Re: Uralic

At 12:01 2000-01-31 -0800, you wrote:

>Dear friends,
>
>I would just copy letters send by Ante Aikio to another IE mailing list
>(Indo-European@...). Please read these before answering the poll.
>I asked him permition to copy it on this list.
>


>[another letter :]

>One thing worth noting is that dates have gone back conciderably. The
>Uralic expansion (for whatever reason it happened) may have been earlier
>than the IE one. Some descendant of proto-U (which would later evolve
>into
>Finnic and Saamic) was spoken in the Baltic Sea / Scandinavia area
>already
>3200 bc, when the Indo-European battle axe culture arrived in
>southwestern
>Finland. There are some Finnic-Saamic loan words with proto-IE
>characteristics (e.g., laryngal reflexes) which are probably connected
>with the battle axe culture, such as Finnic-Saamic *kas´a- 'tip, end' <
>IE
>*Hak´-, *suki- 'family, kin' < IE *suH-. These words are unknown in U
>languages outside the Baltic Sea / Scandianavian area. There are also
>independent proto-IE loans in Saamic (e.g. *s´uki- 'sharpen' < IE *k´uH-
>'pointed, sharp'), which possibly points towards a very early IE /
>pre-Saamic contact zone in mid-Scandinavia. At any rate, a uniform
>proto-U
>language cannot be assumed to have existed after 4000 bc, and 4500-5000
>bc
>seems more likely. I am not sure how this correlates with IE dates - is
>4000-5000 bc too early a date for proto-IE?

I agree with most of the things said in this post, however the very early
arrival of Finnic/Saamic in Scandinavia suggested above seems impossible
since there is also a number of specifically indoiranian loanwords in
Finnic and Saamic which can hardly be as old as 3200 bc, and which must
have been picked up somewhere north of the Black Sea. Saamic also has a
considerable number of Baltic (or possibly Balto-Slavic) loanwords which
are also rather unlikely to have been acquired in northern Scandinavia. It
seems more likely that the PIE loan-words unique to Finnic and/or Saamic
have simply been lost in other U languages (as there is at least one
Baltic loanword that is unique to South Saamic, the dialect spoken in the
far south-west of the Saamic area).
Note also that most saamic words related to the sea and sea animals are
loans from Protogermanic, not PIE.

Tommy Tyrberg