Urheimat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Urheimat (German: ur- original, ancient; Heimat home, homeland) is a linguistic term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language. Since many peoples tend to wander and spread, there is no absolute Urheimat, e.g. there is an Indo-European Urheimat different from the Germanic or Romance Urheimat. If the proto-language was spoken in historical times, the location of the Urheimat is typically undisputed, such as the Roman Empire in the case of the Romance languages. If the proto-language is unattested, however, its existence, and by consequence the existence and exact location of its Urheimat, may always be of a hypothetical nature.

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In cases where the Urheimat of a particular linguistic group is not positively known, one method of identifying it is an analysis of the vocabulary of the proto-language. For example, if there were no historical documents and one wanted to find the Urheimat of the Romance languages, the Romance root for "cow", which is quite similar in all Latin-based languages, would indicate that the Romance languages spread from an area where there were cows.

English: cow

Indo-European topics
Indo-European languages
Albanian · Anatolian · Armenian
Baltic · Celtic · Dacian · Germanic
Greek · Indo-Iranian · Italic · Phrygian
Slavic · Thracian · Tocharian
 
Indo-European peoples
Albanians · Anatolians · Armenians
Balts · Celts · Germanic peoples
Greeks · Indo-Aryans · Indo-Iranians
Iranians · Italic peoples · Slavs
Thracians · Tocharians
 
Proto-Indo-Europeans
Language · Society · Religion
 
Urheimat hypotheses
Kurgan hypothesis · Anatolia
Armenia · India · PCT
 
Indo-European studies

After this manner, scholars have tried to identify the homeland of the Indo-European languages, to which the term Urheimat is most frequently applied. Possibly relevant geographical indicators are common words for 'beech' and 'salmon' (while there is no common word for 'lion', for example—the fact so many European words for "lion" look alike is due to more recent borrowings). Many hypotheses for an Urheimat have been proposed, and Mallory said: “One does not ask ‘where is the Indo-European homeland?’ but rather ‘where do they put it now?’ ”Mallory (1989:143) [1]

Specific hypotheses:

  1. ^ Mallory, J. P. 1989. In Search of the Indo-Europeans. London: Thames and Hudson.

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