Word Exchange at the Gates of Europe. Five Millennia of Language Contact

In this PhD project, an extensive scrutiny of lexical commonalities between the Indo-European and Uralic languages will be carried out in an attempt to separate different strata of Indo-European archaisms:

1. those that may be inherited from an “Indo-Uralic” protolanguage from before 5000 BC
2. those reflected as borrowings from Northwest PIE into Fenno-Ugric mainly between 4000 and 3000 BC
3. material shared by the precursors of Fennic, Germanic and Celtic in Eastern Central Europe around 2000 BC
4. Germanic archaisms in Saami and Balto-Fennic borrowings from the 1st millenium BC

Vocabulary of unknown origin common to Saami and Germanic will also be touched upon in the light of contemporary substratum theories.

Scholar in charge

Adam Hyllested