- I'm replying here to a post in another thread, but its much more sensible to reply in this context here, namely on the question of Etruscan and Uralic and Mario Alinei's ideas: According to him, there basically only ever were three language families in Europe (Basque, Indo-European and Uralic, which he associates with the Y-Haplogroups R1b, R1a and I, I think, when the R1b from the Cantabrian ice age refuge" theory became hip, he was the first to jump the waggon - I don't need to tell anyone of you how insanely dated that idea is by now), therefore his idea that Etruscan must be part of Uralic. From the Indo-European perspective I find the PCT insane, because it has all the problems that you have with the Anatolian hypothesis, multiplied by hundred. You have to explain not only how PIE has common words for "wheel", "yoke" and "horse", but also "cow", "ewe", "swine", etc. which the Paleolithic Europeans obviously didn't have. Back to Uralic, the sound changes that Alinei proposes places Etruscan quite high up in the Uralic "tree", specifically as part of the Ugric languages (spoken in the Urals region, with the exception of Hungarian). I might add that the Ugrian languages exhibit a sound change akin to Grimm's Law in Germanic, by which *k > *h (compare the word for 'fish', Finnish, Estonian "kala" with Hungarian "hal", Khanty "khul"). I might add that there's _no evidence_ whatsoever of Uralic languages in Central Europe before the arrival of the Magyars, which was a relatively late, historic event.