The widespread Uralic family offers several advantages for tracing prehistory: a firm absolute chronological anchor point in an ancient contact episode with well-dated Indo-Iranian; other points of intersection or diagnostic non-intersection with early Indo-European (the Late Proto-Indo-European-speaking Yamnaya culture of the western steppe, the Afanasievo culture of the upper Yenisei, and the Fatyanovo culture of the middle Volga); lexical and morphological reconstruction sufficient to establish critical absences of sharings and contacts. We add information on climate, linguistic geography, typology, and cognate frequency distributions to reconstruct the Uralic origin and spread. We argue that the Uralic homeland was east of the Urals and initially out of contact with Indo-European. The spread was rapid and without widespread shared substratal effects. We reconstruct its cause as the interconnected reactions of early Uralic and Indo-European populations to a catastrophic climate change episode and interregionalization opportunities which advantaged riverine hunter-fishers over herders.

Sampsa Holopaisen suomalais-ugrilaisen kielentutkimukseen alaan kuuluva väitöskirja tarkastettiin Helsingin ylipistossa lauantaina 14. joulukuuta 2019. Vastaväittäjänä toimi professori Matin Kümmel Jenan yliopistosta ja kustoksena professori Janne Saarikivi. Sampsa Holopainen: Indo-Iranian borrowings in Uralic: critical overview of sound-substitutions and distribution criterion. Helsinki: Helsingin yliopisto 2019. Kirja on luettavissa osoitteessa http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-51-5729-4

In this paper, the Indo-European etymologies of Uralic words are analysed that allegedly contain reflexes of Proto-Indo-European palatal stops (palatovelars) *ḱ, *ǵ and *ǵh. Especially Jorma Koivulehto has in many works argued that words that show these reflexes manifest of very early contacts between Indo-European and Uralic, and these ideas have been very influential in the discussion of location of dating of early varieties of Uralic, and to a lesser extent, Indo-European languages. While most of these etymologies are convincing in that they are indeed borrowed from Indo-European, a critical scrutiny leads to the conclusion that they can be considered loanwords from later branches (such as Indo-Iranian) that had already went through satemization. Some etymologies also turn out to be unconvincing in the light of modern views of Uralic and Indo-European historical phonology. These results support other recent, more sceptic views of contacts between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic, and mean that many of the extra-linguistic conclusions based on earlier loanword studies have to be considered unreliable, which is in line with recent studies of prehistory.

This paper presents the new project Digital etymological dictionary of the oldest vocabulary of Finnish (University of Helsinki, funded by the Kone Foundation) and discusses the present state and challenges of the (especially digital) etymological resources of the Finnic languages and Uralic languages in general. It is also shown how crowdsourcing of etymology can work, and how the present platform could be used in the etymological lexicography of other languages and language families.