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