Re: IE & Uralic

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

>
> I was intrigued by this article. What exactly are the
> features shared by European IE & Uralic?
> What are the implications of this?
> If this article is correct, does this place IE
> originally to the east of Uralic rather than to the
> south? --in Central Asia as Johanna Nichols claimed.
> Does it mean that Uralic was originally spoken in the
> area from the Urals to the Black &/or Caspian Sea?
> If so, is there any evidence of contact between Uralic
> and N & NW Caucasian?
>
> Sprachbund
> From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> . . .
> Romance and Germanic languages of Western Europe
> (other than English) share many features due to
> interaction, both with one another and with Classical
> Latin and Greek. Similarly there are also features
> common to languages situated in Europe that are not
> found in Indo-European languages spoken in India and
> Iran, but are found in the Uralic languages. This is
> because of the great migrations across Europe.
> . . .

There are some things in Slavic that are reminiscent of similar
features in Fennic, ie. the use of the genitive in Slavic and the
partitive in Fennic in negative contexts, where the rest of IE would
use a nominative (afaIk). Also, Estonian (and the rest of Fennic?) has
a special verb sajama for precipitation, Russian (and Slavic?) uses
the standard IE movement verb *i- "go" for precipitation, where the
rest of IE has kept separate verbs for rain, snow etc. Perhaps Slavic
developed on a Fennic substrate?


Torsten