IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Ante Aikio]

>    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.

This is an interesting point of view. Is there strong evidence for the
claim that the first split in IE was between Anatolian and the rest? If
only very few things distinguish P-IE before and after the break-off of
Anatolian, are these differences substantial enough to warrant the
reconstruction of a separate, intermediate proto-language for the rest of
the IE branches?

>    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)

It appears that these words were not borrowed to Proto-Uralic: P-U has
*myxi- 'earth', *tuli- 'fire', *elä- 'carry, lift' and *kan-ta- 'carry',
which appear to be native Uralic words. The last one is actually a
causative derivative of P-U *kani- 'go'.

There are some later loans, however. Samoyedic has *pura- 'burn' < IE
*pur- 'fire', and Hungarian and Ob-Ugric have replaced P-U *tuli- 'fire'
with *tüwV-s (perhaps from IE *dhew-, although the vowel causes some
difficulties).

>    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.

In principle, it cannot be totally excluded. However, the idea of a P-U
homeland south of the Black Sea would not be a very fruitful hypothesis,
since it would only create a new, very difficult question to answer: why
and how would the P-U speakers have migrated north to become
hunter-gatherers in the taiga/tundra zone of northern Eurasia? There is
no evidence suggesting that the P-U Urheimat would have been -outside- the
area where U languages are spoken today.

 - Ante Aikio