C.C. Uhlenbeck on Indo-European, Uralic and Caucasian

Abstract

In his early years, C.C. Uhlenbeck was particularly interested in the problem of the Indo-European homeland (1895, 1897). He rejected Herman Hirt's theory (1892) that the words for 'birch' , 'willow' , 'spruce' , 'oak' , 'beech' and 'eel' point to Lithuania and its immediate surroundings and returned to Otto Schrader's view (1883, 1890) that the original homeland must rather be sought in southern Russia and may have included some of the later Germanic and Iranian territories. It is clear that the Mediterranean region and the area around the North Sea can safely be excluded because the arrival of the Indo-Europeans was comparatively recent here, as it was in Iran and the Indian subcontinent. It is difficult to be more specific within the limits of central and eastern Europe and central Asia. Uhlenbeck was impressed by the lexical correspondences between Indo-European and Semitic which had been adduced in favor of an eastern homeland but pointed out that borrowings from Semitic may have reached the Indo-Europeans through an intermediary. He agrees that the Indo-European words for trees and animals point to a moderate climate but questions the possibility of a more specific localization as well as the concept of homeland itself. Uhlenbeck identifies the Slavic word for 'dog' pĭsŭ with the Indo-European word for 'livestock' *peḱu and its original meaning as 'domestic animal'. Unlike Hirt (1895), he recognizes that the Indo-Europeans were pastoralists before they became agriculturalists, as is clear from the absence of common words for 'plough' , 'field' , 'grain' and suchlike. While Armenian shares many agricultural terms with the languages of Europe, these are absent from Indo-Iranian. The common Indo-European vocabulary reflects a stage of development when weaponry was made of stone, wood, bones and hides (cf. Schrader 1890: 320-346). It includes words for 'cart' (ὄχος), 'wheel' (κύκλος), 'axle' (ἄξων), 'yoke' (ζυγόν), 'carpenter' (τέκτων), '(wooden) house' (δόμος), 'vessel' (ναῦς), 'to plait' (πλέκω), 'to weave' (ὑφαίνω), 'to spin' (νέω), 'garment' (εἷμα) and 'to clothe' (ἕννῡμι). The population of Denmark and Scandinavia did not speak an Indo-European language before the advent of pastoralism, which puts these countries beyond the original homeland. The introduction of the cart was evidently more recent than the domestication of cattle, which were used as draught animals. All Indo-European languages have the same words for 'ox' , 'sheep' , 'goat' , 'horse' and

The first horse herders and the impact of early Bronze Age steppe expansions into Asia

“…Particularly, the first identified presence of Caucasian genomic ancestry in steppe populations is through the Khvalynsk burials (2, 47) and that of steppe ancestry in the Caucasus is through Armenian Copper Age individuals (42). These admixture processes likely gave rise to the ancestry that later became typical of the Yamnaya pastoralists (7), whose IE language may have evolved under the influence of a Caucasian language, possibly from the Maykop culture (50, 55). This scenario is consistent with both the “Copper Age steppe” (4) and the “Caucasian” models for the origin of the Proto-Anatolian language (56).…”

Indo-European cereal terminology suggests a Northwest Pontic homeland for the core Indo-European languages

“…On the other side of the spectrum, the Indo-Europeanist Hirt [ 14 ; 15 ] strongly argued for a fully agrarian Indo-European society. Supporters of both sides have persisted into the twenty-first century: while some postulate a complete lack of agricultural terminology in Proto-Indo-European [ 16 ], others admit a wider range of terms [ 17 ; 18 :7–8].…”

Areal Typology of Proto‐Indo‐European: The Case for Caucasian Connections

“…It has been claimed (e.g. by Kortlandt 2009), that the minimal vowel system of early PIE is an areal feature shared by PIE and Caucasian. Minimal vowel system can indeed be posited for Proto‐NW Caucasian (Starostin 2007a; Chirikba 1996), but it is very probable that labialisations and palatalisations of consonants in that language family reflect earlier vowel timbre distinctions.…”

“…Some typological parallels between PIE and the NW Caucasian languages were proposed by Colarusso (1981), who believes, moreover, in their deep genetic relationship 2 . Even more recently, Kortlandt (1989, 2009) reviewed the original arguments in favour of PIE–Caucasian language contacts quite favourably. He claimed that some of the features that are, in his opinion, reconstructable to PIE (e.g.…”

“…He believed that PIE was a language genetically related to Uralic, but that it underwent areal influences from unknown, but presumably Caucasian languages (Uhlenbeck 1901). Like most of Uhlenbeck’s output, his hypothesis about PIE and Caucasian connections remained largely ignored, but many of his arguments have been revived over the last couple of decades (for a re‐evaluation of Uhlenbeck’s work see Kortlandt 2009). Much discussed at the time were the proposals by Trubetzkoy, who in the 1930s claimed that PIE was, in a sense, a mixed language, one component of which came from the Caucasus (Trubetzkoy 1939).…”