Odp: Uralic

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1314
Date: 2000-02-01

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Guillaume JACQUES
To: cybalist@eGroups.com
Sent: Monday, January 31, 2000 9:01 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Uralic

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.


[Ante Aikio :]
I'm interested in knowing how widely accepted is the theory that the
Indo-European "Urheimat" was located in Eastern Europe. And how much
support do such theories as e.g. Colin Renfrew's idea of the Anatolian
origin of IE languages have?

I ask this beacause one central piece of evidence in support for the
East-European origin comes from outside the field of IE studies, namely
Uralic linguistics. But it seems to me (correct me if I'm wrong!) that
among many IE-ists, there's a tradition of uninterest in diachronic
linguistics done outside the IE language family. So, I'd also like to
ask
how well is the recent progress in Uralic linguistics known inside your
field of research? And especially, I'd be interested in hearing comments
on what is presented below from those who do NOT support the
East-European
original home.

During the last ten years it has been discovered that Uralic languages
possess extremely ancient IE loan words: they were loaned from proto-IE
to
proto-U[ralic], which has been dated approximately 4000 bc or before. In
order to provide some substance for discussion, I will give some
examples on the loan etymologies. All etymologies derive from the
Germanist Jorma Koivulehto and most can be found in his book "Uralische
Evidenz für die Laryngaltheorie" (1991). The etymologies are meant to
serve only as an illustration. Thus, only a fraction of the credible
loan
etymologies put forward are presented here.
Just a brief comment. My best regards to Ante Aikio. I have great repect for the recent Finnish contributions to the problem of early IE/Uralic contacts. These issues were brought to my attention a few years ago by Raimo Anttila of UCLA; he also made me read Koivulehto's book and a number of articles by Finnish linguists. They represent first-class scholarship and should be obligatory reading for students of IE as well as for people interested in Nostratic and other long-range comparison schemes. I have expressed the same sentiments on several occasions (when discussing matters Indo-Uralic on this list).
 
As for Uralic (or more specifically Finno-Ugric) contacts with (Proto-)Iranians, they could have take place much farther north than usually assumed. If the Fatyanovo culture (with its core area stretching from the upper Volga to southeast of the River Oka) can be associated with Aryan-speakers, some of those borrowings could have been taken from Aryans living close to modern Pskov and Sankt-Peterburg rather than Pontic steppe nomads. IE-speakers (carriers of the Corded Ware/Battle Axe cultural package) seem to have been settling in Estonia, Finland and eastern Sweden as early as 3200-2500 BC.
 
As for the Anatolian vs. Non-Anatolian IE division, it doesn't rely on trivial things like the preservation vs. retention of "laryngeals": there is enough comparative evidence even without Uralic support that laryngeals were lost through parallel development in the individual branches rather than in the common ancestor of the non-Anatolian languages.
 
Piotr