From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 29484
Date: 2004-01-13
----- Original Message -----
From: "juhavs" <juhavs@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2004 2:20 AM
Subject: [tied] Uralic languages vis-a-vis Indo-European dispersal
> JS: Indeed, Jorma Koivulehto has advocated since 1976 that the
speakers of an earlier phase of Finnic must have come to Finland at
least as early as the Bronze Age. Koivulehto has shown that there are
Germanic loanwords in Finnic that have gone the phonetic changes that
are likely to have taken place between Early Proto-Finnic and late
Proto-Finnic and therefore must have been adopted during the
Proto-Finnic period (actually, a surprising number of these loans are
attested in Saami, too). Given the archaeological evidence, it is
clear that (a) the Jastorf culture did not have any contacts with
Finland and (b) contacts after the Jastorf culture are too late to be
contacts with Proto-Germanic. Hence these contacts must have taken
place before the Jastorf culture, more specifically, with the Nordic
Bronze Age culture, which exerted from 1600 calBC onwards a strong
influence on coastal Finland.
The argument appears to me to be based on unprovable underlying
assumptions -- e.g. that the carriers of the Nordic Bronze Age culture spoke
a language ancestral to Germanic; then the local continuity of Germanic is
supposed to guarantee the local continuity of Finnic-S�mi. I also wonder how
Koivulehto knows that a given loan is pre-Germanic (certainly not
_Proto_-Germanic if we're talking of dates in the second millennium BC).
Have you got any examples of such putative Germanic loans to hand?
Piotr