Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PI

[Jim Rader]

>[S.M. Stirling:]
> >That's where the absense of substratal influence comes in.  The
> >degree of retention of the PIE lexicon is extremely high compared
> >to, say, Hittite.
> [Robert Whiting:]
> Yes, absence of substratum influences would be useful in showing
> either (a) the language was in its original home, (b) the
> language moved into a previously uninhabited area, (c) the
> language does not accept loanwords, or (d) the speakers of the
> language drove off or killed all the original inhabitants before
> there was any significant linguistic contact.  But is it clear
> that there is no substratum influence?  There are a number of
> Balto-Finnic loanwords in Baltic and a considerably larger number
> of Baltic loanwords in Balto-Finnic.  Looks like about what one
> would expect if Baltic were a superstratum language over Western
> Finnic.  Just because there wasn't an unknown substratum, as
> there apparently was in Germanic, that provided a lot of words of
> unknown origin to the language doesn't mean that there wasn't
> some substratum.

I'm sure there are people on the list who can comment much more
learnedly than me on the matter, but isn't the presence of adessive
and illative cases in Old Lithuanian, through agglutination of
postpositional <-p(i)> and <-na> onto existing case endings, a fairly
obvious candidate for Finnic substratal influence?  Another candidate
would be the fixing of dynamic stress--or "ictus" in Stang and
others' terminology--on the first syllable in Latvian and northern
dialects of Lithuanian, at the same time that some original Baltic
accentual distinctions were maintained.   (On the other hand, Livonian,
the Finnic language most intimately in contact with Baltic, developed
lexical tones of a Baltic type--otherwise quite uncharacteristic of
Uralic languages.)  Of course, on a simple typological basis, the
Baltic languages are the most Uralic-like of the modern I-E
languages, because case endings are so crucial in expressing
grammatical relations.  If Baltic had gone the route of most other
I-E languages and suffered severe final-syllable attrition, it would have
been forced to become less Uralic-like morphosyntactically.

Jim Rader