THE INDO-URALIC VERB

C.C. Uhlenbeck made a distinction between two components of Proto-Indo-European, which he called A and B (1935a: 133ff.). The first component comprises pronouns, verbal roots, and derivational suffixes, and may be compared with Uralic, whereas the second component contains isolated words, such as numerals and most underived nouns, which have a different source. The wide attestation of the Indo-European numerals must be attributed to the development of trade resulting from the increased mobility which was the primary cause of the Indo-European expansions. Numerals do not belong to the basic vocabulary of a neolithic culture, as is clear from their absence in Proto-Uralic (cf. also Collinder 1965: 112) and from the spread of Chinese numerals throughout East Asia. Though Uhlenbeck objects to the term “substratum” for his B complex, I think that it is a perfectly appropriate denomination. The best candidate for the original Indo-European homeland is the territory of the Sredny Stog culture in the eastern Ukraine (cf. Mallory 1989). If we can identify IndoHittite and nuclear Indo-European with the beginning and the end of the Sredny Stog culture, respectively (cf. Kortlandt 1990: 138), Uhlenbeck’s view can be unified with Gimbutas’ theory of a primary homeland north of the Caspian Sea and a secondary homeland north of the Black Sea (cf. 1985). What we have to take into account is the typological similarity of Proto-Indo-European to the North-West Caucasian languages. If this similarity can be attributed to areal factors (cf. Kortlandt 1995: 94), we may think of Indo-European as a branch of Indo-Uralic which was transformed under the influence of a Caucasian substratum connected with the Maykop culture in the northern Caucasus. We may then locate the Indo-Uralic homeland south of the Ural Mountains in the seventh millennium BC (cf. Mallory 1989: 192f.) and perhaps identify the Khvalynsk culture on the middle Volga as an intermediate stage before the rise of the Sredny Stog culture in the fifth millennium BC. The Indo-European verbal system appears to combine Uralic flexional morphemes with Caucasian syntactic patterns. Holger Pedersen already argued that the subject of a transitive verb was in the genitive [= sigmatic nominative] case if it was animate and in the instrumental case if it was inanimate while the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb were in the absolutive [= asigmatic nominative] case form (1907: 152), that the endings of the perfect and the thematic present originally belonged to the flexion of intransitive verbs and the “normal”, mostly athematic endings to the flexion of transitive verbs (1933: 311-315), and that the intransitive and transitive flexion types correspond to the Hittite flexional paradigms in -hi and -mi (1938: 80-85). Beekes has shown that this theory explains the origin of the Indo-European nominal flexion in its entirety (1985). Knobloch however identified the Indo-European thematic vowel in verbal paradigms -e/o- with an object marker (1953). Elsewhere I have integrated these findings into a coherent whole, arguing that the Indo-European thematic flexion of the verb can be compared with the objective conjugation of the Uralic languages and that this hypothesis explains the distribution of the thematic flexion in Hittite and Sanskrit as well as the rise of the thematic subjunctive (1983a, cf. now Nikolaeva 1999 on the re