At 8:47:58 PM on Sunday, February 17, 2008, Rick McCallister wrote:
> His article has evidently been taken down. What is the
> current estimate?
I'm looking at it right now. Did you perhaps omit the .html
at the end of the URL:
http://www.kotikielenseura.fi/virittaja/hakemistot/jutut/kallio1_2006.html
The key paragraph:
However, loanword studies contradict the dating of
Proto-Uralic to 4000 BC. Two reasons are given for this.
First, Proto-Indo-Iranian loanwords with a wide
distribution in the Finno-Ugrian languages suggest that
the branches of Finno-Ugrian had not yet linguistically
diverged from one another in the latter half of the third
millennium BC, when Proto-Indo-Iranian was most likely
spoken. Second, Northwest Germanic loanwords in Finnic and
Sámic similarly suggest that Finnic and Sámic were still
two dialects of the same Proto-Finno-Sámic language as
late as the latter half of the first millennium BC, when
Northwest Germanic most likely came into being.
Brian