From: Mark Odegard
Message: 1306
Date: 2000-02-01
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.
I cannot cite specific references, but this is my understanding too. The Uralic presence in Scandinavia seems to have occured after the breakup of PIE. It is not improbable to suggest pre-Germanic was in Scandinavia before Uralic.As Tommy implicitly points out, the Uralics originated deeply inland, and had no knowledge of seafaring and sea animals (seals etc). Like Germanic, they borrowed these terms from adjacent people. The Uralic homeland is usually said to be centered someplace around the Samara Bend of the Volga, a location that certainly agrees with the historic distribution of its languages on either side of the Urals.
The progress of Uralic-speakers into Scandinavia would seem to have originated from the Volga and thence westward to the Gulf of Finland, while what became Baltic reached its historic range via the Vistula and/or Elbe.
The "standard model" puts the PIE homeland in the Sredny Stog culture in Ukraine, 4500-3500 BCE. Just east of Sredny Stog is the Khvalynsk culture (4900-3500 BCE) centered on Samara. The successors of both are the much more widespread Yamna culture, 3600-2200 BCE.
By the standard model, then, the place Uralic took its earliest loanwords was probably in the vicinity of the eastward-most bend of Don.
The great question, of course, is when proto-Uralic and proto-IE emerged -- or rather, the date when Indo-Uralic fell apart. There have been rumors for what is now a couple decades about Uralic-IE cognates, and tales of how these are circulating via photocopies among university linguistic departments, but little seems to have been published. Are these Uralic cognates 'borrowings' or do they come to Uralic as a matter of common descent?
Mark Odegard.