Search found 164 matches

by Octavià
Fri Dec 10, 2010 5:18 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

AF thinks the shift was actually *z- > *s- ~ *H 2 - , but I'm affraid his etymologies are wrong. There is this curious pattern in much of your argumentation once again. You cite some stuff from someone else to support your hypothesis; but when someone points out that it has problems, you say, "Oh y...
by Octavià
Fri Dec 10, 2010 5:16 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

Soap wrote:Is sybwydd a loan? It doesnt seem to match up to the regular sound changes of Celtic. Welsh -b- is usually from *bh or gʷ or gʷh.
This is a compound from *sap- and *widu- 'tree'.
by Octavià
Fri Dec 10, 2010 6:22 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

Let's see if this keeps up (looking thru the rest of AF's wordlist)… AF thinks the shift was actually *z- > *s- ~ *H 2 - , but I'm affraid his etymologies are wrong. "Thorn" *ab- ~ *sap- S-initial form in Latin sappīnus (which is usually connected to the "sap" root however). No-initial form in Lati...
by Octavià
Wed Dec 08, 2010 4:32 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

Perhaps these links would help (please ignore high-level links):
*sal- 'to jump'
*sam- 'summer'
*sel- 'dwelling, settlement' (+ Latin solum)
by Octavià
Wed Dec 08, 2010 3:45 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

These are from Arnaud Fournet, a former colleague of mine. This is why I call the sound shift *H 2 - > *s- as "Fournet's Law". Which IE languages have which forms? One possibility is that we are dealing with borrowings from an IE dialect with the shift */s/ > */h/, which has happened independently ...
by Octavià
Wed Dec 08, 2010 1:09 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

There's another thing it doesn't work in Jörg's "Hesperic" theory, namely that the Old European Hydronymy (OEH) has actually no / h / but zero, which is the expected result from PIE *H 2 - (/ χ /). It's actually the non-IE substrate language which has *H 2 - > *s- . An actual example would be the OE...
by Octavià
Wed Dec 08, 2010 10:03 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

AFAIK, there's no Nostratic/Eurasiatic etymology for this. Here is when Vasco-Caucasian comes to rescue. If there are no cognates in other Eurasiatic languages, it may of course be possible that Proto-Europic borrowed the word from some other language, perhaps in the Caucasian region ... wait ... E...
by Octavià
Wed Dec 08, 2010 7:36 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: I'm new, and I want to learn Vulger Latin.
Replies: 20
Views: 4692

Re: I'm new, and I want to learn Vulger Latin.

For a fuller example, I'll try to translate one brief line into some approximation of the Latin of Spain in c. 500 (Spanish being the Romance language I'm most familiar with and whose history I know best). In one section you have "I pacifice inter ille sonor et illa festinatione, et recorda in tale...
by Octavià
Tue Dec 07, 2010 4:47 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

Maybe. I cannot say "No way, you are wrong!" - with my current state of knowledge (or whoseever state of knowledge), such a judgment lies beyond my capabilities. But I feel that my hypothesis (namely that PIE *sal and Hesperic *hal are regular reflexes of a Proto-Europic *sxal ) is simpler. A relat...
by Octavià
Tue Dec 07, 2010 4:20 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

I don't think my theories are actually much more speculative than yours. :) I admit that my hypotheses are somewhat speculative. But the key difference between us two is that you think you know what happened and claim the truth, while I know and openly admit that I don't know what was really going ...
by Octavià
Mon Dec 06, 2010 5:37 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

Baseless speculation of the sort our friend Octavià indulges in may be useful as source of inspiration for conlangs, but you always have to be aware that you are speculating, and must not peddle them as the truth. I speculate about prehistoric languages myself in my conlanging, but I am aware that ...
by Octavià
Mon Dec 06, 2010 9:47 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

It's not impossible, but from what I understand, metathesis of a vowel was not common in PIE, so korp- and krep- are hard to reconcile. That's leaving aside the problem of the voicing of the final consonant. If I said "(quasi-)homonymous" it's precisely because I don't think these two roots are rel...
by Octavià
Mon Dec 06, 2010 9:21 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

Don't forget crabs also live in rivers , although this isn't really important. My guess is that both crab (Germanic) and scorpion (from Latin) are ultimately related, pointing to a root *grabh- ~ *(s)korp- * whose original meaning would be 'claw'. Although this is actually the same root found in PSe...
by Octavià
Mon Dec 06, 2010 8:49 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

But unlike crabs, scorpions are armed with a poisonous weapon, its sting. Scorpion bitings can be very painful, as my own mother experienced when she was a child.
by Octavià
Mon Dec 06, 2010 8:42 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

Legion wrote:You're not stigmatized: nobody gives a shit about you, and the minute you stop talking, we stop thinking about you.
Then I suggest you ignore me from now on.
by Octavià
Mon Dec 06, 2010 8:21 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

I'm not sure if you can understand my object of study are submerged substrate languages, that is, languages which only survive in the form of loanwords. As the archaeologist David Anthony said in one of his books, languages become extinct because their speakers were stigmatized by the dominant socie...
by Octavià
Mon Dec 06, 2010 7:48 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

Now I'm waiting for you to use homeopatics to back up your vasco-caucasian nonsense. About homeopathy , I'm not an expert, but I think it's like "programming" water mollecules to convey a specific message (usually for healing something). This is achieved by extreme dilution ratios, in order to assu...
by Octavià
Mon Dec 06, 2010 7:36 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

I think the only who's joking here is you :mrgreen:
by Octavià
Mon Dec 06, 2010 7:16 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

In fact, Proto-Germanic has many words with no likely PIE etymnology. There's a big and very important difference here between "no likely" and "no known", which is at the root of the reasons why nobody here agrees with your methodology. I'm not going to waste any time explaining it, because it shou...
by Octavià
Mon Dec 06, 2010 6:42 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

Well, spending several pages arguing over whether a single example is valid or not doesn't do anyone any good; a single example isn't worth anything. You may not have 100 words, Octavià, but at the very least, dazzle us with all of the ones you do have, and demonstrate some regular correspondences,...
by Octavià
Sun Dec 05, 2010 6:29 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

The problem here is that there is also nothing which guarantees your point of view. If you give me a list of more than 100 words with regular sound correspondences , then I'll start thinking that maybe it has some validity. As I stated before, this kind of data (substrate loanwords) doesn't allow f...
by Octavià
Sun Dec 05, 2010 6:22 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

Unless you were switching reference to something other than *gerbh- without telling me, you said that [the etymology of] "crab" is homonymous with "carve". Actually it's crab which is homonymous to *grebh- . And IMO "crab" and "carve" aren't that far apart from each other in meaning - at least the ...
by Octavià
Sun Dec 05, 2010 6:19 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

In understand your point, but the thing is there's nothing which guareents us the word crab actually goes back to PIE. In fact, Proto-Germanic has many words with no likely PIE etymnology. There's also nothing (other than pre-conceived ideas) that would exclude the possibility of languages related t...
by Octavià
Sun Dec 05, 2010 6:01 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

Astraios wrote:So now you're saying that the PIE root *gerbh- had two meanings, one of which led to "carve" and the other to "crab"? Sure, why not, that sounds more reasonable than your earlier suggestions.
By no means, 'crab' has NOTHING to do with 'carve'. This is my point.
by Octavià
Sun Dec 05, 2010 5:44 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 230597

Re: European languages before Indo-European

Then tell me what the hell has to do 'crab' with 'to write'. The actual English cognate of the Greek word is carve , not crab . If you're going to use that web site to back up your own claims, then take a look at this . It's clear the authors of OED were mistaken with respect to crab , as this isn'...