zompist bboard

Salmoneus wrote:Here's an alternative solution: PIE k'er, "head", from which "horn" is derived, and Afroasiatic qar, "horn" (seen in Egyptian and Omotic as well as in Semitic), are simply two words in unrelated languages that simply happen to look somewhat alike if you squint.

If there was no linguistic contact, how to explain the apparent PS wordshape of the PIE words for star, bull, seven and maybe six? Honest question.

KathTheDragon wrote:@Znex: Someone (either Kloekhorst or Melchert I believe, though I don't recall exactly where I saw this) compares the -n(i) with the final -ν of the Greek 1pl -μεν. It's likely to be some particle with a meaning that made it possible to become fused to plural verbs.

Any significance in the dialectal alternation -μεν~-μες in Ancient Greek, other than -μες is like the forms found in Sanskrit and Latin? Is it feasible that -s is a similar verbal innovation (though from what I've read, Kloekhorst seems to think so)?

Zju wrote:
If there was no linguistic contact, how to explain the apparent PS wordshape of the PIE words for star, bull, seven and maybe six? Honest question.

star: Im not sure what you mean. Wiktionary reconstructs the PIE as h₁eh₂ster, meaning it's a derivative of a verb stem meaning "to glow, burn". Speculative, for sure, but I dont see anything jumping out at me that makes me thinking it's a loan from Semitic even if Wiktioanry is wrong about the original form. I should add that I dont know what the Semitic root for "star" is, .... AHD suggests there existed a root /ʕṭtr/, appearing in some words associated with deities, but that cant be just a word for "star" if it has 4 consonants. My hunch is "coincidence" on this one.

taurus: Quite possible, i think, that this is a wanderwort, perhaps either a synonym of PIE's native word (assuming that gʷow- inflected for gender) or a word for originally a specific breed of cattle that later became applied more generally. It could be a coincidence, but this word seems to have no other known cognates in PIE, strengthening the case that it is indeed a loan .... PIE seems to usually favor large word families. there's also the fact that this word is commonly reconstructed with an /a/ in it, which many scholars believe did not exist in PIE as a phoneme, and was at best an allophone of /e/.

seven I've seen this one quoted a lot ,but the words dont really look that close to me. It's possible, but just that. The Semitic stem is s-b-ʕ, which means it oculd have supplied *half* of the PIE stem for seven, but if the word already meant "seven" by itself, why would PIE need to add to it? Not saying it's impossible, but just that Im not convinced.

six Likewise, same situation here. the possibility is strengthened if seven were known to be a loan, but standing on its own, the roots for six have just one consonant in common, and that one is believed by many not to have been part of the original PIE root anyway.

Znex wrote:Is it feasible that -s is a similar verbal innovation (though from what I've read, Kloekhorst seems to think so)?

It's certainly possible, since it's lacking in the preterite reconstructed for PIE

Znex wrote:I'm just reading through Kloekhorst's etymological Hittite dictionary, and I can't find one mention of where the Anatolian -ni plural verb marker comes from; by which I'm referring to as in both the -mi and -Hi paradigms.

If you don't mind me bringing up the Indo-Uralic hypothesis, there is a very interesting paper about a similar -nV suffix in Uralic:
http://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust270/30_desmit.pdf

Howl wrote:If you don't mind me bringing up the Indo-Uralic hypothesis

Actually I do mind, there's already that other thread for that.


JAL

Howl wrote:If you don't mind me bringing up the Indo-Uralic hypothesis, there is a very interesting paper about a similar -nV suffix in Uralic:
http://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust270/30_desmit.pdf

Indo-Uralic is of course unproven, which does not exclude the possibility that there is a connection between some element in one family and some element in another, but it makes the argument highly precarious.

And in this case, it escapes me what a Uralic individualizing suffix should have to do with an IE verbal plural marker.

Salmoneus wrote:What's the reason for assuming direct loaning, rather than loaning from a third family?

'Horn' is a rarely loaned core vocabulary item, so other things being equal, it's better to assume only one loaning event rather than two.

Salmoneus wrote:

I've always assumed that, at a deep enough time level, pre-PIE probably came counterclockwise around the Caspian Sea, from an ancestor spoken in NE Levant. An Anatolian route seems to be ruled out, and the Caucasus is just too difficult to go through at a time depth when it will have been already populated.

Oh, now that is an interesting idea.
So far as I'm aware, though, it's a very improbable one, since I don't think there's any trace - genetic or archeological - of that sort of Iranian influence on the steppe, so the language would have to be transmitted by some very small elite; and Iran was, like the Caucasus, a populous and expansive area, so it's less likely that there would have been a migration from the levant through Iran.

The primary relevant variable is traversability, not population or bare distance. The Caucasus is heavily mountaineous and has "always" been strictly an obstacle that nothing short of a Russian Empire goes over of. On the contrary, linguistic expansions that go right through Persia have been common enough. The first clear case is (1) Mitanni Aryan, followed by (2) Proto-Iranian dialects, then (3) Greek (mainly as a trade/administrative language), (4) Arabic (alongside Islam), (5) Persian proper (as a back-expansion to Central Asia, i.e. Tajik), and most recently (6) Turkic. So, six verifiable expansions over a period of about 3000 years. Even "tunnelling" effects are clearly possible, as in the case of Turkic: little effect on the Persian heartland, extensive new speaker areas established both to the west and to the north(east). Yet we know for certain they did go right through Persia, not by boat across the Caspian Sea, or by trekking over the Caucasus.

These precedents in hand, we already ought to assume that there have been also various earlier linguistic expansions that go through Persia in one direction or the other.

By similar argument, with the Caucasus being a residual zone, also the most likely explanation for genetic links in mtDNA towards Europe actually doesn't involve those genes coming from the Caucasus, but instead from a common source elsewhere:
1) A spread wave comes in from the steppes, re-populating Europe and the Caucasus with common mtDNA lineages (at this time also Y-DNA lineages);
2) Another spread wave (e.g. PIE) comes in, takes over the steppes first and Europe later, and replaces the old Y-DNA lineages with new, unrelated ones.

Salmoneus wrote:What shred of evidence is there for seeing PIE as the language of Levantine exiles?

None that I know of, and I suggested no such thing. I'm operating with a timescale of a couple millennia — the idea is PIE speakers as fairly distant linguistic descendants of once Levantines or neighbors, kind of like how modern-day speakers of Californian English are distant linguistic descendants of Proto-Germanic speakers from southern Scandinavia. Getting the language from Scandinavia to California was not some kind of a single long-distance wormhole jump, it went through multiple separate expansions several centuries apart (Proto-West Germanic down the North Sea coast; Anglians and Saxons across the canal to Britain; assorted Brits to colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America; homesteading Americans westward across the continent).

Salmoneus wrote:Why invent such a complex procedure to explain two vaguely similar phonemes in one lexical item?

It's not "one" lexical item. If you look into the works of Nostraticists who include Afroasiatic (Bomhard, Dolgopolsky), you can get together a triple-digit-number of PIE-PS lexical comparisons.
PIE *bʰeh₂- ~ PS *b-h-r, *b-h-w, *b-h-q 'to shine'
PIE *bʰeg- ~ PS *b-q-ʕ, *b-q-r- 'to break, split'
PIE *bʰars ~ PS *barr 'grain'
PIE *bʰerH- ~ PS *b-r(-z) 'to bore'
etc.
Probably some percentage is accidental similarity, but I don't think there's much of a chance literally every bit of this data is.

Before getting all Nostratic with things though, we still ought to be looking over possible loaning scenarios. Some cases like 'grain' could work as long-distance Wanderwörter; but connecting most cases, like 'horn' or 'to shine', seems to require a bit closer contacts between the PS lineage and PIE lineage.

Salmoneus wrote:This is a literal violation of Ockham's Razor, supposing the existence of languages lying around the middle east, for which there is no other archeological, genetic or linguistic evidence, just so that they can lend a word or two to a later-arriving Semitic.

I'm not sure what you mean. We have plenty of archeological evidence that the Middle East has been populated for tens of thousands of years, and this implies some sort of languages being spoken in there as well. Most of them going extinct without leaving direct descendants is also only to be expected (cf. Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Phoenician…). So is most of them leaving a couple substrate lexical items around regardless.

We know that some Eurasian people went back to Africa. We know people in the stone age had primitive boats. There was probably some trading going on across the Black Sea and Mediterranean. So why would we be surprised that we find similar words in Semitic and IE?

WeepingElf wrote:

Howl wrote:If you don't mind me bringing up the Indo-Uralic hypothesis, there is a very interesting paper about a similar -nV suffix in Uralic:
http://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust270/30_desmit.pdf

Indo-Uralic is of course unproven, which does not exclude the possibility that there is a connection between some element in one family and some element in another, but it makes the argument highly precarious.

And in this case, it escapes me what a Uralic individualizing suffix should have to do with an IE verbal plural marker.

Within the context of PIE, I don't think there is much more to say about the -ni/-n suffix. It was there, and we can speculate all we want about what it meant. I don't think the -ni/-n suffix was originally a plural marker, just like the Uralic -nV suffix was not a singular marker. But the reasons why I think so, don't come from PIE proper.

Tropylium wrote:

Salmoneus wrote:What's the reason for assuming direct loaning, rather than loaning from a third family?

'Horn' is a rarely loaned core vocabulary item, so other things being equal, it's better to assume only one loaning event rather than two.

Is it that rarely loaned? It's a trade good, after all.
[although since it seems to be independently derived in both families, the question's rather moot]

The primary relevant variable is traversability, not population or bare distance. The Caucasus is heavily mountaineous and has "always" been strictly an obstacle that nothing short of a Russian Empire goes over of.

I'm sorry, but that's not true. Plenty of people have crossed the caucasus. [for a start, all three caucasian language families are spoken on both sides of the watershed, and their range to the north was one considerably large - circassians used to live as far north as the sea of Azov. The Armenians, also, had a large diaspora north of the mountains, as far north even as the crimea. Nor is there any trouble moving large numbers of horsemen across the mountains - the Mongols and their successors managed it repeatedly with no difficulty (most famously in the campaign leading to the Battle of the Kalka River, in which the Mongols invaded Ukraine via Georgia). ]

Most obviously, if you look at Yamnaya... who's that right on their southern border? Right, yes, Maykop, which extended from the Taman to the Kura, right straddling the Caucasus! It seems most likely their ancestors were from south of the caucasus, but migration from the north of the caucasus is also a widely-held view. The caucasus aren't much of a barrier - you can follow the coasts, or you can just follow the river.

Incidentally, Maykop shares the Yamnaya fondness for kurgans - there seems to have been considerable cultural as well as genetic contact across the caucasus at this point in time.

These precedents in hand, we already ought to assume that there have been also various earlier linguistic expansions that go through Persia in one direction or the other.

No offence, but it's a silly argument to say that just because some people have crossed Persia, therefore PIE must have done so.

By similar argument, with the Caucasus being a residual zone, also the most likely explanation for genetic links in mtDNA towards Europe actually doesn't involve those genes coming from the Caucasus, but instead from a common source elsewhere:
1) A spread wave comes in from the steppes, re-populating Europe and the Caucasus with common mtDNA lineages (at this time also Y-DNA lineages);
2) Another spread wave (e.g. PIE) comes in, takes over the steppes first and Europe later, and replaces the old Y-DNA lineages with new, unrelated ones.

But we know that neither of those things happened in reality. The Caucasian influence in the later steppe populations goes back to hunter-gatherer times in the caucasus.

Salmoneus wrote:What shred of evidence is there for seeing PIE as the language of Levantine exiles?

None that I know of, and I suggested no such thing. I'm operating with a timescale of a couple millennia — the idea is PIE speakers as fairly distant linguistic descendants of once Levantines or neighbors, kind of like how modern-day speakers of Californian English are distant linguistic descendants of Proto-Germanic speakers from southern Scandinavia. Getting the language from Scandinavia to California was not some kind of a single long-distance wormhole jump, it went through multiple separate expansions several centuries apart (Proto-West Germanic down the North Sea coast; Anglians and Saxons across the canal to Britain; assorted Brits to colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America; homesteading Americans westward across the continent).

That's what I meant; I didn't specific 'first generation exiles'! But the fact remains, there is no evidence for any of this.

Salmoneus wrote:Why invent such a complex procedure to explain two vaguely similar phonemes in one lexical item?

It's not "one" lexical item. If you look into the works of Nostraticists who include Afroasiatic (Bomhard, Dolgopolsky), you can get together a triple-digit-number of PIE-PS lexical comparisons.
PIE *bʰeh₂- ~ PS *b-h-r, *b-h-w, *b-h-q 'to shine'
PIE *bʰeg- ~ PS *b-q-ʕ, *b-q-r- 'to break, split'
PIE *bʰars ~ PS *barr 'grain'
PIE *bʰerH- ~ PS *b-r(-z) 'to bore'
etc.
Probably some percentage is accidental similarity, but I don't think there's much of a chance literally every bit of this data is.

And the same sort of vague resemblances can be found for any other pair of language families you look at.

Sure, some of these will be wanderwoerter. The word for barley/grain, for instance, may well be borrowed from a third language family, since neither PIE nor Semitic represents the early agricultural population of the area.

Salmoneus wrote:This is a literal violation of Ockham's Razor, supposing the existence of languages lying around the middle east, for which there is no other archeological, genetic or linguistic evidence, just so that they can lend a word or two to a later-arriving Semitic.

I'm not sure what you mean. We have plenty of archeological evidence that the Middle East has been populated for tens of thousands of years, and this implies some sort of languages being spoken in there as well. Most of them going extinct without leaving direct descendants is also only to be expected (cf. Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Phoenician…). So is most of them leaving a couple substrate lexical items around regardless.

Yes, there were people, but there's no reason to think they were Indo-European people! You're literally fixing a hole in your theory by postulating a new population - new genetics, new language family, new archeological culture - for which we have absolutely zero evidence, and who are effectively an unfalsifiable hypothesis existing only to make the theory work. Are they possible? Sure, that's the advantage of unfalsifiable lost populations. But that's no reason to go around believing in them.

Howl wrote:We know people in the stone age had primitive boats. There was probably some trading going on across the Black Sea and Mediterranean.

"probably" as in "I have read reliable scientific sources hypothesizing this", in which case please supply some references or "probably" as in "I personally think it's likely, since stone age people had boats, traders have boats, therefore stone age people were traders"?

A quick Google on neolithic boats seem to suggest they were mostly dugout canoes, unsuitable for transportation across large swaths of water. The closest to crossing dangerous waters is the colonization of various islands (e.g. Orkney), but that's a far stretch from steady long-distance see-faring trade.


JAL

jal wrote:

Howl wrote:We know people in the stone age had primitive boats. There was probably some trading going on across the Black Sea and Mediterranean.

"probably" as in "I have read reliable scientific sources hypothesizing this", in which case please supply some references or "probably" as in "I personally think it's likely, since stone age people had boats, traders have boats, therefore stone age people were traders"?

A quick Google on neolithic boats seem to suggest they were mostly dugout canoes, unsuitable for transportation across large swaths of water. The closest to crossing dangerous waters is the colonization of various islands (e.g. Orkney), but that's a far stretch from steady long-distance see-faring trade.


JAL

The Haida conducted long-distance seafaring trade in canoes, from southern Alaska as far south as California. However, I'm unaware of anything like a Haida canoe in the Old World.

Zaarin wrote:The Haida conducted long-distance seafaring trade in canoes, from southern Alaska as far south as California. However, I'm unaware of anything like a Haida canoe in the Old World.

Apart from that, it's dangerous (scientifically) to equate non-Old World cultures without extensive metallurgy with stone-age cultures in the Old World. There's little use in trying to draw parallels, I think.


JAL

jal wrote:

Zaarin wrote:The Haida conducted long-distance seafaring trade in canoes, from southern Alaska as far south as California. However, I'm unaware of anything like a Haida canoe in the Old World.

Apart from that, it's dangerous (scientifically) to equate non-Old World cultures without extensive metallurgy with stone-age cultures in the Old World. There's little use in trying to draw parallels, I think.


JAL

I agree.

jal wrote: A quick Google on neolithic boats seem to suggest they were mostly dugout canoes, unsuitable for transportation across large swaths of water. The closest to crossing dangerous waters is the colonization of various islands (e.g. Orkney), but that's a far stretch from steady long-distance see-faring trade.

Two things.
1. In our modern age, people have constructed these primitive boats and used them to cross long distances over sea.
2. The archeological record actually confirms that there was sea-faring trade around the Aegean during the neolithic.

I have a new, possibly wacky, idea about what could have effected the phonological "Kartvelization" of PIE (the phonological similarities between PIE and Kartvelian) which Gamkrelidze and Ivanov used as an argument for a Transcaucasian homeland of PIE). The idea is a para-Karrvelian language in western Ukraine spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans' western neighbours, the Cucuteni-Trypillia people. What? The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture emerged from the eastern recesses of the Linearbandkeramik (LBK), who were genetically similar to modern Georgians and may have spoken a language related to Kartvelian. Their language may have formed a Sprachbund with pre-PIE.

Of course, this is so far nothing but idle speculation, and perhaps utter bottocks. I am not sure of this at all (the phonological resemblances between PIE and Proto-Kartvelian aren't really all that great), and I should perhaps better forget about it. It is just something I came up with when thinking about "Tommian", my latest lostlang project concerning the language of the LBK culture.

From what I can tell, the LBK samples only show similarity to modern Georgians in mitochondrial DNA, and not at all in Y chromasomal DNA, which just brings us back to the same problem as Caucasian mtDNA in Indo-Europeans. Since they lived nearby, this might even be a single data point caused by the same migration of DNA.

https://www.eupedia.com/genetics/linear ... ture.shtml
https://www.eupedia.com/europe/european ... ency.shtml
https://www.eupedia.com/europe/european ... oups.shtml

Just to change the subject but what is it about the PIE mediopassive that means it's lost in so many of the daughter languages? And further to that, if we didn't have access to the historical written languages would we still have grounds for reconstructing it?

I have abandoned the idea I posted yesterday again. There really isn't all that much reason to assume that the LBK language was related to Kartvelian (though it is of course a possibility); the similarities between Kartvelian and IE aren't that great (Kartvelian ablaut is not as similar to IE ablaut as people like Gamkrelidze said, etc.), and there is no reason to assume that the common ancestor of LBK and Kartvelian, at least 8000 years ago if it ever existed, already had these features in place. Kartvelian ablaut probably is not much older than IE ablaut, and the two ablaut systems may just have evolved independently from each other.

Frislander wrote:Just to change the subject but what is it about the PIE mediopassive that means it's lost in so many of the daughter languages? And further to that, if we didn't have access to the historical written languages would we still have grounds for reconstructing it?

Modern Greek preserves the PIE mediopassive, but I don't know if any other IE language does.

The mediopassive is prone to turning into a passive, as it did in most later branches (e.g. Italic, Celtic, Germanic). It's only reconstructable as such because the older languages do clearly preserve it as a mediopassive.

Nortaneous wrote:Modern Greek preserves the PIE mediopassive, but I don't know if any other IE language does.

I'm pretty sure Albanian does as well, and I would imagine there are enough hints and traces of it in the other modern languages that it would be possible to posit its existence, if not fully reconstruct it.

Salmoneus wrote:

Tropylium wrote:'Horn' is a rarely loaned core vocabulary item, so other things being equal, it's better to assume only one loaning event rather than two.

Is it that rarely loaned? It's a trade good, after all.

If you don't trust Swadesh on this, ask the people behind the Leipzig-Jakarta list.

As far as I know, "horns" are not a notable trade good (though specific materials like cattle horns might be sometimes). 'Horn' is an anatomy term that refers to literally anything that is firm and juts out of the head of an animal, be it a chameleon or a giraffe or a narwhal. You don't normally replace this word just because cool drinking horns or musical instruments are currently a popular trade item, any more than e.g. doing trade in dried fish makes you replace your word for 'fish' altogether, or doing trade in pâté makes you replace your word for 'liver' altogether.

Salmoneus wrote:I'm sorry, but that's not true. Plenty of people have crossed the caucasus (…)

Sorry, let me correct that: nothing goes over the Caucasus while making permanent impact but without displacing the previous inhabitants (and I guess not even the Russians fit that after all). The Caucasian families clearly enough cross the mountains, but they do so mostly contiguously. Pre-PIE coming over the Caucasus is believable only if they had free passage at some point, which then for some reason got filled in by other families entirely.

Where do you think NEC and NWC come from, if the Caucasus used to be full of para-IE or pre-IE speakers? You could surely assume residual groups hanging out in more isolated areas, but what doesn't fly offhand is those peoples then somehow re-expanding downwards to drive out all the IE-ish-speakers, who would supposedly be holding all the trade connections and cultural capital.

(Kartvelian, though, is southern enough that it may have come in from that direction.)

Salmoneus wrote:Incidentally, Maykop shares the Yamnaya fondness for kurgans - there seems to have been considerable cultural as well as genetic contact across the caucasus at this point in time.

Cultural contacts, sure, and genetic contacts are not a stretch either. That still does not imply ethnolinguistic identity though. Just look at later steppe confederations, with Huns and Turks and Bulgars and Magyars and Mongols all hanging out together, in a melange with no distinguishable divisions of material culture, despite being clearly distinguishable ethnolinguistic lineages.

Salmoneus wrote:No offence, but it's a silly argument to say that just because some people have crossed Persia, therefore PIE must have done so.

…That's not even remotely the argument. I'm making the argument that, other things being equal, getting from the Levant to Central Asia or vice versa is easier accomplishes thru Persia than thru the Caucasus.

Salmoneus wrote:But we know that neither of those things happened in reality. The Caucasian influence in the later steppe populations goes back to hunter-gatherer times in the caucasus.

No, we don't know that. You're misunderstanding again that labels in genetic component analyses are just labels; they don't imply that "Caucasian influence" had to come from the Caucasus. Our coverage of paleo-DNA is still very patchy, enough so that we cannot rule out the (a priori very probable) scenario where northern Caucasian hunter-gatherers were a group of people who had originally wandered in from the steppes, and that it was their sibling groups who spread these "Caucasian" genes also elsewhere.

Salmoneus wrote:But the fact remains, there is no evidence for any of this.

The evidence is in the lexical parallels between IE and Semitic, if your memory isn't stretching far enough. Without those, sure, there will be no reason for any speculation of a southern origin of IE whatsoever. It is there, though. You can think it is weak evidence, but to claim there is "no evidence" is simply incorrect.

Salmoneus wrote:

Tropylium wrote:If you look into the works of Nostraticists who include Afroasiatic (Bomhard, Dolgopolsky), you can get together a triple-digit-number of PIE-PS lexical comparisons.
PIE *bʰeh₂- ~ PS *b-h-r, *b-h-w, *b-h-q 'to shine'
PIE *bʰeg- ~ PS *b-q-ʕ, *b-q-r- 'to break, split'
PIE *bʰars ~ PS *barr 'grain'
PIE *bʰerH- ~ PS *b-r(-z) 'to bore'
etc.
Probably some percentage is accidental similarity, but I don't think there's much of a chance literally every bit of this data is.

And the same sort of vague resemblances can be found for any other pair of language families you look at.

Wrong. It's not "vague resemblance", they're close enough that we can establish various regular correspondences (e.g. *bʰ ~ *b in these examples, and already in them also *r ~ *r, as also turns up in 'horn').

You probably mean they're weak resemblances (most comparisons are basically only biconsonantal), but then what? I agree they don't warrant the assumption of common origin, but identifying loanwords doesn't require nearly the same level of evidence. You can, in fact, identify loanwords even in the complete absense of parallels — I'm fairly confident that, say, Finnish Tahiti originates from Tahitian, even though I am also confident that there has never been any Finnish-Tahitian contact of note (and I would be confident in this even if I didn't know that the place is called "Tahiti" also in English)

Salmoneus wrote:You're literally fixing a hole in your theory by postulating a new population - new genetics, new language family, new archeological culture - for which we have absolutely zero evidence, and who are effectively an unfalsifiable hypothesis existing only to make the theory work. Are they possible? Sure, that's the advantage of unfalsifiable lost populations. But that's no reason to go around believing in them.

Literally everything that is believed about unwritten prehistorical languages (such as PIE) is, in principle, unfalsifiable. "Falsifiability" of prehistory is a meaningless concept; the cornerstone of all historical inquiry is the principle of uniformitarianism.

I'm also not sure what you think is the theory that my proposed model of pre-PIE spread is "patching" — that's the main idea I'm proposing here.

When lexicon matches better than morphology, it is likely that one is dealing with a layer of loanwords. This had turned out to be true with Armenian (considered an Iranian language on the base of lexical resemblances before Hübschmann proved that wrong on morphological grounds in 1863), and is IMHO also likely with Yukaghir vs. Uralic; we have also discussed the lexical resemblances between IE and Uralic, concluding that they look like loanwords, and I think this is also the case with the lexical resemblances between IE and Semitic. The two families are utterly different from each other in almost every other regard, so we are almost certainly dealing with loanwords here, probably Neolithic Wanderwörter, perhaps from a lost third source.

But the entire reason for looking for IE-Uralic lexicon matches is the existence of suggestive morphological similarities between the two!