IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

Ante Aikio anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi
Tue Jan 25 15:07:52 UTC 2000


On Sun, 23 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> Betraying my ignorance, I must once again ask why this exchange [of
> words between proto-Uralic and IE] must have happened with PIE and not
> with an early daughter.

In principle, it could have - providing that the early daughter of p-IE
still had laryngals. But the wide distribution of the loan words in Uralic
speaks against this, since proto-U must be dated 4000 bc or before. Unless
one accepts that p-IE had already differentiated to several daughter
languages by then, the loans must be proto-IE. There are also IE loan
words with a narrower distribution within Uralic, which actually seem to
derive from "early daughter languages" which still had laryngals (see my
previous mail to the list). The example words I put forward in my first
mail must be older loans, since they go back to proto-U.

> I MUST also find out someday why Uralic would need to borrow words for water,
> move, bring and wash from IE.

Words can be borrowed for many reasons, not only because there is a
"need" for them. If the contact is intensive enough and/or the prestige
great enough, basic vocabulary can be borrowed. I see no reason why
proto-U could not have borrowed these words from
Indo-Europeans. Similarly, Finnish has borrowed words for e.g. 'mother'
and 'food' from Germanic, and 'tooth' and 'neck' from Baltic, and North
Saami has borrowed words for e.g. 'son', 'meat', 'man' and 'moon' from
proto-Scandinavian. These examples are not exhaustive; there are lots of
relatively late "basic vocabulary" loans from IE languages in Finnic and
Saamic.

Furthermore, there is internal evidence in Uralic supporting the loan
origin of p-U *weti 'water'. This item does not have cognates in Saamic
and Khanty. Instead, these two languages share a lexeme p-U *s´äcä, whose
reflexes mean 'water' in Saamic and 'flood water' in Khanty. This was
probably the original U word for 'water', which was replaced in the other
languages by the IE loan word *weti. The word *s´äcä has no cognates in
languages that show reflexes of *weti. (The Khanty meaning 'flood water'
is probably secondary, since the Khanty word for 'water' derives from
the p-U word for 'ice').

> anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fiwrote:

> <<It seems that the only logical option is to place proto-IE in Eastern
> Europe north of the Black Sea. This area is just about south from area where
> current research usually places the center of the Uralic expansion.>>

> PIE originates just south of where Uralic originates?  So that Uralic did not
> expand south because PIE speakers were already there?  Or did somebody move
> in?  Or is the assertion that they were all once one language and perhaps
> this wasn't borrowing at all.

I am not sure if understood the question correctly. But yes, p-IE probably
originated south of p-U, and Uralic has probably never expanded south
(with the exception of Hungarian in approx. 900 ad), for the reason stated
above. On the contrary, IE has expanded north at the cost of U
languages. This process is partially traceable through historical
records.

As for the assumption of "Urverwandtschaft" between U and IE, we are
obviously dealing with loaning here. The loan explanation has more
explanatory power: the proto-U forms of the loan words are (largely)
predictable from the proto-IE ones and they conform to phonetically
natural sound substitution patterns. This is not the case if one assumes
common genetic origin: it is not possible do demonstrate regular sound
correspondences between the items. There have been no convincing attempts
to link IE and U genetically. These language families also differ
typologically radically from each other, which makes demonstratable
genetic connection highly unlikely.

 Ante Aikio
 anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi



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