Indo-Uralic Languages - Arguments For Relationship Between Indo-European and Uralic - Lexical

Lexical

A second type of evidence advanced in favor of an Indo-Uralic family is lexical. Numerous words in Indo-European and Uralic resemble each other (see list below). The problem is to weed out cognates due to borrowing. Uralic languages have been in contact with a succession of Indo-European languages for millennia. As a result, many words have been borrowed between them, most often from Indo-European languages into Uralic ones.

An example of a Uralic word that cannot be original is Finno-Ugric *śata 'hundred'. The Proto-Indo-European form of this word was *km̥tóm (compare Latin centum), which became *ćatám in early Indo-Iranian (reanalyzed as the neuter nominative–accusative singular of an a stem > Sanskrit śatá-, Avestan sata-). This is evidence that the word was borrowed into Finno-Ugric from Indo-Iranian or Indo-Aryan. This borrowing may have occurred in the region north of the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 2100–1800 BC, the approximate floruit of Indo-Iranian (Anthony 2007:371–411). It provides linguistic evidence for the geographical location of these languages around that time, agreeing with archeological evidence that Indo-European speakers were present in the Pontic-Caspian steppes by around 4500 BCE (the Kurgan hypothesis) and that Uralic speakers may have been established in the Pit-Comb Ware culture to their north in the fifth millennium BCE (Carpelan & Parpola 2001:79).

Another ancient borrowing is Finno-Ugric *porćas ‘piglet’. This word corresponds closely in form to the Proto-Indo-European word reconstructed as *porḱos, attested by such forms as Latin porcus 'hog', Old English fearh (> English farrow 'young pig'), Lithuanian par̃šas ’piglet, castrated boar’, Kurdish purs 'pig', and Saka pāsa (< *pārsa) 'pig'. In the Indo-European word, *-os (> Finno-Ugric *-as) is a masculine nominative singular ending, but it is quite meaningless in Uralic languages. This shows that the whole word was borrowed as a unit and is not part of the original Uralic vocabulary. (Further details on *porćas are given in the Appendix.)

Thus, *śata cannot be Indo-Uralic on account of its phonology, while *porćas cannot be Indo-Uralic on account of its morphology.

Such words as those for 'hundred' and 'pig' have something in common: they represent "cultural vocabulary" as opposed to "basic vocabulary". They are likely to have been acquired along with a more complex number system and the domestic pig from the more advanced Indo-Europeans to the south. Similarly, the Indo-Europeans themselves had acquired such words and cultural items from peoples to their south or west, including possibly their words for 'ox', *gʷou- (compare English cow) and 'grain', *bʰars- (compare English barley). In contrast, basic vocabulary – words such as 'me', 'hand', 'water', and 'be' – is much less readily borrowed between languages. If Indo-European and Uralic are genetically related, they should show agreements in basic vocabulary, with more agreements if they are closely related, fewer if they are less closely related.

Advocates of a genetic relation between Indo-European and Uralic maintain that the borrowings can be filtered out by application of phonological and morphological analysis and that a core of vocabulary common to Indo-European and Uralic remains. As examples they advance such comparisons as Proto-Uralic *weti- (or *wete-) : Proto-Indo-European *wotʼer- (or *wodr̥), oblique stem *wetʼen-, both meaning 'water', and Proto-Uralic *nimi- (or *nime-) : Proto-Indo-European *nomen- (or *H₁nōmn̥), both meaning 'name'. In contrast to *śata and *kuningas, the phonology of these words shows no sound changes from Indo-European daughter languages such as Indo-Iranian. In contrast to kuningas and *porćas, they show no morphological affixes from Indo-European that are absent in Uralic. According to advocates of the Indo-Uralic hypothesis, the resulting core of common vocabulary can only be explained by the hypothesis of common origin.