U spekers would have occupied an area south of the Black Sea).

-- I see nothing to disagree with here.