IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

Adam Hyllested <adahyl at cphling.dk> wrote:

>The development *-eH3- > *-oH3- took place already in PIE, and I find it
>very unlikely that a PIE *-oYw- should show up as *-i- in Uralic. Of
>course the borrowing could have taken place at the time of
>Pre-Proto-Indo-European, i.e. before the "colouring" of *eH3 to *oH3. But
>the word is also found outside Uralic; it appears in Yukaghir as <niu,
>neve, nim> and in Chuvan as <nyva:>. An Indo-Uralo-Yukaghir
>reconstruction *(n)newme- seems much more probable.

>Critics would point out that the PIE word is formed by adding a
>derivational suffix *-men. First of all, I don't see why a stem ending in
>*-me shouldn't analogically add an *-n, if nouns are productively formed
>with a suffix *-men. Secondly, the Uralic reconstruction *-a: corresponds
>perfectly to the IE vocalic *-n (*-e doesn't). So if the IE suffix isn't
>analogical, the Indo-Uralic form must be reconstructed as *(n)newmn-.

But what about the laryngeals?  They can't have sprung out of
thin air in the Indo-European part of Indo-Uralic.  If this word
is a cognate, we should at least reconstruct something like
*(H)neGumn-, for some value of H and G.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl