IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Wolfgang Schulze]

JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>> Georg at home.ivm.de writes:

> << Everything can be borrowed, and there are examples for everything actually
>> having been borrowed at some point in space and time. >>

> -- true, although of course some things are more _likely_ to be borrowed than
> others. Numerals, body parts, family relationships, and so forth, are less
> likely to be loan-words.

Why? Do you refer to statistics [which would be rather problematic] or do you
think of some kind of 'motivated constraints' on borrowing "[n]umerals, body
parts, family relationships, and so forth"? What kind of constraints would you
think of? Cognitive, knowledge based, social (habitual) constraints? I agree
with Stefan: everything can be borrowed and linguists should be prepared to
accept the possibility of borrowings even if such an event does not fit into
the general line of arguments. Linguists should 'obey' to languages, but
languages never 'obey' to linguistic generalizations...

Best wishes,
Wolfgang
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Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze
Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
D-80539 München
Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345
Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/
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