IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>jer at cphling.dk writes:

>If the Uralic Urheimat is placed for independent reasons somewhere in
>Central Ukraine and the IE ditto has been put in the southern part of the
>Ukraine, the two protolanguages were in fact once contiguous and the old
>loan relations stem from some period within that contact.

-- as far as I know, the Uralic Urheimat is generally placed around the Ural
mountains (hence the name).  A bit further east than the central Ukraine,
although not much further.  Subsequent spread was to the west _and_ east;
hence Uralic (or Finno-Ugric) languages are found from Siberia all the way
west to Finland (further, counting Sammi).

>As for the position of Anatolian, there are very few things that
>distinguish Proto-IE as it was before the break-off of pre-Anatolian from
>what it became during the time up to its next split when the second branch
>(Tocharian?) left the remaining stock. Consequently, we cannot tell from
>the form of an IE loanword in Uralic whether it was borrowed before or
>after the separation of Anatolian from the rest.

-- that, I think, is a fair statement.

>That being so, we cannot quite exclude that the IE homeland was in Anatolia
>and that the rest had moved to the north of the Black Sea and there met the
>(pre-)Proto-Urals and handed them a bag of loanwords.

-- true, but this requires all the other languages to derive from a _single_
movement northwards from Anatolia.

There's also the matter of the strong evidence that the Anatolian IE
languages were intrusive in the areas they were occupying when the first
records are written.

Eg., the very large stock of Hattic loanwords in Hittite, for instance.

>there are enough laryngeal-sensitive phonetic changes
>in the individual branches to guarantee that laryngeals survived as
>segmental units well into the separate lifelines of the other
>subbranches also.

-- I think that's fair.  The survival of the laryngeals in Hittite and Luvian
is, I think, at least partly an artifact of the very early date at which the
written records of those languages begin.  If we had written records in
Balto-Slavic from the early 2nd millenium BCE, who knows what archaic
features might be found?