IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Ante Aikio]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote:
[snip]
>    We need very specific evidence to tell whether Anatolian had separated
> from the rest or not by the time of the oldest loans in Uralic
[snip]

This popped into my mind. The PU word for 'name', *nimi-, shows curious
variation: the Mordvin and Mari forms show and irregular *l- (< PU
*limi-). *nimi has been considered an IE loan (< PIE *nmen-). Now as far
as I know, Hittite shows irregular initial l- in the word for 'name', but
the other IE languages have uniformy *n-. This might be pure speculation,
but do you think there is any chance of Mordvin-Mari *limi- instead of
regular *nimi- resulting from Pre-Anatolian influence or even being a
separate loan from Pre-Anatolian? (If I recall correclty, Koivulehto may
have suggested something like this, but I can't recall the exact source
right now.) Of course, the changes might be coincidental, but this would
seem a bit weird since both of them are irregular, as far as I
understand. But then again, there are a couple of words in Mordvin with a
dialectal alteration between initial n- and l-, but these seem to be
relatively late descriptive formations.

 - Ante Aikio