IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Robert Orr]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

> AA>there is internal evidence in Uralic supporting the loan origin of p-U
> AA>*weti 'water'.

> .. Please try to fancy that there /could/ have been a common origin of
> that word !
> I do not know a single linguist who would confirm that a word like 'water'
> could be object to borrowing!

Myself, for starters.  I  will take the liberty of quoting myself:

"It should always be borne in mind that linguistically unsophisticated native
speakers are unable to distinguish borrowings from native words.  In many
instances words may have been borrowed and then, at some later stage, after
they had become properly established in the language and thus indistinguishable
from native words to native speakers, undergone a semantic shift and replaced
original native terms for, e.g., "hand", "head", etc; cf. Russian  ruka
(probably an original borrowing from Baltic, see, e.g., Bernštejn 1961:92;
Klimas 1970:265), and German Kopf, an original borrowing from Latin; neither of
those forms would have been borrowed in their respective meanings of "hand" or
"head", but would have shifted to these meanings after being "naturalized",
parallel to the development of Latin testa to French tête.  The arguments put
forward by Bernštejn and Klimas are interesting: the Baltic form (Lithuanian
rankà, Latvian roka) can be etymologized on the basis of Baltic forms ("the
gatherer" < Lithuanian riñkti; renkù "gather") while Common Slavic *roka is
isolated within Slavic.  Bernštejn suggests that originally *roka may not
have been borrowed in the meaning of "hand".  While this proposal may well be
correct, the implied evolution of the semantics of *roka, and the manner in
which it became the Slavic word for "hand' would in any case be very complex,
and, unhappily, in the absence of actual records, unrecoverable with our
present state of knowledge."  (Diachronica XVI)

Refs.
Bernštejn, Samuil B. 1961. Ocerk sravnitel'noj grammatiki slavjanskix
jazykov. Moscow: Izd. "Nauka".

Klimas, Antanas. 1970. "Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic". Donum Balticum ed.
by Velta Ruk  e- Dravin a, 263-269.  Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.

I can't think of any actual examples where this would have happened with
"water", but it seems quite plausible.

Robert Orr