IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

In his mail of Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Ante Aikio speaks, I believe, a word of
common sense.
   If there are pan-Uralic words of IE origin that look as old as our
reconstructions, they may very well be loanwords from Proto-IE into
Proto-Uralic or one of its prestages. They may of course also be older
than PIE; since it is apparently only lexical material, there is little to
tell us anything about the time depth of the donor forms. Therefore, it is
not absolutely compelling to draw the conclusion that the two
protolanguages were contiguous, but it is still one very fair possibility.
It is also a quite strong argument that, if the Uralic Urheimat is placed
for independent reasons somewhere in Central Ukraine and the IE ditto has
been put in the southern part of the Ukraine, the two protolanguages were
in fact once contiguous and the old loan relations stem from some period
within that contact.
   As for the position of Anatolian, there are very few things that
distinguish Proto-IE as it was before the break-off of pre-Anatolian from
what it became during the time up to its next split when the second branch
(Tocharian?) left the remaining stock. Consequently, we cannot tell from
the form of an IE loanword in Uralic whether it was borrowed before or
after the separation of Anatolian from the rest. That being so, we cannot
quite exclude that the IE homeland was in Anatolia and that the rest had
moved to the north of the Black Sea and there met the (pre-)Proto-Urals
and handed them a bag of loanwords. Note that laryngeals are not retained
only in Anatolian; there are enough laryngeal-sensitive phonetic changes
in the individual branches to guarantee that laryngeals survived as
segmental units well into the separate lifelines of the other subbranches
also.
   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 (the words
for "earth", "bear" or "fire" would be interesting), and until such time
we just cannot decide the issue on a linguistic basis and should,
consequently, leave it up the archaeologists to argue about it.
   Flaunting my ignorance, I may perhaps ask the silly question: How can
you exclude that the Uralic homeland had a prehistory south of the Black
Sea? If Proto-Uralic was only one language when it split into the many
that have become known, can one really exclude that the speakers of that
language had earlier lived somewhere else? I'm not advocating that one
should make up all sorts of fanciful scenarios, far from it, but it just
could be playing a trick on us.
   Even so - and that is what I like about your suggestions - it should be
specified how things are in case appearances are NOT deceitful and things
really ARE what they seem. In that case we have certainty about the
location of the IE Urheimat - and even if there is some deception involved
the argument is still pretty strong that both groups lived at two stations
north of the Black Sea and so may well have been in contact here.

Jens