IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Stefan Georg]

>[Ed]

>Maybe this is not the right place, but I have this question that has been
>nagging me for years: would Turkish 'gün' for 'day' fit in here?

>Ed.

I started this with a joke, now I see us in the middle of a nostratic
discussion !

Well, I'd rule it out that /gün/ (< kün), originally "sun" has anything to
do with Basque /egun/, simply because a) no point has been made for any
kind of relationship between the two languages (nor will one be made, but
take this as my private opinion) and b) no physical contact has occured
between the respective populations during all of known history (and it
seems pretty unlikely for most of unknown history as well).
However, just to give this a slightly serious turn, a connection between
this Turkic word and an IE one has been seriously proposed (by A.
Róna-Tas). It has been theorized that the Turkic word might be a loan from
(some form of) Tokharian koM/kauM "id.". No, I'm not sure whether I believe
this. I believe in *some* LW from Tokharian in very early Turkic, but not
necessarily in this one, since any criteria to judge this particular case
seem to be lacking. At least for me at 1:51 a.m. ...

And, Ed, you can happily note in your calendar that on this very day this
question will stop doing what it has been doing to you for years, since the
internal history of the Turkic word (g < k) shows that what seems to be a
similarity (Tk. g- : basque -g-) is only a secondary one, brought about by
Oghuz initial sonorization (which happened no longer that at most 1k ago).

Dr. Stefan Georg
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