IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

Rick Mc Callister rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu
Tue Jan 25 07:59:12 UTC 2000


	Is it possible to tell whether these are loanwords or cognates from
Nostratic?
	Why? Why not? Examples?
	[to be continued on Nostratic list --if the discussion goes that way]

>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.

	[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701



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