ElHorsto
Banned
- Messages
- 1,034
- Reaction score
- 185
- Points
- 0
- Ethnic group
- German
- Y-DNA haplogroup
- Yes
- mtDNA haplogroup
- Yes
- concerning the Saami, they are speakers of Uralic languages (the language family that also includes Finnish, Estonian and much more distantly, Hungarian). The Uralic languages are generally thought to be Mesolithic (or, lacking that, at least, the language of hunter-gatherers), but there's considerable reason to assume that the Uralic languages were not native to Europe. In the past there have been attempts to link the Uralic languages to the Turkic languages (Uralo-Altaic), and more recently (and perhaps more fruitful), the Yukaghir languages of Siberia. Regardless of this, Haplogroup N (which is usually associated with the Uralic-speaking peoples) did evidently originate somewhere in Northeast Asia, and it would seem thus likely that the Proto-Uralic peoples arrived from the east across the taiga zone some time during the Mesolithic. If this is the case, then the Proto-Uralic peoples would have intermixed with the native hunter-gatherers of Europe (who, if we follow the idea, may have been bearers of the North European component).
- regarding the question of the Indo-Europeans, it should be pointed out that the Proto-Indo-European language is merely a reconstruction of a (essentially hypothetical) "point" from which all descendant branches of the proto-language (Proto-Italo-Celtic, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Armenian, Proto-Indo-Iranic, Proto-Balto-Slavic, Proto-Tocharian etc.) all diverged. This point is usually assumed to have been in the late(st) Neolithic (most importantly, the Proto-Indo-Europeans are usually thought to have been in possession of wheeled vehicles). In reality, it would not have been a single point but a rather long time period (probably spanning centuries), and the Proto-Indo-Europeans must have had a history before that, one that (in however way) must go back into the early Neolithic (and Mesolithic before that). What this means for this context is that the Proto-Indo-Europeans may very well have been bearers of the North European component as a result of their pre-history.
There seems to exist an interesting word for birch trees which is common among all major IE languages:
Germanic, Slavic, Baltic:
Germanic: Berko
Old Prussian: Berse
Lith.:Berlas
Slavic: Bereza
Celto-Italic:
Irish: Beith
Galician: Bidueiro
Italian: Betulla
Latin: Betulis
Birches are the typical flora of north-eastern europe, exactly where North_european/Atlantic_Baltic components are modal.
Yet the Celto-Italic words seem to be somewhat different from the Baltic/Slavic/Germanic, but still similar. (I'm not so skilled yet in linguistics)
These languages seem to have unrelated words:
Basque: urki
Finnish: koivu
Spanish: abedul
Romanian: mesteacăn
Turkish: huş ağacı
Hungarian: nyírfa, vesszőkorbács