Proto-Uralic Homeland (II): Forests & Climate

This post is part of a draft on palaeolinguistics and the Proto-Uralic homeland. See below for the color code of protoforms.

3. Forests

3.1. Regular terms

PU (Saa.? Fi., Md., Ma., Ms., Hu.? Smy.) *kojwa ‘birch’ (UEW Nº 334).

PU (Saa., Fi., Ma., P, Kh., Ms.) *ćänä ‘bracket fungus’ (UEW Nº 995; Aikio 2020: 115 with references).

PU (Md., Ma., Hu.) *ćalV/*će̮li/*ćälV ‘elm’ (UEW Nº 926), from PMd. *śäľǝŋ, PMa. *šolǝ, Hu. szil (Aikio 2020: 101 with references).

PU (Saa., Fi., Md., Ma., P, Kh., Ms., Smy.) *kowsi/*kusa ‘spruce; fir’ (UEW Nº … Read the rest “Proto-Uralic Homeland (II): Forests & Climate”

Proto-Uralic Homeland (I): Foraging & Animals

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This post is part of a draft on palaeolinguistics and the Proto-Uralic homeland. See below for the color code of protoforms.

1. Foraging

1.1. Hunting

PFU (Fi., Ma., Md., Ms., Hu.) *lewi- ‘to shoot’ (UEW Nº 482; Aikio 2019: 47).

PU (Saa., Fi., Md., Ma., Kh., Ms., Hu., Smy.) *je̮ŋsi/*joŋsi ‘bow’ (UEW Nº 190; Aikio 2020: 71 with references).

PU (Saa.? Fi., Ma., Kh., Ms., Hu., Smy.) *jänti(ni) ‘sinew; (bow)string’ (UEW Nº 169; Aikio 2019: 47 with references).

PU (Saa., Fi., Md.., Ma., P, Kh., Ms., Hu., Smy.) *ńe̮li (*ńōle) ‘arrow’ (UEW Nº 622).… Read the rest “Proto-Uralic Homeland (I): Foraging & Animals”

Palaeolinguistics: The Homeland Problem

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The practice of making inferences about the cultures of language users on the evidence of reconstructed languages is called linguistic palaeontology. These inferences may concern the material culture and geographic location of speakers as well as their social relations, mythology, and beliefs – the notion of ‘archaeological culture’ is used to capture both material culture and behaviour (Mallory 2020).

Proto-Uralic Homeland

This is the introductory post for my draft on the Proto-Uralic Homeland, which I have divided into eight pieces according to semantic fields or chronology, or both. During the following week, you will … Read the rest “Palaeolinguistics: The Homeland Problem”

“Local” Tollense Valley warriors linked to Germanic peoples

Recently published paper Genomic Data from an Ancient European Battlefield Indicates On-Going Strong Selection on a Genomic Region Associated with Lactase Persistence Over the Last 3,000 Years, by Burger et al., submitted to Current Biology, available at CellPress SneakPeek.

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):

Tollense sample shows no structure

Multiple lines of evidence point to little or no genetic structure in the population from which the Tollense individuals were sampled. First, all individuals fall within the range of Central and northern European variation when projected onto a principle component analysis (PCA) trained on modern samples and their spread matches that

… Read the rest

European hydrotoponymy (VI): the British Isles and non-Indo-Europeans

The nature of the prehistoric languages of the British Isles is particularly difficult to address: because of the lack of ancient data from certain territories; because of the traditional interpretation of Old European names simply as “Celtic”; and because Vennemann’s re-labelling of the Old European hydrotoponymy as non-Indo-European has helped distract the focus away from the real non-Indo-European substrate on the islands.

Alteuropäisch and Celtic

An interesting summary of hydronymy in the British Isles was already offered long ago, in British and European River-Names, by Kitson, Transactions of the Philological Society (1996) 94(2):73-118. In it, he discusses, among others:… Read the rest “European hydrotoponymy (VI): the British Isles and non-Indo-Europeans”

European hydrotoponymy (V): Etruscans and Rhaetians after Italic peoples

There is overwhelming evidence that the oldest hydrotoponymic layer in Italy (and especially Etruria) is of Old European nature, which means that non-Indo-European-speaking (or, at least, non-Old-European-speaking) Etruscans came later to the Apennine Peninsula.

Furthermore, there is direct and indirect linguistic, archaeological, and palaeogenomic data supporting that the intrusive Tursānoi came from the Aegean during the Late Bronze Age, possibly through the Adriatic, and that their languages spread to Etruria and probably also to the eastern Alps.

Hydrotoponymic layer

The following are translated excerpts (emphasis mine) from Lenguas, genes y culturas en la Prehistoria de Europa y … Read the rest “European hydrotoponymy (V): Etruscans and Rhaetians after Italic peoples”

European hydrotoponymy (IV): tug of war between Balto-Slavic and West Uralic

In his recent paper on Late Proto-Indo-European migrations, when citing Udolph to support his model, Frederik Kortlandt failed to mention that the Old European hydrotoponymy in northern Central-East Europe evolved into Baltic and Slavic layers, and both take part in some Northern European (i.e. Germanic – Balto-Slavic) commonalities.

Proto-Slavic

From Expansion slavischer Stämme aus namenkundlicher und bodenkundlicher sicht, by Udolph, Onomastica (2016), translated into English (emphasis mine):

NOTE. An archived version is available here. The DOI references for Onomastica do not work.

(…) there is a clear center of Slavic names in the area north of the

… Read the rest

European hydrotoponymy (III): from Old European to Palaeo-Germanic and the Nordwestblock

The study of hydrotoponymy shows a prevalent initial Old European layer in central and northern Germany, too, similar to the case in Iberia, France, Italy, and the British Isles.

The recent paper on Late Proto-Indo-European migrations by Frederik Kortlandt relies precisely on this ancestral layer as described by Jürgen Udolph to support a Danubian expansion of North-West Indo-European with East Bell Beakers, identified as the Alteuropäische (Old European) layer that was succeeded by Germanic in the North European Plain.

The Proto-Germanic homeland

The following are excerpts are translated from the German original (emphasis mine) in Udolph’s Namenkundliche Studien … Read the rest “European hydrotoponymy (III): from Old European to Palaeo-Germanic and the Nordwestblock”

Genetic continuity among Uralic-speaking cultures in north-eastern Europe

The recent study of Estonian Late Bronze Age/Iron Age samples has shown, as expected, large genetic continuity of Corded Ware populations in the East Baltic area, where West Uralic is known to have been spoken since at least the Early Bronze Age.

The most interesting news was that, unexpectedly for many, the impact of “Siberian ancestry” (whatever that actually means) was small, slow, and gradual, with slight increases found up to the Middle Ages, compatible with multiple contact events in north-eastern Europe. Haplogroup N became prevalent among Finnic populations only through late bottlenecks, as research of modern … Read the rest “Genetic continuity among Uralic-speaking cultures in north-eastern Europe”