IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Ante Aikio]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Hans Holm wrote:

> "Loans"? That appears as an extremely narrowed view.

> Of cause, resemblances between two langs/Protolangs alone do not prove
> borrowing, let alone any direction of of it.

There is a misunderstanding here. We are -not- dealing with random
phono-semantic look-alikes between Proto-U and Proto-IE. Instead, there
is a substantial amount of thoroughly argumented loan etymologies (for
details, one should refer to the publications of Jorma Koivulehto).

Besides, the etymologies precisely -prove- that the direction of loaning
was IE > U and not vice versa. This is because the Proto-U form is
predictable from the Proto-IE form, but not the other way round. Given the
phonological structure of P-U (which differed radically from P-IE), it is
predictable that e.g. P-IE *kwelH- was nativized as P-U *kulki- and P-IE
*wed- as P-U *weti. But there is no reason why e.g. P-U *kulki- would
become P-IE *kwelH- (and not *kulk- or something like that).

> Additionally to the possibility of loans it must be found out wether the
> resemblances could be due to
> - only chance (about 2 to 8 %, decreasing e.g. with word-length),
> - common origin.

It has already been found out. As for common origin, it is not possible to
discredit semantically and phonologically natural loan etymologies by
replacing them with Nostratic speculations. There have been multiple
attempts to relate IE and U genetically, and all of them have failed. Of
course, it is impossible to -prove- (in the strict sense of the word) that
the lexical similarities are not due to common genetic origin.  But
then, it is impossible to disprove -any- proposed genetic
relationship. Because of this, the task of proving belongs to those who
propose a genetic relationship, and this has not been succesful for
proto-Indo-Uralic or Nostratic.

Chance correspondeces are naturally another matter. However, given that
there are only about 300 semantically and phonologically credible P-U
etymologies, and these contain at least 30 proto-IE loans, I'd say that
chance correspondence is ruled out. One also has to bear in mind that the
U languages contain substantial amounts of later loan words of varying
age (eg. proto-/pre-Baltic, proto/pre-Germanic, proto/pre-Aryan,
proto-Iranian); this makes it natural to assume that contacts between U
and IE were possible at a still earlier date (i.e., when at least the
former still was a proto-language).

 - Ante Aikio