Re: [tied] "Will_the_'real'_linguist_please_stand_up?"

----- Original Message -----
From: "george knysh" <gknysh@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 7:21 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] "Will_the_'real'_linguist_please_stand_up?"


> ******GK: Just as a clarification. Is it definitely
> established that the ONLY ancient loan words in PU are
> II, viz., that there is no evidence of ANY loans from
> PIE or from some other ancient (and
> non-II)Indo-European language(s)?*****

I can't find any good evidence of PIE labiovelars in words borrowed by FU (sic! FU rather than Uralic), whereas even the oldest layer of loans discovered by Koivulehto show palatal reflexes of the *K^ series. In fact, IE *g^(H) --> FU *j is one of the securest substitution patterns in the "Koivulehto loans". Koivulehto identifies some of the IE --> FU correspondences as involving laryngeals, but that's no big deal, since at least some of the PIE laryngeals were preserved as consonantal segments as late as PIIr. (for example, their presence blocked the operation of Brugmann's Law). A fortiori, they must have been present in Proto-Satem. The oldest loans in FU show no palatalisation of *K(W) before front vowels. All this evidence taken together points to Proto-Satem IE as the source of the oldest identifiable loans in Finno-Ugric. They are not as numerous as later loans from Iranian and Baltic, but appear to be real enough to me. The contemporaneity of PFU and PSat. ca. 3000 BC could be accepted by most historical linguists, I believe.

Piotr