Urheimat
Urheimat (German: ur- original, ancient; Heimat home, homeland) is a linguistic term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language. Since many peoples tend to wander and spread, there is no absolute Urheimat, e.g. there is an Indo-European Urheimat different from the Germanic or Romance Urheimat. If the proto-language was spoken in historical times, the location of the Urheimat is typically undisputed, such as the Roman Empire in the case of the Romance languages. If the proto-language is unattested, however, its existence, and by consequence the existence and exact location of its Urheimat, may always be of a hypothetical nature.
Reconstruction
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Indo-European topics |
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| Indo-European languages |
| Albanian · Anatolian · Armenian Baltic · Celtic · Dacian · Germanic Greek · Indo-Iranian · Italic · Phrygian Slavic · Thracian · Tocharian |
| Indo-European peoples |
| Albanians · Anatolians · Armenians Balts · Celts · Germanic peoples Greeks · Indo-Aryans · Indo-Iranians Iranians · Italic peoples · Slavs Thracians · Tocharians |
| Proto-Indo-Europeans |
| Language · Religion · Society |
| Urheimat hypotheses |
| Adamic · Anatolian · Armenian Indian · Kurgan · Paleolithic |
| Indo-European studies |
In cases where the Urheimat of a particular linguistic group is not positively known, one method of identifying it is an analysis of the vocabulary of the proto-language. For example, if there were no historical documents and one wanted to find the Urheimat of the Romance languages, the Romance root for "cow", which is quite similar in all Latin-based languages, would indicate that the Romance languages spread from an area where there were cows.
English: cow
- Portuguese: vaca
- Spanish: vaca
- French: vache
- Italian: vacca
- Romanian: vacă
Indo-European homeland
After this manner, scholars have tried to identify the homeland of the Indo-European languages, to which the term Urheimat is most frequently applied. Possibly relevant geographical indicators are common words for 'beech' and 'salmon' (while there is no common word for 'lion', for example—the fact so many European words for "lion" look alike is due to more recent borrowings). Many hypotheses for an Urheimat have been proposed, and Mallory said: “One does not ask ‘where is the Indo-European homeland?’ but rather ‘where do they put it now?’ ”Mallory (1989:143)
Specific hypotheses:
- Adamic language
- Anatolian hypothesis
- Armenian hypothesis
- Kurgan hypothesis
- Out of India theory
- Paleolithic Continuity Theory
