IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Ante Aikio]

On Wed, 9 Feb 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>> Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes:

>> let me take an Indo-European example, e.g. Italian and French. Superficially
>> seen they only have one ancestor: Latin. But this is only the dominant
>> ancestor.
>> If we look at e.g. French it has a lot of strata which can be called its
>> fathers:

> -- nope.  It has some substrate influence from Celtic, and some loan-words;
> ditto from Frankish.  But that does not alter its status as a Romance
> language one iota.

> If you took all the non-Romance elements out of French, it wouldn't make that
> much difference.  If, on the other hand, you took out all the elements
> derived from Latin, it would cease to exist.

Indeed. But the crucial point is not whether it makes much difference -
a language can borrow so much that taking all the borrowed elements
out would certainly make a difference.

> Run it backwards, and it
> becomes Latin, not a Celtic or Germanic language.

Yes, this is the important factor - French is a changed version of Latin
and not a changed version of Celtic or something else. And this is
of course what genetic relationship by definition is about.

 Ante Aikio