IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Ante Aikio]

On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote:

> AA>there is internal evidence in Uralic supporting the loan origin of p-U
> AA>*weti 'water'.

> .. Please try to fancy that there /could/ have been a common origin of
> that word !

Of course P-U *weti 'water' and P-IE *wed- might be of common origin. It
is impossible to prove that they are -not-. But then again, in etymology
it is pretty much impossible to prove -anything-, when it comes to
prehistoric times. The question is rather: which is more likely, a
semantically and phonologically flawless loan etymology, or a
Proto-Indo-Uralic or Proto-Nostratic guess?

Besides, even if Proto-U *weti is not an IE loan, this of course has no
implication on the other loan etymologies.

> I do not know a single linguist who would confirm that a word like 'water'
> could be object to borrowing!

Consider this: in the classical Helsinki slang of Finnish, 'water' was not
vesi (as in standard Finnish), but voda (borrowed from Russian). Now this
was of course only a social dialect, but it is nevertheless a speech form
where the word for 'water' was replaced with a loan word.

I would also like to know what makes 'water' so different from other basic
vocabulary (mother, man, moon, food, meat, neck, tooth etc.) that it can
absolutely -not- be borrowed (the examples in brackets can be borrowed and
they have been). Note that I never said that borrowing a word for 'water'
would be common or likely; nevertheless, I can't see why it would be
impossible.

	- Ante Aikio