Uralic languages vis-a-vis Indo-European dispersal

From: juhavs
Message: 29472
Date: 2004-01-13

Some of the recent posts have dealt with Uralic/Finno-Ugric matters.
I believe it might be of some use for our participants and readers to
know what the Finnish scholarly mainstream thinks about these issues.
So, here are a couple of comments on recent posts.

This is what Alexander (Stolbov) wrote:

"I know that some (even many) scholars consider P-C cultures as
Finno-Ugric. I can't take this seriously. It's impossibly to draw
unbroken line from them to modern Finnic or Ugric nations. But from
the "Setchataya keramika" cultures it goes smoothly. However these
cultures can't be taken as descendants of the Pit-Comb cultures. On
the most territories the latter disappear much earlier than the former
appear. This is just chronology. Ethnographical evidences are more
demonstrative. I can defend this position much stronger than the Slavs
emergence hypothesis."

JS: Could you please give your argument in favour of your claim that
it is impossible to draw an unbroken line from them to modern Finnic
or Ugric nations? After all, as you quite correctly point out, the
scholarly mainstream disagrees with you, at least here in Finland. A
characteristic position is taken by Asko Parpola and Christian
Carpelan in their "Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic and
Proto-Aryan. They think that immigrants representing the Combed Ware
Style 2 brought the Late Proto-Uralic language to Finland while the
gradually assimilated earlier local population are likely to have
spoken more or less distantly related languages. Why are Parpola,
Carpelan et al. mistaken in your opinion?


Torsten (Pedersen) wrote: "Some (I believe among them Koivulehto)
have proposed that Finnish borrowed from Germanic already in the
Bronze age. That would not be good for my idea that Proto-Germanic as
we know it entered Scandinavia in the first century BCE."

JS: Indeed, Jorma Koivulehto has advocated since 1976 that the
speakers of an earlier phase of Finnic must have come to Finland at
least as early as the Bronze Age. Koivulehto has shown that there are
Germanic loanwords in Finnic that have gone the phonetic changes that
are likely to have taken place between Early Proto-Finnic and late
Proto–Finnic and therefore must have been adopted during the
Proto-Finnic period (actually, a surprising number of these loans are
attested in Saami, too). Given the archaeological evidence, it is
clear that (a) the Jastorf culture did not have any contacts with
Finland and (b) contacts after the Jastorf culture are too late to be
contacts with Proto-Germanic. Hence these contacts must have taken
place before the Jastorf culture, more specifically, with the Nordic
Bronze Age culture, which exerted from 1600 calBC onwards a strong
influence on coastal Finland.

Best regards, Juha