IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Ante Aikio]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>> And how much support do such theories as e.g. Colin Renfrew's idea of the
>> Anatolian origin of IE languages have?

> -- very little, among linguists, because of the weird contortions in
> linguistic development he assumes.

I was in the (apparently false) belief that Renfrew had some support among
linguists as well.

> -- actually, early IE (and Indo-Iranian) loanwords in the Uralic languages
> have been known for some time, and are commonly cited (eg., by Mallory).

Yes, the fact that U languages possess relatively early IE / Aryan /
Iranian loan words has been known among IE-ists for a long time, and
Mallory correctly cites the Uralic loan word evidence in support
for the Ukrainean original home.  But what does not seem to be commonly
known are the details of the IE loan word layers in Uralic. The picture
has changed much during the last approx. 15 years and is still
constantly changing. The details might shed light on the internal
development / differentiation of IE (or, at least its northern
branches) in the future.

One thing worth noting is that dates have gone back conciderably. The
Uralic expansion (for whatever reason it happened) may have been earlier
than the IE one. Some descendant of proto-U (which would later evolve into
Finnic and Saamic) was spoken in the Baltic Sea / Scandinavia area already
3200 bc, when the Indo-European battle axe culture arrived in southwestern
Finland. There are some Finnic-Saamic loan words with proto-IE
characteristics (e.g., laryngal reflexes) which are probably connected
with the battle axe culture, such as Finnic-Saamic *kas´a- 'tip, end' < IE
*Hak´-, *suki- 'family, kin' < IE *suH-. These words are unknown in U
languages outside the Baltic Sea / Scandianavian area. There are also
independent proto-IE loans in Saamic (e.g. *s´uki- 'sharpen' < IE *k´uH-
'pointed, sharp'),  which possibly points towards a very early IE /
pre-Saamic contact zone in mid-Scandinavia. At any rate, a uniform proto-U
language cannot be assumed to have existed after 4000 bc, and 4500-5000 bc
seems more likely. I am not sure how this correlates with IE dates - is
4000-5000 bc too early a date for proto-IE?

A question that should be thoroughly researched is the possibility
of U loan words in IE. Since there are massive amounts of IE loan words of
varying age in the U languages, it seems overwhelmingly unlikely to me
that there would be (almost) none in (proto-)IE. However, I know only two
debatable cases that have been proposed, Germanic-Celtic *yeg- 'ice' < p-U
*jäNi id. (N = velar nasal), and IE *(s)kwalo- '?whale, ?fish species' <
p-U *kala 'fish' (the first case seems convincing enough to me). Has
anyone written anything on this?

Ante Aikio
The Department of the Finnish and Saami Language and Logopedics
University of Oulu, Finland

anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi