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In Indo-European studies, the salmon problem or salmon argument^[1] (also known by the German term Lachsargument^[2]) is an outdated argument in favour of placing the Indo-European urheimat in the Baltic region, as opposed to the Eurasian Steppe, based on the cognate etymology of the respective words for salmon in Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages.^[3] The word's wide distribution likely means it existed in its current form in a Proto-Indo-European language.^[4]

The reasoning went as follows: Since the term for Atlantic salmon in the Germanic, Baltic and Slavic languages could be derived from a common Proto-Indo-European root *laḱs-,^[5] the urheimat of the Indo-Europeans must be where both the languages and the object it describes can be found: Northern-Central Europe. The argument was first put forward by German philologist Otto Schrader in 1883.^[6] The argument was subject to continued scholarly debate throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in German academia.

In 1953, German indologist Paul Thieme submitted that the descendants of *laḱs- found in the Caucasus described the brown trout (Salmo trutta) rather than the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar).^[7] American philologist George Sherman Lane concurred in a 1970 conference paper: "In my opinion, the name in question probably did refer originally not to the Salmo salar at all, but rather to the Salmo trutta caspius of the northwest Caucasus region."^[8] That lent support to the Kurgan hypothesis.

Since the mid 19th century, philologists began to be interested in words, which were similar in multiple Indo-European languages. They were considered to share a common origin either in Proto-Indo-European or in the younger proto language of the so-called "Litu-Slavo-Geramans"^[9] The occurrence or absence of those words was thought to provide clues for the Indo-European urheimat. Some of the numerous hypotheses about its location e.g., in Northern Europe, in the Kurgan, or in the Balkans, were based on race theory^[10] or nationalistic ideas.^[11]

Comparative linguistics indicated a lack of common Indo-European vocabulary for fishes.^[12][13] Even a shared word for "fish" itself seemed to be absent (comp. Latin: piscis, Sanskrit: mátsya-, Ancient Greek: ichthýs, and Church Slavonic: ryba).^[14] Both of which made an origin from Eurasian Steppe or woods, which are low on fish, seem plausible.^[15]

When it comes to salmon (Latin: Salmo salar), dictionaries being published from the 1970s on began to compile more and more similar words for it in Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic languages. Those forms excluded to possibility of it being a loanword. In 1876, the German philologist August Fick collected Old Norse: lax, Old High German: lahs, German: Lachs, Lithuanian: lászis, lasziszas, Latvian: lassis, lassens, Prussian: lasasso, Polish: łosoś, and Russian: losós.^[16] The Deutsches Wörterbuch by the Brothers Grimm added Old English: leax in 1877.^[17] The philologist Friedrich Kluge further added Scottish Gaelic: lax and reconstructed Gothic: *lahs.^[18]

Otto Schrader was the first to ubicate the "land of the Slavo-Germans" based on a zoogeographical argument. He argued that the terms for salmon indicated that a located where salmons can be found. According to Brehms Tierleben, salmons populate the Baltic Sea, the North Sea and the Easter Arctic Ocean in Europe.^[19] Since Schrader thought this to be the origin of the Germanic people only, he did not introduce this argument in the discussion about the Indo-European urheimat.

The anthropologist Karl Penka, who believed the urheimat to be in South Skandinavia, wrote about salmon in 1886, "this fish was known to Arian people," without stating, how he came to this conclusion. He expaneded the salmon argument by including the lack of salmon words in it: "Salmons (Salmo salar), which has its habitat in the Arctic Ocean an the nothern part of the Atlantic, can only be found in the rivers of Russia flowing into Baltic Sea and the White Sea, but not in those that flow into the Black Sea, or the Caspic Sea. Neither does it occur in the rivers of Asia and the Mediterranean, therewith explaing the absenence of corresponding forms of Proto-Indo-European *lakhasa in the Iranian and Indic languages, Greek, and Latin."^[20] Penka does not explain the origin of his reconstructed form *lakhasa.

Schrader responded in 1890: "[The words for salmon similar to Lachs] are confined to a more limited linguistic area.^[21] The linguist Johannes Schmidt, too, used the absence of salmon words from some Indo-European languages against Penka. He argued that Penka only postulate North European terms as Indo-European to show the equivalence of Indo-European animal terms and South Swedish fauna.^[22] In 1901 Schrader took over the formulation by Penka ex negativo: "Since the fish occur in those rivers only, which flow in to the Ocean or the Baltic Sea [...], it becomes clear why Greeks and Romans had peculiar names for this fish."^[23]

In the first 30 years after its coining, both the advocates for a Northern European urheimat and those locating the urheimat in the steppe used the salmon argument. Whie the former interpreted the common origin of those words as Proto-Indo-European, the latter argued for it to stem from a phase when what was to become Germanic, Baltic and Slavic languages had already separated from the other languages.^[24][25] A linguistic debate about the Proto-Indo-European or the Proto-West-Germanic form of salmon did not take place. The urheimat debate was based on the words for plants and mammals, agricultural terms, archeological findings, and craniological comparisons. The salmon argument was not at the forefront of this debate.

In 1908 philologists identified an extinct language in Central Asia, in what is today known as Tarim Basin in North-West China, as Indo-European and published the first translations of tests in this language.^[26] The textual fragements of this language where mostly from the second half of the first millennium AD and were written in two different variations, which were later called Tocharian A and B. The first to point out that it contained a salmon word, even befor the text including this word was published, was Schrader in 1911.^[27] At the time, he did not want to draw conclusions from it.^[28]

The next Salmon word to be discovered was Ossetian: læsæg in the Digorian dialekt of Ossetian, which belongs to the Iranian branch of Indo-European and is spoken in the Northern part of the Caucasus. It was first recorded by a linguist in 1929.^[29] In 1934, the Norwegian Indoiranianst Georg Morgenstierne reasoned that "[it] can scarcely be a loan-word from Russian Russian: losoś."^[30] He pointed out that salmon species do occur in Caucasian rivers, Indologist Sten Konow noted its similarity to the Tocharian word.^[31]

Following the discovery of the salmon words in Tocharian and Ossetian, further additions to the list of salmon words did not create a new quality of the debate. Armenian: losdi was first included in a dictionary in 1929 and added to the list in 1963.^[32] In 1976 the anthropologist Richard Diebold included Romance *locca in his list,^[32] which was proposed in 1935.^[33] By doing this he also added French: loche and its English descendant loach.^[32]

Since 1911, the words for salmon were considered to be of Indo-European origin. Even after the fall of the nationalsocialist government in Germany, the salmon argument kept being controversial for the identification of the urheimat. The North European hypothesis was supported by the words for salmon in Tocharian and Ossetian, since it shows the common origin as an Indo-European root, but it also challenged the hypothesis, as the explanation for the geographic dispersion of the words became more and more problematic. What the speakers of Proto-Indo-European referred to as "salmon" was unclear until 1970.

• Historical linguistics
• Comparative method (linguistics)
• Proto-Indo-European homeland
• North European hypothesis
• Beech argument