Re: A dialogue in Old Urianian.

Hi Lars

On 22/02/07, Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...> wrote:

>
> Well, Samic belongs to the Uralic group, and historically it's been
> spoken at least as far south as Gudbandsdalen. I don't think the
> timing of these migrations or disseminations are so well-established
> yet. None of them are just one big vawe, there are several.

A linguistic map of the Uralic speaking areas on Wikipedia seems to indicate
patches of Uralic along the northern and shores of Russia, (and of course in
the Urals), extending into Estonia and Finland with Hungarian as an outlier.
(The rest of the Ugric subgroup, which Hungarian belongs to, is on the other
side of the Finnic subgroup, between that and Samoyedic.) This suggests a
map somewhat like that of the Celtic languages before the Anglo-Saxon
invasion of Britain, with retreating areas of Celtic in France, Q-Celtic in
Ireland and Western Scotland, and P-Celtic in Wales and (what later became)
England - and we know that the Celts were pushed westward by the Germans and
other groups before being "wiped" out, linguistically, in France by the
Romans and Britain and Ireland by the Anglo-Normans/English. So it's
possible the Uralic-speaking areas were much once larger in a time before
the onslaughts of Germanic and Balto-Slavic peoples.

And I
> think an early Uralic population is a good alternative for a
> substratum of Germanic. After all our Germanic forefathers had to get
> their initial stress from somewhere.

There are various curious phenomena associated w/ the comparative study of
Uralic and Indo-European. For example, whereas you rightly point out,
Germanic languages are stressed on the first syllable, it is entirely
possible that:

(a) They "inherited" it from Uralic and were simply "best" at preserving it;
or
(b) Their long contact with Uralic languages influenced its preservation; or
(c) They inherited it from PIE.

The last possibility is supported by the fact that Latin, like Germanic
today, originally had stress on the first syllable too, which would account
for the the lack of a full range of consonants in non-initial syllables: for
example "inimical"/"in-imical" comes from "in-"/"not" and "amicus"/"friend",
with reduction of the initial a- of "amicus" to "i-" after "in-".
First-syllable stress, of course, is also responsible for the reduction of
vowels (often to schwa) in non-initial syllables in Germanic, and vowel
harmony in Uralic languages.

Jeff

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