Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate?

anthony.appleyard@umist.ac.uk anthony.appleyard at UMIST.AC.UK
Fri Jan 19 08:41:41 UTC 2001


On Mon, 6 Nov 2000 18:44:37 +0200, Ante Aikio <anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi>
wrote:

> However, there are lexical correspondences between western Uralic and
> Germanic which have no further etymologies in either language family, e.g.
>   Germ. *saiwa- ~ Samic *saajvê 'fresh water',
>   Finnic *kauka- 'long' ~ Germ. *hauha- 'high',
>   Germ. *ailda- 'fire' ~ Samic *aaltê-nkê-ssê 'lightning'.
> But all of these can be explained as borrowings in one direction or the
> other, so there is no special reason to asssume separate borrowing from
> some substrate language in these cases.

Please where can I find a complete list of these words which are found in
both Germanic and western Uralic?

Someone said in gothic-l at egroups.com that archaeologies ancestral to the
modern South Saami (= Lappish) culture have been found in all of Scandinavia
dand as far south as Hamburg in Germany. If so, then perhaps in South Saamic
we have a living descendant of one of the many aboriginal substratum
languages that incoming Indo-European overrode so long ago, and the above
words and their like are pre-IE substratum words. If Finno-Ugrian languages
were once spoken in all Scandinavia and Denmark and a long way into
Schleswig-Holstein, then their speakers in those southern areas would have
changed from tundra hunters to a denser population and more settled mode of
life as the climate got warmer as the Ice Age ended and then farming and
livestock herding came in. That increases the chance that Germanic started
as Indo-European spoken with a "south coast of the Baltic" type Finno-Ugrian
accent. That might also explain peculiar Germanic features such as weak-type
adjectives declining different from 1st and 2nd declension nouns.

Perhaps also, Balto-Slavonic (Lithuanian etc) started as IE spoken with a
"south-east coast of the Baltic" Finno-Ugrian accent; Estonian and Livonian
would be the nearest living relatives of that area's pre-IE substratum.



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