Re: Finnic substrate in Slavic?!

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, johnvertical@... wrote:

>
> > > > > What leads you to choose a Finnic substrate in Slavic over
> > > > > a Balto-Slavic substrate in Finnic?
> > > >
> > > > Because historically the Finnics were the losers.
> > >
> > > Seriously now.
> >
> > I am serious. The Finnic speakers have historically been
> > retreating before Balto-Slavic speakers.
>
> The historical situation at the Latvia/Estonia boundary more
> resembles random fluctuation that happen'd to be in the Latvians'
> favor, than any constant tendency (as was the case with later
> Slavic conquests).

Slavic speakers are Balto-Slavic speakers, so I take it you agree.

> Oh BTW, if Baltic was never spoken north of Latvia, what do you
> make of the existence of Baltic loans (some of them independant of
> Finnic) in Samic?

What you mean to ask is what I make of the presence of cognate words in Baltic and Saami. Well there are three possibilities:
1. Saami borrowed them from Baltic
2. Baltic borrowed them from Saami
3. Baltic and Saami borrowed them from some substrate.

In favor of 3. would be such things as the occurrence of known pre-Saami (Aikio) words outside the present Saami area, eg. *soom-/*sam-. Ahem.

> > > > But lately the consensus seems to be that the Baltic
> > > > languages are relatively recent at the Baltic coast, appr.
> > > > 2000 years ago.
> > >
> > > A similar consensus is emerging for Baltic-Finnic and Samic
> > > languages, so that doesn't really help.
> >
> > So that leaves a big gap between them, unto which they have
> > expanded, which should make us wonder what language(s) was/were
> > spoken in the gap.
>
> It's difficult to say much else than "apparently non-IE,
> non-Uralic".
>
> But such a gap would have existed even in most older-date
> formulations too.

Yes, so people saw the need to assume some language there (or some did).

> (re: -t)
> > > > We have these logical possibilities:
> > > > 1. some language related to PIE was a substrate of Finnic, or
> > > > 2. some language related to Finnic was a substrate of PIE, or
> > > > 3. some language unrelated to either was a substrate to both,
> > > > or, if it was just a case of a loan of a postposition -t-
> > > > 4. loan between neighboring languages.
> > >
> > > 5. IE and Uralic are related
> >
> > If so, then so far back it's irretrievable. The fundamental
> > matches usually cited are too few and too little changed for me
> > to accept as other than substrate influence.
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Uralic_languages
>
> "Too much to be nothing, too little to be something" or how was it
> they said of Nostratic?
>
> > > 6. coincidence
> >
> > Gut feeling: no.
>
> If it were limited to this one item, mine would be "yes". But it's
> not (verbal endings etc.)

I think the IE -mi declination is a locativic progressive involving a participle or verbal noun (like the English gerund) personalized in the style of some types of Finnish participles. So
*<stem>-nu-en,
*<stem>-sa-en,
*<stem>-ta-en,
->
*<stem>-n,W-i,
*<stem>-s-i,
*<stem>-t-i,
where *nu, *sa and *ta are deictic pronouns
"at me", "at thee", "at him".

This means that originally only those deictics had to be loaned, or borrowed as grammatical particles for there to be the seemingly fundamental correspondence we see today. PIE has deictics in *n- (Armenian), *s- and *t-, so does Estonian. And there's Estonian nüüd "now".

> Back to the topic however…
>
> > Arnoud tells me in a mail that Mordva has a dative,

Oops, Arnaud. I'm always mentally deriving it from Arnold. I don't know why he gets so upset over that.

Torsten