Re: Uralic Loanwords in Germanic

From: johnvertical@...
Message: 65869
Date: 2010-02-17

> For the other way round, which of these IE groups was the most
> relevant for the Uralic languages, in terms of lexical (et al.)
> influences?
>
> [ ] Alans
> [ ] Germanic tribes
> [ ] Baltic populations
> [ ] Proto-Slavs

That depends on the language. All of these groups are newer than the dissolution of PU into its main components. There's some IE influence into disintegrating Proto-Uralic, but at the time depth of Proto-Indo-Iranian or Proto-Tocharian.

That aside, Germanic was (and still is) probably the most important influence for Finnic and Samic. A very minor amount of words appear to have made their way to Mordvinic, Mari or Permic, possibly intermediated by Finnic (incl. extinct languages like Muromian and Chudic).

Baltic influence is of similar distribution but cut off erly from Samic and North Finnic (for obvious geographical reasons), while continuing in Livonian to this day.

Slavic influence generally begins from the level of Old Russian, tho there are some loans into Finnic that appear a bit older.

I'm not sure how much of various later Iranian influence has been attributed to Alans specifically, but this layer of words exists in everything except Samoyedic (and is scarce in Samic), while all the other groups contain independant loans not found in other branches.

Also Turkic has been an influence for everything from Mordvinic eastwards (incl. Hungarian).


> PS: in the Uralic language Hungarian, there is a significant
> part of vocabulary which is deemed as being of (A) Alanic
> origin and (B) Persian-Iranic origin (e.g. terms meaning "God
> (yazdan/yashtan), lady, gold, silver, green/yellow, bridge,
> customs, sword, cart, glass" &c.).
>
> rgds
> George

Not too significant compared to later influences, if the chart here is correctly cited:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_language#Lexicon

John Vertical