Re: beyond languages: Mitanni and Rg-Vedic chronology

From: fournet.arnaud
Message: 58252
Date: 2008-05-01

----- Original Message -----
From: "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@...>

>> ...there is a question to answer: are Mordvins Uralic people with
>> a strong Indo-Aryan substrate? or are Mordvins actually Indo-
>> Aryans that have been Uralicized?

>I'm very interested in this Mordvin story, Arnaud, but could you
>kindly eleborate further on the alleged *Indo-Aryan* features of
>some Mordvinic languages? I thought this was a case of *Iranian*
>linguistic influence on Uralic.
> Thanks and best regards,
>Francesco

============
As I have already stated a couple of times
The problem is we don't have a reliable reconstruction of Uralic,
and for that reason, there is much fog on when words were borrowed and under
which form,

Because most Uralicists just make sloppy reconstructoids,
we cannot sort out widespread multiple late LWs and inherited early LWs,
and we have no historical phonology of Uralic.

Another problem is the inadequate phonetic description,
entailed by cyrillic :
in many cases the sequence sj is treated as the same thing as ç (palatal as
in niç(h)t "not")

Nevertheless,
I suppose we can sort out Iranic-looking and Indic-looking LWs,
on the basis that Iranic has s, z Satem, and Indic has ç, j Satem.
On that basis, we have :

Iranic-looking
Noun- + zä : my N : egho > *-za
i-sjak "yesterday" < *i-zja-
prtsä "pig" < *pVr-tsa
uzör "ax" < *voz-r (?) (not from *vajra)
sjora "cereal" < *sjoro < *kor
sjada "hundred" < *sjata < *knt-om
(there must have been some kind of yod in the proto-form)

Indic-looking
vrgas < *vrk-as "wolf" < *wlkwo
çjora < *çor- "horn" < *kor
çjam "clothe" < *çam < *kem

Note the minimal pair : sjora "cereal" and çjora "horn".

Arnaud
============