--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, johnvertical@... wrote:
>
> > Note that UEW is again fighting with the problem of explaing away
> > cognates between Germanic and all of Finno-Permic; they resort to
> > claiming that the Finnish sense of FP *lama was influenced by
> > Swedish lam "lame" and not that of the other FP cognates, which
> > have similar senses.
>
> The modern stance on *lama is that it is a loan from Germanic >
> Finnic and that the Permic cognates are unrelated (the
> palatalization and the vocalism are not explainable from a common
> FP root).
Obviously there is a problem, and I can't see why they are so intent on preserving the old Germanic -> Baltic Finnic theory. And solution by fiat never worked in empirical sciences.
> Distribution in Komi but not Udmurt, and the a~a correspondence may
> however suggest loaning from BF.
How? By what movement? The least problematic proposal is one that ascribes the glosses I listed to a pre-IE, pre-Uralic layer.
Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture
'PIT-COMB WARE CULTURE
The term Pit-Comb Ware culture can be applied specifically to a culture of the c fifth-third millennia BC occupying the territory between the east Baltic to the northern Ukraine. It is also applied as a blanket term for a series of cultures stretching across the forests from eastern Scandinavia to the Urals from the fifth millennium BC onwards. These cultures might include the Narva culture of the Baltic region, the Sperrings culture of Finland, the Pit-Comb Ware culture proper of western Russia to the Ukraine, the Upper Volga-Oka Pit-Comb Ware (or Lyalovo) culture, the Kama Neolithic culture, and the Ural Neolithic culture. Similarities between these different cultures are such that they can be treated as a single block with reference to the Indo-Europeans.
In general, the Pit-Comb Ware culture occupied the forest region of northeast Europe and settlements are primarily confined to the Baltic, lakes, and rivers where the economy was primarily, in most areas exclusively, based on hunting-fishing and gathering. The wild fauna is extensive but is particularly comprised of red and roe deer, elk, aurochs, wild pig and beaver with a considerable number of other species (bear, fox, wolf, marten, otter, wolverine, lynx, etc.); coastal sites have also yielded remains of seals. There is some evidence for mixed farming in the Baltic, e.g., in the Narva culture of Lithuania there is evidence for sheep and goat and sickle blades attesting (perhaps) some agriculture. Evidence for habitations often tends to be slight except in areas where marine resources permitted longer term stable settlement, e.g., the Baltic coast. Normally, the evidence for settlement is limited to transient camp sites in its earlier phases but by the late phase there is some evidence for more substantial houses, measuring up to 8 x 5 m in size, and sunken into the ground. Tools comprised arrowheads, spearheads, harpoons, axes, fishhooks and other implements appropriate for a hunting-gathering economy. The Pit-Comb Ware culture also made use of pointed-based, frequently highly-decorated, pottery. Where the iconography is representational, it sometimes depicts water birds.
The region of the Pit-Comb Ware culture would appear to lie too far north of what is normally presumed to have been an area of early Indo-European settlement. Moreover, its culture, primarily hunting-gathering rather than agriculture and stockbreeding, makes a very poor fit with the picture of PIE culture derived from linguistic evidence and later technological items such as wheeled vehicles, metals, plows, etc., would also be very foreign to the Pit-Comb Ware culture. As its geographical location accords well with the later distribution of the Uralic-speaking peoples and its economy also accords in general with that reconstructed lexically for Proto-Uralic it has often been regarded as the archaeological expression of the Uralic language family. This equation, however, also has many critics as it has proven nearly impossible to correlate the various Pit-Comb Ware cultures with the inter-stock divisions of the Uralic language family or their probable movements. Moreover, toponymic evidence from this region suggests some reason to identify a strata of non-Uralic (and non-Indo-European) language(s) in the Pit-Comb Ware area, especially in the Volga-Oka region. Chronologically, many prefer to have the Proto-Baltic-Finnish movement begin only in the last millennium BC and find its ascription to populations in this area so many millennia earlier as extremely doubtful. The widely disseminated presence of, (Indo-)Iranian loanwords in the Uralic languages would also suggest that their dispersal was later than the fifth or fourth millennium origin of the various Pit-Comb Ware variants. Finally, there is a body of scholars who prefer to situate the original home of the Uralic languages at least east of the Upper Volga if not east of the Urals altogether.
The fate of the Pit-Comb Ware culture is also problematic. The Baltic, central Russia, and the northern Ukraine were all areas of the later Corded Ware horizon, e.g., Battle-ax culture, Fatyanovo culture, Middle Dnieper culture, which has generally been associated with early IE movements. However, these cultures appear in some areas where we have no reason to suspect early IE settlement, e.g., central Russia, and there they have often been seen to have been culturally (and presumably linguistically) assimilated by the descendants of the Pit-Comb Ware populations.
...
LINDEN
*lenteha- "linden (Tilia spp)"
[IEW 677 (xlentÄ-), Wat 36 (*lento-), Fried 90-92]
ON lind "linden",
OE lind "linden" (> NE lime with dissimilation),
OHG linta "linden",
Lith lenta "(linden) board",
Rus
lut "(linden)bast",
lutÄje "young linden ready to be stripped",
Alb
lende "wood, material",
lende (< *lentweha-) "oak",
lis ( < *lentsto-) "oak"
To this might be added
Lat lentus "pliant, sticky" .
A word of the west and center of the IE world.
?*leipeha- "linden (Tilia spp)"
[Fried 90-92]
Lith liepa "linden",
Latv liÄ"pa "linden" (< Proto-Baltic *lÄ"ipÄ),
Ukr lypa "linden" (< Slav xlipa)
To the Baltic and Slavic set has sometimes been compared MWels llwyf(en) "elm, linden", and Celtic place names in LÄ«mo-, etc (< Celt *leımo-) although this is more likely from *h1elem "elm" because of the similarity between the two trees Also dubious are attempts to relate Grk (Hesychius) `αλÃÏαλoÏ "a kind of oak" (if < *"linden") The word may derive from *lip- "to stick to, to slip, smear" with a shift to the tree name because of its special properties.
There is a sharp contrast between botany and linguistics The tree was present m many forms and used in many ways such that the early Indo-Europeans (excepting the Irish whose land lacked the linden) must have had a word for it Yet the philological evidence, while rich and suggestive in some stocks, leaves us with several only potentially related cognate sets, each of which splay out into possible etymological relations with disparate but logically associated concepts and symbols That the linden or lime (American basswood) was important in the religious ritual of early Indo-Europeans is suggested not only by the Germanic evidence but also by the Finno-Ugric cultures of European Russia where bast bridles were used for sacrificial horses, linden bark and branches dripped with the blood of sacrificial animals, and there existed linden groves and linden sacrifice trees These functions and the easily worked wood, the useful fibrous bark, and the medicinal blossoms have to be combined with the fact that the genus Tilia in three species, roughly northern, central and southern, was spread across Europe from east to west during the Atlantic period: the linden was an essential part of the early IE world.'
> > Note in support of the proposed sl-/sw- alternation also the l-/v-
> > alternation in Komi S leÅ, P veÅ "ruhig, still (Wetter);
> > windstill"
> >
>
> It's not "alternation", it's a regular dialectal development l > v.
It's not "is", it's "has been proposed to be"
Torsten