Re: Uralic

Mark wrote 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 I would ask do these cognates also exist in Yukaghir too, especially since Uralic-Yukaghir seems now to accepted as one language family. And if the Ket-Burushaski link is genuine and linked to Uralo-Yukaghir (as Glen suggests) what about the cognates here? I suspect rather than a common culture as recently as Sredny Stog or just before, given these very widely dispersed and ancient Uralic links (Glen even attaches Chuchki-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut!) the "falling apart" between PIE and P-U must have been much earlier than 4,900 BCE. Regards John