Urheimat
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.
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 For example, if there were no historical documents and one wanted to find the Urheimat of the Romance languages, the Romance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. On the other hand, there is no common root for "
potato" in all Romance languages; therefore
South America would be a very unlikely Urheimat of the Romance languages, because, according to
archaeological evidence, there were potatoes but no cows in South America before
1492.
COW
*
Portuguese: vaca
*
Spanish: vaca
*
French: vache
*
Italian: vacca
*
Romanian: vacă
POTATO
* Portuguese: batata
* Spanish: papa (Latin American), patata (European)
* French: pomme de terre or patate
* Quebecois: patatie
* Italian: patata
* Romanian: cartof
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). See
Proto-Indo-European language for a more detailed account of the question.
*
Sprachraum
