Basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics)

[Ante Aikio]

>> But "hand", "eye", "I", "water", "brother" aso. are not safe. They simply
>> don't bear a label "Attention ! Native word! Don't replace by foreign
>> gobbledeegook !" on them.

> -- effectively speaking, they do.

> After all, when presented with a new language, what's the first thing we do
> to determine whether it's IE or not?
> We look at the numerals from one to ten, the family relationship terms, and
> so forth.  Later on more detailed examination is necessary, but that's the
> first step.
> In fact, that's how the fact that there _is_ an IE family of languages was
> discovered in the first place.

This is irrelevant. This is what a linguist would do, but one must
remember that a linguist is not a normal speaker (I prefer this
term to the widely used "naive native speaker"). Normal speakers don't
even have the concepts of "IE" or "related language" unless they've been
taught to them in school. From experience I can say that most speakers
find it hard to perceive even obvious borrowings as e.g. Finnish pelaa-
'to play' < Swedish spela, Finnish (s)kaappi < Swed. skåp.

I would like to elaborate it is a different thing for a word to be
borrowed and for the borrowing to become established. Words are borrowed
because they are recognised as foreign and the speakers want to use them
precisely for this reason (e.g., many young people in Finland who want to
sound "cool" use words like "anyway", "cool", "about", "shit",
"place" etc. because they are English and not Finnish). If the borrowed
word remains in use for a couple of generations, it may undergo
phonological nativization. Then it becomes established, because it is no
longer recognised as a borrowing.

A note: the migration discussion is also very interesting, but perhaps the
subject line should be changed? There is not much in common between the U
/ IE contacts and the Bantu expansion, I believe... :)

 - Ante Aikio