Talk:Pre-Finno-Ugric substrate

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Kert's list[edit]

should probably not be considered highly reliable: at least aps, čad'z', koan'n't, nirr and puaz and have had Uralic etymologies for a century now and are found in all standard reference works. They come from *ipse, *śäčä [1], *kunta [2], *näre (older *nēre) [3] and *poča(w) — though the Kildin Sami forms are of course not the most commonly cited reflexes. abbr' and sejjd have moreover had Indo-European loan etymologies for nearly half a century too.

The citation of specifically Kildin Saami also strikes me as an obscurantist move on Kert's part. If they're reconstructible for Proto-Sami, we should then give those forms instead (I keep a list on Wiktionary which may help if anyone else wants to give a hand) and perhaps also the more widely recognizable Northern Sami forms.

--Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 20:24, 2 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Scope[edit]

If no-one protests, I would like to reframe this article to be specifically about substrate in the Saami languages. This is what we do with Indo-European as well: we may have a single main article for Pre-Indo-Europeans, but then separate articles for all clearly distinguishable substrates such as Pre-Greek substrate, Germanic substrate hypothesis, Goidelic substrate hypothesis, Old European hydronymy.

Additionally, currently the pre-Saami substrate is probably the only one that has any real coverage in reliable sources. All other pre-Uralic languages, like substrate in Nganasan or substrate in Ob-Ugric have so far been only barely mentioned in literature, e.g.^[1] and they would be maybe best treated in the respective articles so far. (There will be a handbook "Substrate Languages in Northern Europe" published in maybe a year or two from now though.) --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 20:45, 2 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

References[edit]

^ Helimski, Eugene. 2000. Before the Uralians came: White spots on the historical language map of Northern Eurasia and the Uralic languages. – Congressus Nonus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum. Pars II. Tartu. 72–73.

@Tropylium: Sounds good. From your description, only "Pre-Saami substrate" would deserve a standalone at the current stage of published research. So you could either A) rewrite this article, move non-Saami content to the respective main articles, and subsequently move this page to "Pre-Saami substrate"; or B) you could create a new article "Pre-Saami substrate", and reduce the content of this article accordingly, leaving a hatnote pointing to the new article; or C) we can leave things as they are, and just restructure the current article by sorting "Pre-Saami substrate" and "Substrates in other Uralic branches" into sections of their own. Options B) and C) would leave space open for inserting future research results, which I personally prefer. –Austronesier (talk) 11:56, 3 December 2019 (UTC).[reply]

Reference to Pictish in “Theories” section[edit]

The theories section describes the substratum language as having a large amount of germinate consonants, which it describes as “…also characteristic of some Pictish inscriptions in a presumably non-Indo-European language.” As described in the corresponding Wikipedia article on Pictish, which is linked in the original quote, the theory that Pictish is a non-Indo-European (Pre-) language is widely discredited in the modern era. It is instead classified as a Celtic language, usually a P-Celtic language related to Brittonic. I therefore think that this statement should be omitted from the article, as it seems to be factually incorrect (or at least outdated or biased), and at the least a note should be added to address the idea that Pictish isn’t of IE origin. MichaelAmpe101 (talk) 01:18, 1 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@MichaelAmpe101: ge_minate, not geRminate. just my 50 cents.

[1] Helimski, Eugene. 2000. Before the Uralians came: White spots on the historical language map of Northern Eurasia and the Uralic languages. – Congressus Nonus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum. Pars II. Tartu. 72–73.

[1]