Language as a Clue to Prehistory

[lpetrich]

 Kóryos

The kóryos (Proto-Indo-European: "army, people under arms" or "detachment, war party") refers to the Proto-Indo-European brotherhood of warriors in which unmarried young males served for a number of years before integrating their host society, in the context of a rite of passage into manhood.

Subsequent Indo-European traditions and myths feature parallel linkages between property-less adolescent males, perceived as an age-class not yet fully integrated into the community of the married men; their service in a "police-army" sent away for a part of the year in the wild (where they hunted animals and raided foreign communities) and defending the host society during the remaining part of the year; their mystic self-identification with wolves and dogs as symbols of death, promiscuity, lawlessness, and warrior fury; and the idea of a liminality between invulnerability and death on one side, and youth and adulthood on the other side.

*kóryos < *kóros ("cutting, section, division") > Old Persian kāra ("people, army"), Lithuanian, kãras ("war, army")

*kóryos > Greek kouros ("youth, boy"), Baltic *kāryas ("army"), Celtic *kóryos ("troop, tribe"), Germanic *harjaz ("host, troop, army, raiding-party")

Some Gallic tribe names: Uo-corri ("two-armies"), Tri-corii ("three-armies") and Petru-corii ("four-armies")

West Central IE has a derivative with the suffix -nos -- *koryonos ("leader of the *kóryos") > Ancient Greek koíranos ("army leader"), Old Norse Herjan (< PGmc *harjanaz; "leader of the army"), and Brittonic Coriono-totae ("people of the army-leader")

 

[Politesse]

 Kóryos

The kóryos (Proto-Indo-European: "army, people under arms" or "detachment, war party") refers to the Proto-Indo-European brotherhood of warriors in which unmarried young males served for a number of years before integrating their host society, in the context of a rite of passage into manhood.

Subsequent Indo-European traditions and myths feature parallel linkages between property-less adolescent males, perceived as an age-class not yet fully integrated into the community of the married men; their service in a "police-army" sent away for a part of the year in the wild (where they hunted animals and raided foreign communities) and defending the host society during the remaining part of the year; their mystic self-identification with wolves and dogs as symbols of death, promiscuity, lawlessness, and warrior fury; and the idea of a liminality between invulnerability and death on one side, and youth and adulthood on the other side.

*kóryos < *kóros ("cutting, section, division") > Old Persian kāra ("people, army"), Lithuanian, kãras ("war, army")

*kóryos > Greek kouros ("youth, boy"), Baltic *kāryas ("army"), Celtic *kóryos ("troop, tribe"), Germanic *harjaz ("host, troop, army, raiding-party")

Some Gallic tribe names: Uo-corri ("two-armies"), Tri-corii ("three-armies") and Petru-corii ("four-armies")

West Central IE has a derivative with the suffix -nos -- *koryonos ("leader of the *kóryos") > Ancient Greek koíranos ("army leader"), Old Norse Herjan (< PGmc *harjanaz; "leader of the army"), and Brittonic Coriono-totae ("people of the army-leader")

Pure Romanticist speculation.

 

[lpetrich]

 Kóryos

The kóryos (Proto-Indo-European: "army, people under arms" or "detachment, war party") refers to the Proto-Indo-European brotherhood of warriors in which unmarried young males served for a number of years before integrating their host society, in the context of a rite of passage.
...

...

Pure Romanticist speculation.

How so?


Now to "karma". The word is borrowed from Sanskrit, where it is an an-stem noun. The ending -ma / man- is cognate with Latin -men / min- and Greek -ma /-mat-, all < IE *mn-

English "name" and numerous other IE cognates are derived from IE *Hnomn- with that suffix.

It literally means "action", and it is formed from root kr "to do, make". This is from PIE *kwer- "to do, make, build"

Another descendant that found its way into English is Greek teras / terat- ("sign, marvel, wonder" / "divine sign, omen, portent" / "monster")

Reconstructionroto-Indo-European/kʷer- - Wiktionary

Wiktionary is a good reference on Indo-European roots.

 

[lpetrich]

It's remarkable that we have a fairly good idea of how Proto-Indo-European was pronounced, though some aspects continue to be controversial.

 Indo-European sound laws
 Proto-Indo-European phonology

The first reconstructions of it were rather Sanskrit-like, and that is reflected in the traditional reconstruction of the stop consonants: *T, *D, *Dh. As I mentioned earlier, that is typologically awkward: lots of *p but hardly any *b. That is what has led to hypotheses like the glottalic one: *T(h), *T', *D(h) -- where T' is glottalic or ejective -- the consonant sound with a short pause between it and the following vowel.

If more recent linguists were reconstructing PIE for the first time, they would label the consonants *T1, *T2, *T3 with numbers.

That is what they do with the most controversial aspect of PIE phonology, laryngeals.

First a departure into PIE vowels. The first reconstructions were Sanskrit-like, using a in many cases. But it turned out that Latin and Greek e, a, and o correspond to each other, and that in Germanic and Slavic, L&G e correspond to e and L&G a and o correspond to one vowel, either a or o.

So PIE is reconstructed as having vowels *e, *a, and *o, along with vowels *i and *u, related to semivowels *y and *w.

In the ancestor of the Indo-Iranian languages, languages like Sanskrit, *e, *a, and *o got merged into a.

PIE is also reconstructed as having short and long vowels, a common distinction.

So far so good.

But there are some oddities.

Like Sanskrit i ~ other IE langs e, like in pitar- "father" ~ Latin pater, Greek patêr, Old English fadar, ...

That led to the reconstruction of a schwa sound in such places.

Root shape is a further problem.

Most PIE word roots have structure CVC- where C is a consonant or a cluster of consonants.

But some have structure VC-, like *okw- "eye" and C(long V)-, like *dhê- "to put, place"

Almost as if there were some missing consonants.

 

[lpetrich]

In 1879, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure first proposed the missing-consonant theory in the form of "coefficients sonantiques". Then in the early 20th cy., Hittite was discovered, with a sound usually written as ḫ - h with a downward-curving line underneath it. This sound did not correspond to any sound present in most other IE langs, but it did correspond to Saussure's "coefficients sonantiques".

Some linguists speculated that it was pronounced like various throaty consonants or "laryngeals" in some languages, and the name stuck.

There are three of them usually reconstructed, *H1, *H2, and *H3.

*H1 either disappears or turns into a schwa. It was likely a glottal stop.
*H1es- > *es- ("to be", imperfective root)

*H2 is a-coloring, turning a vowel into "a". It was likely some throaty sound, like "kh" but farther down.
*H2egwnos > *agwnos ("lamb")

*H2 is o-coloring, turning a vowel into "o". It was likely like H2, but with lips rounded, to make a "w".
*H3ekw > *okw- ("eye, to see")

 

[Politesse]

How so?

Because there is no menaingful evidence for all this supposed cultural reconstruction. It has more to do with European imaginations about the lost virility and race purity of days gone by than any sort of tangible evidence that could be deduced from language.

 

[lpetrich]

 Early human migrations
 Pre-modern human migration
 Indo-European migrations

A note: "Mesolithic" is an intermediate state between Paleolithic (foraging: hunting and gathering) and Neolithic (farming) - Mesolithic societies often emerged around rivers with lots of fish, like in the Pacific Northwest of North America, and also in some places in Europe.

A plausible ancestral population for the Proto-Indo-European speakers was the Dnieper–Donets culture (E Ukraine, ca. 5000-4200 BCE). It started off as Mesolithic, but moved to the Neolithic late in its existence, with the acquisition of domestic cattle, sheep, and goats, and some crop plants.

It became the Sredny Stog culture (same place, ca. 4500-3500 BCE). Its people were one of the first to have domesticated horses.

Emerging from it was the Yamnaya or Yamna culture (E Ukraine to the Ural Mtns., 3300–2600 BCE). Its people likely spoke Late Proto-Indo-European dialects.

An offshoot was the Corded Ware culture (N Europe between Belgium and Moscow area, with S Scandinavia, 3100-2350 BCE).

-

Sredny Stog / Yamna is the mainstream hypothesis for the Proto-Indo-European homeland, and IMO the most successful one.

The homelands of its descendant families have been a less contentious issue.

 Proto-Germanic language
Corded Ware culture
Nordic Bronze Age (Denmark, S Sweden, S Norway coast, 1700–500 BCE)
Jastorf culture (Iron Age, 750 BCE – 1 CE). Successor of the Nordic Bronze Age. By 1 CE, it spread to Belgium, Netherlands, N Germany, and N Poland.

 Proto-Celtic language
Corded Ware culture
Bell Beaker culture (W Europe, 2800-1800 BCE)
Unetice culture (Czechia, 2300-1680 BCE)
Tumulus culture (Czechia, 1600-1200 BCE)
Urnfield culture (C Europe, 1300-750 BCE)
Hallstatt (Czechia and nearby, 1200-500 BCE)
La Tène (iron Age, 450 BCE - 1 CE (Roman conquest))
By 1 CE, Celts had spread over much of Europe, and even a little bit into Anatolia (the Galatians of the New Testament)

 Proto-Italic language
Bell Beaker?

 Proto-Balto-Slavic language
 Proto-Slavic
 History of Proto-Slavic
 Early Slavs
The Slavic homeland's location is a contentious issue - it was somewhere around E Poland - W Ukraine.

The inherited Common Slavic vocabulary lacks detailed terminology for physical surface features that are peculiar to mountains or the steppe, the sea, coastal features, littoral flora or fauna or saltwater fish.[32]

Proto-Slavic hydronyms have been preserved between the source of the Vistula and the middle basin of the Dnieper.[33] Its northern regions adjoin territory in which river names of Baltic origin (Daugava, Neman and others) abound.[34][35] On the south and east, it borders the area of Iranian river names (including the Dniester, the Dnieper and the Don).[36] A connection between Proto-Slavic and Iranian languages is also demonstrated by the earliest layer of loanwords in the former;[29] the Proto-Slavic words for god (*bogъ), demon (*divъ), house (*xata), axe (*toporъ) and dog (*sobaka) are of Scythian origin.[37] The Iranian dialects of the Scythians and the Sarmatians influenced Slavic vocabulary during the millennium of contact between them and early Proto-Slavic.[38]

A longer, more intensive connection between Proto-Slavic and the Germanic languages can be assumed from the number of Germanic loanwords, such as *duma ("thought"), *kupiti ("to buy"), *mĕčь ("sword"), *šelmъ ("helmet") and *xъlmъ ("hill").[39] The Common Slavic words for beech, larch and yew were also borrowed from Germanic, which led Polish botanist Józef Rostafiński to place the Slavic homeland in the Pripet Marshes, which lacks those plants.[40] Germanic languages were a mediator between Common Slavic and other languages; the Proto-Slavic word for emperor (*cĕsar'ь) was transmitted from Latin through a Germanic language, and the Common Slavic word for church (*crъky) came from Greek.[39]

Another Germanic borrowing in Slavic was Proto-Slavic *xlěbъ (x = kh) "bread", from Proto-Germanic *hlaibaz from which we English speakers get "loaf".

Littoral = near-shore in the ocean

The ancestral Slavic vocabulary is consistent with inland Europe.

 

[lpetrich]

 Proto-Anatolian language
 Hittite language
 Bedřich Hrozný
This family contains the oldest recorded Indo-European language, Hittite, a language interpreted as having very archaic features. Features like a r/n declension being common, when it is rare among other IE languages.

In the early 20th cy., Czech orientalist and linguist Bedřich Hrozný helped decode it and he showed that it was an Indo-European language. Here is a sample of it:

nu (BREAD)-an e-iz-za-at-te-ni wa-d-da-ar-ma e-ku-ut-te-ni

The e-iz-za- part seemed much like English "eat", German "essen", and Latin "edere", from IE *ed-, and that's something that one would want to do with bread. The next word resembled English "water", German "Wasser", and his native language's "voda", all from PIE *wodr, *wedn-. Water would go along with bread, and the next word would be a word for "to drink". Both words have the same ending, suggesting the same action.

The hint that Hittite was Indo-European helped him a lot, and that text is roughly

Now let us eat bread, then let us drink water.


 Proto-Tocharian language
Afanasievo culture (Minusinsk Hollow, 3300-2500 BCE)

There is an interesting curiosity here. In the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang, China, some  Tarim mummies were discovered, dating as far back as 1800 BCE.

Genetically, the Tarim-mummy people are mixed, with their mitochondria, a female-inherited part, being part West Eurasian and part East Eurasian, and their Y chromosomes, a male-inherited part, being all West Eurasian. This is consistent with Chinese chroniclers describing Western barbarians that had green eyes and red hair -- Northern European features.

Tocharian-language documents were found in sites in the Tarim Basin, and their language is Indo-European, meaning evidence of an early migration eastward out of the Indo-European homeland.

Culture Change: War Bands Hooked Up With Neolithic Farm Women | Live Science - to produce the Corded Ware culture. Those were Indo-European kóryos war bands.

Genetically, there is not much genetic contribution from the previous people -- and not much archeological evidence of violence. Instead, the Yersinia plague is a likely culprit. This means that stereotypically Northern European features like blond and red hair, and green and blue eyes, were originally present among the PIE speakers. Some of them went eastward into the Tarim Basin, thus explaining those Chinese chroniclers' accounts of Nordic-looking barbarians.

 

[lpetrich]

 Proto-Greek language

 Proto-Armenian language

 Proto-Indo-Iranian language
 Proto-Indo-Aryan language
 Proto-Iranian language
Sintashta culture (Caspian Sea - S Ural Mountains, 2400–1800 BCE) - ancestral home
Andronovo culture (Kazahstan and nearby stans, 2000-900 BC)

Yamna successors:
Catacomb culture (2800-1700 BC)
Srubnaya culture (1800–1200 BC), a.k.a. Timber-grave culture
Scythians, Sarmatians

In the S Ural Mtns, around 2000 BCE, the first spoke-wheel chariots were found. Chariots were designed for speed. A chariot is a two-wheeled vehicle pulled by horses. Its body is small, with a floor only large enough for its driver and usually one passenger. It has low walls on the front and side and no wall on the back.

Chariots spread from there across the Ukraine - South Russia - Kazakhstan steppe zone and southward to the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. PBS NOVA has a documentary on building an imitation of a New Kingdom Egypt war chariot.

Chariots were likely taken some of the way by some of these people themselves, to the Indian subcontinent, to Iran, and to what is now Kurdistan in Iraq as the short-lived Mitanni kingdom of around 1400 BCE.

 Kikkuli was the author of a Mitanni treatise on horse training. A surviving tablet, written in Hittite, starts with
um-ma ki-ik-ku-li (lu)a-as-su-us-sa-an-ni sa kur (uru)mi-it-ta-an-ni
"Thus speaks Kikkuli, master horse trainer of the land of Mitanni"

Seems like the actual writing was done by a scribe who took down dictation.

The text had such Indic borrowings as aiga-, tera-, panza-, satta-, nāwa-wartanna (one, three, five, seven, nine turns), almost identical to Vedic Sanskrit eka-, tri-, pañca- sapta-, nava-vartana.

 

[Swammerdami]

A plausible ancestral population for the Proto-Indo-European speakers was the Dnieper–Donets culture (E Ukraine, ca. 5000-4200 BCE). It started off as Mesolithic, but moved to the Neolithic late in its existence, with the acquisition of domestic cattle, sheep, and goats, and some crop plants.

It became the Sredny Stog culture (same place, ca. 4500-3500 BCE). Its people were one of the first to have domesticated horses.

Emerging from it was the Yamnaya or Yamna culture (E Ukraine to the Ural Mtns., 3300–2600 BCE). Its people likely spoke Late Proto-Indo-European dialects.

An offshoot was the Corded Ware culture (N Europe between Belgium and Moscow area, with S Scandinavia, 3100-2350 BCE).

-

Sredny Stog / Yamna is the mainstream hypothesis for the Proto-Indo-European homeland, and IMO the most successful one.

Ipetrich: Thanks for the posts on the interesting story of I-E origin and expansion!

Minor clarifications:
It was the  Samara culture near the Volga River to the north-east of Dnieper-Donets and Sredny Stog that was probably the earliest identifiable homeland of P-I-E culture. At Samara sites are found

• pit grave burials resembling other early I-E burials and considered to be the earliest "kurgans,"
• evidence of ritual horse sacrifice,
• R1b-P297 Y-chromosomes, the same clade that is ancestral to most of Western Europe.

The  Khvalynsk culture, also on the Volga, is considered the link between Samara and Yamna. (However IIRC the Y-chromosomes most common at Khvalnysk are R1a-M417 or its siblings, ancestral to Slavs, Balts, many Scandinavians and India's Brahmin.) The  Botai culture, branching eastward from Khvalynsk, while Yamna migrated westward, is often associated with "first domestication of horse."

Yamna, Sredny Stog and Corded Ware were cultural horizons of great geographic size; Yamna divided into an eastern half (carrying R1a-M417 chromosome and eventually speaking 'Satem I-E') and the western half (carrying R1b-P297 and retaining the 'Centum' language). (Tocharian in the East wasn't Satem but it had split off, perhaps with Botai, before Satem emerged.)

Western Yamna competed for the same territory as the powerful  Cucuteni-Tripillia culture which responded by building fortified towns, some with thousands of dwellings — by far the largest human cities of their time.

 

[lpetrich]

Chalcolithic, Eneolithic, Aeneolithic, or Copper Age - between Neolithic and Bronze Age
Samara (Samara Bend of Volga River, ~ 5000-4500 BCE)
Khvalynsk culture (at Samara, 4900–3500 BCE)
then Yamna / Yamnaya

Botai culture (3700-3100 BCE)

 Cucuteni–Trypillia culture also Cucuteni-Tripolye (Ukrainian vs. Russian town name)
(NE Romania, Moldova, W Ukraine, 5500-2750 BCE)

The majority of Cucuteni–Trypillia settlements consisted of high-density, small settlements (spaced 3 to 4 kilometres apart), concentrated mainly in the Siret, Prut and Dniester river valleys.[3]

During the Middle Trypillia phase (c. 4000 to 3500 BCE), populations belonging to the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture built the largest settlements in Neolithic Europe, some of which contained as many as three thousand structures and were possibly inhabited by 20,000 to 46,000 people.[4][5][6]

One of the most notable aspects of this culture was the periodic destruction of settlements, with each single-habitation site having a lifetime of roughly 60 to 80 years.[7] The purpose of burning these settlements is a subject of debate among scholars; some of the settlements were reconstructed several times on top of earlier habitational levels, preserving the shape and the orientation of the older buildings. One particular location; the Poduri site in Romania, revealed thirteen habitation levels that were constructed on top of each other over many years.[7]

The size record for cities with Neolithic technology may be held by the Aztec city Tenochtitlan, where Mexico City now is, with estimates like 200,000 - 400,000 people.

That burning of houses is called the  Burned house horizon, and it's not sure whether it's accidental or deliberate.

Back to linguistics, there is a lot of evidence of a pre-Indo-European substrate in Europe, something I'd posted about earlier. Words like "bean", borrowed separately in different places. Latin fava < first borrowed as *bhabha < original *baba, for instance.

This is consistent with Cucuteni–Trypillia and its predecessors and SE European contemporaries being pre-Indo-European.

 

[Swammerdami]

Development of proto-Germanic language is a mystery

With one exception the relationships — at least in broad brush-stroke form — can be deduced between the early adventures of the P-I-E people and the eventual placement of the subfamilies of Indo-European language. The exception is Germanic.

When farmers arrived, hunter-gatherers were outnumbered and had to adopt farming themselves, flee to the north, or die out. The "shell midden" people along the Atlantic coast with a very productive littoral economy could hold out longest, but they eventually adopted farming also, celebrating this new success by becoming the "Megalithic" people, doing the initial constructions at Stonehenge and erecting le Grand Menhir Brisé in Armorica (Brittany). (I wanted to add a Wiki link to the fabulous menhir erected 6700 years ago, but some Wikipedia nitwit now has that term redirecting to Locmariaquer, a commune near the menhir site!)

Europe's North was the one place where non-farmers held out. Around the shorelines of Denmark, northern Germany, Sweden and Norway, hunter-gatherers practiced sealing and fishing, and were building log-boats before 6000 BC. These ancient people are among the ancestors of the Germanic people.

The Mesolithic  Ertebølle culture of Scandinavia gave birth to the  Funnelbeaker culture which was unique in several ways. It had little resemblance to the farming cultures of  Linear Pottery culture to its south, nor to the Kurgan P-I-E cultures emerging to its east. The slovenly style of Funnelbeaker (aka TRB) settlements betray its origin from hunter-gatherer culture, yet it led the way in some Neolithic developments. The earliest preserved wagon-wheels are found at TRB sites.

TRB eventually came into competition with the Kurgan-derived Globular Amphora and Corded Ware (aka Battle-Axe or Single-Grave) cultures, but I think care should be taken before generalizing about these vast cultural horizons which stretched from the Rhine to the Volga. The Western portion of Corded Ware was sibling to Bell Beaker and might have spoken a language sibling to Italo-Celtic. The eastern part of Corded Ware had R1a haplogroup compared with R1b in the West, and eventually spoke proto-Baltic. Meanwhile Funnelbeaker persisted and competed with Corded Ware for several centuries in Denmark and northern Germany. Conditions would have been ripe for the creation of a creole language, but if such a language survived it was probably re-creolized 1000 years later! Funnelbeaker (TRB) was also in conflict with the  Pitted Ware culture to its north, a non-farming culture possibly related to the (Uralic speaking?)  Comb Ceramic culture to its east. Although non-farmers, Pitted Ware should not be under-estimated! They were superb hunters, sealers, fishers and sea navigators; had fur-skins and amber to trade for agricultural goods they wanted; and might have been daring raiders and warriors.

It is said that the Nordic Bronze Age began in Denmark or southern Sweden, as a result of a union between the Corded Ware-Battle-axe culture and Pitted Ware. Again there was opportunity for language creolization, or at least the emergence of a strong Pitted Ware substrate in the language that became proto-Germanic.

I detail the above just to argue against a glib equation of proto-Germanic with Corded Ware. The Germanic languages are most divergent from other I-E branches based on grammar, lexicon and phonology, and show evidence of inheritance both from Italo-Celtic and from proto-Baltoslavic. The development of proto-Germanic language is a complicated, largely-unknown story.

 

[lpetrich]

Returning to  Pre-modern human migration, I note its mentioning

•  8.2 kiloyear event - a cold spell that lasted for a few centuries, likely caused by the sudden draining of some North American glacial lakes.
•  Bond event (5.9 kiloyear event) - one of several ice-rafting events every 1000 - 1500 years
•  4.2 kiloyear event droughts in the Mediterranean Basin and North America and some places, and wet conditions and flooding in some other places. It likely caused the collapse of Old Kingdom Egypt and the Akkadian Empire.

Back to linguistics and prehistory.

 Early Slavs - Slavs spread out of their homeland and overran much of Eastern Europe over 500 - 1000 CE.

Their early borrowings from Germanic show that they were a more-or-less unified community around 500 CE.


 Uralic languages
 Proto-Uralic language
 Proto-Uralic homeland hypotheses
Toward the northeast of the Indo-European homeland was the homeland of the Proto-Uralic speakers, and there's an interesting story of contacts there. The speakers of the Uralic languages are in and near the northern part of the Ural Mountains, extending into northern Siberia and Scandinavia. There is also an isolated population of Uralic speakers: Hungary. The closest relatives of Hungarian are Khanty and Nenets, "Ob-Ugric" languages, because of being near the northern end of the Ob River in Siberia.

How did Hungarians get there? Their Proto-Hungarian-speaking ancestors learned how to be cattle-herding nomads from some neighbors, likely the Turkic Chuvash people, and some of them went on a long journey, settling down in their current home in the early Middle Ages and mixing with the local population.

Hungarians' own name for themselves is Magyar and for their nation Magyarorszag, "Magyar Land".

 Pre-Finno-Ugric substrate
Finno-Ugric is all the Uralic langauges but the Samoyedic ones, and is named after Finnish and Hungarian. It has some words that are not Indo-European and likely not Uralic. But these words don't have much in common with putative pre-Germanic non-Indo-European ones:  Germanic substrate hypothesis

I note in passing  Goidelic substrate hypothesis - some putative pre-Celtic words in the Insular Celtic languages:

• Continental Celtic: Gaulish, etc.
• Insular Celtic: Goidelic: Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Manx
• Insular Celtic: Brittonic: Welsh, Cornish, Breton

 

[lpetrich]

What was before Indo-European and Uralic in Europe:
 Pre-Indo-European languages
 Paleo-European languages

I'll turn to Indo-European and Uralic contacts. There are several layers:

• Proto-Indo-European
• Indo-Iranian
• Proto-Germanic
• Recent centuries

Recent centuries aren't very interesting for prehistory, other than illustrating what words tend to be borrowed. Two words that English relatively recently got from Uralic languages are:

• Sauna - hot room - from Finnish, likely descended from a borrowing from early Germanic
• Goulash - a kind of beef stew - from Hungarian gulyás

Looking back further, we find the Finnish and Estonian words for king: kuningas. It has other cognates in the Finnic branch of the Uralic languages, and it was borrowed from early Germanic *kuningaz, reconstructed from English "king", German "König", and other such words.

Even further, we find a lot of words in Uralic that were borrowed from early Indo-Iranian languages. This points to contacts around 2000 BCE with early Indo-iranian speakers in the Ukraine - Russia - Kazakhstan steppe zone.

Indo-Iranian loanwords in the Uralic languages
INDO-IRANIAN BORROWINGS IN URALIC: CRITICAL OVERVIEW OF THE SOUND SUBSTITUTIONS AND DISTRIBUTION CRITERION - INDO-IRA.pdf
Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations

For example, the Finnish word for a young pig, porsas, is from Proto-Uralic *porsas < Proto-Indo-Iranian *porsas < PIE *porkos, also "young pig". It became the usual word for pig in Latin, porcus, and from Old French, it came into English as "pork". English "farrow" is also from PIE *porkos.

Another early borrowing is words for "hundred" in much of Uralic. Finnish sata and Hungarian száz < PUR *sita < PII *satam < PIE kmtom, also "hundred". This is reconstructed from English "hundred", Latin centum, Greek hekaton, Russian sto, Sanskrit satam, etc.

 

[lpetrich]

Going further, we find connections between Proto-Uralic and Proto-Indo-European.

 Laryngeal theory - mentions IE-Uralic connections
 Indo-Uralic languages
Frederik Kortlandt: Other electronic publications - has some stuff on Indo-Uralic comparisons
indo european - Did Uralic borrow basic vocabulary from PIE, and if so why? - Linguistics Stack Exchange

From that Stack Exchange page,

This section of the Wikipedia article on laryngeal theory lists proposed IE-to-Uralic loanwords containing laryngeals. Several of these have quite basic meanings: "woman", "person", "do", "give", "go". Though not unheard of, it's unusual for languages to borrow such basic vocabulary, especially in large numbers.

The first answer noted the work of Björn Collinder. In his voluminous writings, he notes four layers of borrowing:

1. PIE -> Proto-Uralic
2. Proto-Indo-Iranian -> Proto-Finno-Ugric (ancestor of all Uralic other than Samoyedic)
3. "Pre-modern borrowings from IE languages into individual Uralic languages, notably the borrowings from Alanic (the ancestor of Ossetic, an Iranian language) into Hungarian, or the borrowings from proto-Germanic into Finnish."
4. Over the last few centuries, like Swedish -> Finnish

The second answer:

The IE-to-Uralic loanword transfer phenomenon is quite messy. There are those basic vocabulary terms that look alike, but it goes beyond that sometimes. The conjecture that the borrowings are borrowings is moderately well accepted, though people have been pointing out the exact same problems you just did: they are so fundamentally basic it's almost silly.

Like "give", "do", "woman", "person", "wet/water", "fish", "to stab, push", ... 1st, 2nd person pronouns, some noun-case endings, some personal verb endings, ...

Also some correspondence between IE laryngeals *H and Proto-Uralic *k.

 

[lpetrich]

There is a complication in attempts to probe humanity's prehistory with language:  Sprachbund (roughly "language federation" in German) - speakers of languages who live near each other can exchange a lot of linguistic features. Such features are often called "areal features".  Areal feature

The  Balkan sprachbund was first recognized in the early 19th century - Albanian, Romanian, and Bulgarian seemed to one scholar to be three languages with one grammar, even if very different lexicons.

Language	Score
Balkan Slavic	11.5
Albanian	10.5
Greek, Balkan Romance	9.5
Balkan Romani	7.5

No score for Turkish, however.

They tend to share a lot of grammatical features.

Reduction of noun cases to nominative (subject), accusative (object), vocative (for addressing someone), genitive (of) / dative (to) as one case.

Locative (in) and directional (into) expressions are also merged.

Future tenses are often formed with auxiliary "to want", like in English.

Perfect tenses are often formed with auxiliary "to have", like in Germanic and Western Romance languages.

Infinitive constructions are often replaced with subjunctive ones: "I want that I eat" instead of "I want to eat". (English has some subjunctive constructions)

Bare subjunctive for wishes, intentions, suggestions, and mild commands: "That you eat" for "You should eat".

Definite article is postposed (after) instead of preposed (before): "book the" instead of "the book".

Not surprisingly, oodles of shared vocabularly and lots of shared calques. Those are loan translations, part-by-part translations.  List of calques is a big list with some of them.

 

[lpetrich]

Another sprachbund is  Standard Average European -- it emerged over the late-antiquity migration period, the Middle Ages, and early modern times. These language families have SAE features to varying degree:

• Germanic languages
• Romance languages
• Baltic languages
• Slavic languages
• Albanian
• Greek
• Hungarian

Though all but the last one are Indo-European, their shared ancestor was some early Indo-European dialects some 5000-5500 years ago. The Romance languages share a much more recent common ancestor, some 1500 - 2000 years ago. Likewise with Germanic, some 2000 years ago, and Slavic, some 1500 years ago. I'm not sure about Baltic, however.

From the article, "Haspelmath regards French and German as forming the nucleus of the Sprachbund, surrounded by a core formed by English, the other Romance languages, the Nordic languages, and the Western and Southern Slavic languages. Hungarian, the Baltic languages, the Eastern Slavic languages, and the Finnic languages form more peripheral groups."

Using 9 features, French and German have all 9, Dutch, most other Western Romance languages, and Albanian 8, English, Romanian, and Greek 7, North Germanic languages and Czech 6, Baltic languages, most Slavic langues, and Hungarian 5, Welsh, Basque, and Maltese 2.

These videos explain the concept:

• Standard Average European: The European Sprachbund - YouTube
• Euroversals - Are all European languages alike? - YouTube

Some features:

1. Both definite and indefinite articles: Germanic, Romance, a few others. Only 1/3 of the world's languages have articles, and having both is rare.
2. Relative clauses with relative pronouns. "the one who drove the car" and "the one whose car I drove". Most European langs.
3. The "have perfect". "I have finished it." All Germanic, Romance langs, some Balkan langs.
4. Passive with linking verb and past participle. "I am finished." Most European langs.
5. Dative external possessors. German Die Mutter wusch dem Kind die Haare "The mother washed the child's hair" (lit. "The mother washed the hair to the child"). Most European langs but not NW langs like English.
6. Negative pronouns without negative on verbs. "Nobody came". Most W European langs (Germanic, Romance other than Romanian, Albanian).
7. Equality comparison with adverbial relative clause. "as tall as me". Most European langs.
8. Not pro-drop -> strict subject agreement (pro-drop: can drop subject pronouns): NW Europe
9. Distinguishing between "self" as intensifier and "self" as reflexive pronoun. German selbst vs. sich, French lui-même vs. se, for instance. English doesn't have it. Most European langs.

There are weaker features, features also found outside Europe, like:

• Subject-verb-object word order
• Absence of reduplication (repeating a word or a part of it)
• No instrumental (using something) vs. comitative (alongside) distinction: "I cut it with a knife while I was eating with some friends" - "with" as instrumental, then comitative
• No distinction between inclusive and exclusive first person plurals: "we and you" and "we but not you".
• No distinction between alienable (removable) and inalienable (attached or naturally associated) possession.

Proto-Indo-European is reconstructed as having very few SAE features. For instance, it had no articles (a/an, the), its passive was a medio-passive (reflexive serving as passive), and its perfect was formed in various ways, but other than the SAE way.

 

[lpetrich]

Standard Average European also includes a lot of shared vocabulary, from borrowing across it.

Foreign Language Training - United States Department of State has a list of languages by difficulty in learning them - how many class weeks or hours (25 hr/wk) needed to reach some target level of proficiency.

• 24 weeks: Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish
• 30 weeks: French
• 36 weeks: German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili
• 44 weeks: all the others
• 88 weeks: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean

The last category has two sources of difficulty. For Arabic, having to learn Modern Standard Arabic and some regional dialect, and for the others, Chinese characters. Japanese and Korean speakers continue to use a sizable number of them alongside some phonetic scripts.

Having lots of SAE features correlates fairly well with ease of learning for English speakers.

Some other sprachbunds are:

• Indian subcontinent
• Mainland Southeast Asia
• Possible Northeast Asia

 

[lpetrich]

From Uralic I go further eastward into Asia, into the three branches of the Altaic (putative) family.

The Turkic family has spread over much of Asia from Anatolia to northeastern Siberia, doing so over the last 1500 years. The oldest writings in a Turkic language are the Orkhon inscriptions written in the 8th cy. CE in the Orkhon Valley in central Mongolia.  Proto-Turkic language is fairly straightforward to reconstruct, though there is a curious phonological split in its attested languages. Where the Oghur languages (Chuvash, among others) have r and l, the "Common Turkic" ones have z and sh. This is often interpreted as an original palatalized r and l: ry and ly.

The Proto-Turkic homeland was likely in Mongolia.

Also in Mongolia and nearby are the  Mongolic languages. Their main dispersal was with Genghis Khan's conquests, over 1207 - 1227.

 Tungusic languages - they have a scattered distribution in eastern Siberia, as if they had been overrun by others. They likely dispersed from their homeland around 500 BCE - 50 CE, and their homeland was likely northern Manchuria or halfway between there and Lake Baikal.

 Koreanic languages - Korean and the language of Jeju Island to the south of Korea.

 Japonic languages - Japanese and Ryukyuan, of the Ryukyu Islands south of Japan.

Our next step is

•  Ural-Altaic languages
•  Proto-Altaic language
•  Eurasiatic languages
•  Nostratic languages

This is a rather contentious issue, with some linguists calling the Altaic family a sprachbund rather than a genetically-related set of languages.

This is roughly Joseph Greenberg's subdivision:

• Micro-Altaic: Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic
• Macro-Altaic: Micro-Altaic, Japonic, Koreanic
• Paleosiberian: Nivkh (E Siberia), Eskimo-Aleut (North America Arctic), Chukotko-Kamchatkan (E Siberia)
• Eurasiatic: Indo-European, Uralic, Yukaghir (NE Siberia), Paleosiberian, Macro-Altaic, Ainu (Hokkaido (Japan))

 

[lpetrich]

Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia

Mentioning long-range comparisons,

Such evidence is often criticized for two reasons. First, most words are thought to suffer from too much semantic and phonetic erosion to allow secure identification of true cognates beyond 5,000 to 9,000 y (11, 12), and second, even if a number of apparent cognates can be identified, proponents of long-range relationships have been unable to provide statistical verification that the resemblances they have found are beyond what would be expected by chance between unrelated languages (11, 12). Where statistical tests have been used (9, 13), the results have been inconclusive because of the difficulty of establishing secure null models that estimate the number of resemblances expected to arise by chance.

Both objections can be overcome if it can be shown that: (i) a class of words exists whose members’ sound-meaning correspondences are expected to last long enough to retain traces of their ancestry between language families separated by thousands of years; and (ii) these ultraconserved words can be predicted a priori and independently of their sound correspondences to other words. Regarding the former, we have shown that most words have about a 50% chance of being replaced by a new noncognate word [a word’s linguistic half-life (14, 15)], roughly every 2,000–4,000 y, consistent with the belief that words lose traces of their ancestry quickly. However, some words, such as the numerals, pronouns, and special adverbs (e.g., I, you, here, how, not, there, what, two, five) are replaced far more slowly, with half-lives of once every 10,000, 20,000 or even more years (14, 15).

...
Generalized frequency-of-use, along with part of speech, is also a significant predictor of cognate class size (Fig. 3B) (r = 0.48, P < 0.001). For a range of words used at low frequencies, maximum cognate class size remains stable at around two (most have the minimum cognate class size of one), but as frequency-of-use increases above a threshold, the size of the cognate class steadily increases. This result suggests that, consistent with their short estimated half-lives, infrequently used words typically do not exist long enough to be deeply ancestral, but that above the threshold frequency words gain greater stability, which then translates into larger cognate class sizes. Generalized frequency-of-use does not contribute to the prediction of cognate class size after controlling for rates of lexical replacement (P = 0.253), consistent with the view that frequency-of-use acts on cognate class size via its influence on the rate of lexical replacement

They estimate 10,000 - 12,000 years for the Eurasiatic languages' branching, about 13,000 for the Kartvelian ones, and 15,000 for the Dravidian ones.