The PIE substrate in Uralic

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/2/2000 7:00:13 PM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes:

<< The Uralic data does not seem to support the idea that there would have
been some kind of "para-IE" languages in this area before the arrival of the
predecessors of northwest IE languages in the region. >>

Actually, a strong case for dating PIE to before 5000BC and Danubian culture
came from your presentation of the *PIE substrate in proto-Uralic on this
list awhile back.

(If you recall, back then (january of this year) I gave you Hajdu's (1975)
5000BC terminus dating from Dolukhanov (1996).  This is based if I remember
on the expansion of Niemen, Sperrings, Upper Volga, etc. communities across
northeastern Europe in early neolithic times.  The maps indicate that pit
comb culture common to them moved south and overlapped the northeastern range
of Tripolye-Cucuteni in the northern Ukraine before or around 5000BC.   The
main and more southern Ukraine candidate for IE hometown, Sredni Stog, did
not appear until about 500 years later.)

I should point out something here.  If you look at my initial post, I wasn't
REALLY asking why we shouldn't look for a pre-PIE substrate.  I was actually
asking what it would look like if we were to look for one.  That is, if we
didn't decide ahead of time there couldn't be one.

Actually, looking back in the archives, you did address this issue.
You wrote:

<< I can only say that on linguistic grounds, there is very little we can say
about Pre-U and Pre-IE. Consequently, it is hard to identify Pre-IE loan
words in Pre-U since we cannot reconstruct these languages. This creates a
tempting, but possibly false picture that the IE and U groups came into
contact when they still spoke their relatively uniform proto-languages. But
we can't exclude the possibility that there was contact between the
predecessors of the proto-languages even in very remote past - we simply
cannot say, because without reconstructed pre-proto-languages the loan words
may have changed beyond our recognition. >> (Mon, 31 Jan 2000 15:26:18, Re:
PIE and Uralic)

Of course, if the Danubian culture that was in contact with Proto-Uralic
before 5000BC was *PIE, the question about identifying pre-PIE might well be
irrelevant.

You also wrote:

<<And in addition to this, the western Uralic languages have a huge amount
of words of unknown origin. It seems that one is dealing here with an
extensive lexical substrate not unlike that in Germanic. Because the
putative substrate words look nothing like Indo-European (having e.g.
affricates and palatalized consonants), there must have been non-Uralic
and non-IE substrate languages in the Baltic Sea area.>>

Well, that doesn't really appear to negate my question (based on the
Cavalli-Sforza quote).  If Pre-IE arose around the Danube and gave a
substrate to the later "daughter" PIE language of the Ukraine cultures
(Cavalli-Sforza's idea, not mine) -- then other substrates are STILL totally
acceptable.

You see the archaeological evidence supports some very well developed
mesolithic cultures across north central and eastern Europe that PREDATE the
neolithic Danubian culture.  In fact, the spread of full domestication of
plants and animals to the more northern regions would only occur with the
coming of Corded Ware around 3000BC.

So the existence of those supposed non-IE substrates in Germanic or Uralic
does not really negate the question:  if PIE superimposed itself on Pre-IE,
what would it look like?  What would one look for?

Regards,
Steve Long