European languages before Indo-European

[Octavià]

Yeah. Come on guys, what were you thinking? Obviously a single example of a semantic shift that isn't even in the dictionary proves that it must have also happened 7000 years ago in the northern European plains. And sure, he said it required a "Stone Age" mentality to make that kind of association, but hey, it's Spain, they're pretty backwards, right? Oh, you might object, "muzzle and lips aren't the same thing" but come on, who really knows the difference. I mean who among us hasn't said to a girl "Your muzzle is so beautiful!"

Obviously you didn't read my former statement that makes both seta and jeta to be Semitic loanwords from a word meaning 'lip'. And I've already explained what the semantic relationship between these two meanings is.

[Legion]

I am not insulting you, I am voicing the general consus toward you, which you brought upon yourself, all by yourself.

[Octavià]

OK, I'd live with that.

[Neek]

No, ad hominem is an insult masquerading as a valid argument. What I'm doing is blatantly insulting you. There is a big difference.

Then I'd kindly ask you leave this thread.

More enough, I think you should be banned. People who insult and death threat others HAVE NO PLACE HERE.

No. You have no place here.

Listen, Octavio, when you came here earlier I gave you some good advice. You want people to take your bullshit seriously, and I told you to approach your theory with a scientific mind, knowing that ANY criticism will help shape your theory into a valid, sound one. You haven't listened and you haven't changed.

This thread is entertaining, don't get me wrong. You do for linguistics what Augusten Burroughs does for memoir writing.

You know what? Sod this. Let's invite some youtube commentators and linguistic professors into this forum to see what they think. I think it would make for an entertaining day.

WeepingElf, post some more Alpic. At least you approach this whole "pre-Indo-European Europe" a bit more soberly.

Goatface, let's get a beer.

[Åge Kruger]

Yes, you make yourself clear. It's just very hard to believe that you would insist that *leb and *lab are two different roots, and that 'lip' and 'lap' aren't semantically related

Yes, I think so. Although this doesn't exclude they could have contaminated each other in some languages.

when, at the same time, you claim that mushroom, lip, and buttock are semantically related and roots as diverse as *kómpV, *tɬ’a:npV, *ƛep, and *swombh come ultimately from the same root.

These are semantic drifts which presumably took place in different languages. But substratal IE *leb- 'lip' (IMHO a loanword from some reflex of *tɬ’a:npV) kept the original meaning.

BTW, Sino-Tibetan *tɬep is 'lick' and so possibly related to IE *lab-.

Here's the problem of credibility again. You maintain semantic drift between a range of widely divergent meanings, but not such a possibility for 'lip' and 'lap'. Whether or not mushroom/lip/buttocks are or can be shown to be semantically related is no longer interesting. What's interesting is your stubborn refusal to accept that 'lip' and 'lap' could be semantically similar in light of your readiness to accept much larger semantic leaps.

[WeepingElf]

No, ad hominem is an insult masquerading as a valid argument. What I'm doing is blatantly insulting you. There is a big difference.

Then I'd kindly ask you leave this thread.

More enough, I think you should be banned. People who insult and death threat others HAVE NO PLACE HERE.

No. You have no place here.

Listen, Octavio, when you came here earlier I gave you some good advice. You want people to take your bullshit seriously, and I told you to approach your theory with a scientific mind, knowing that ANY criticism will help shape your theory into a valid, sound one. You haven't listened and you haven't changed.

Indeed. When he returned to the forum after the Great Migration, I was of the opinion that he should not be banned again, but given a fair chance of reform. He did not really take that chance. While he did not yet employ the "My opponents are Nazis" stick, he has turned out to behave exactly like he behaved before, with no indication of reform. While posting speculative hypotheses is no improper conduct (after all, that's what this thread is meant for), considering all objections ad hominem attacks, is. And calling for the ban of people like Legion or Goatface definitely is just not cricket!

This thread is entertaining, don't get me wrong. You do for linguistics what Augusten Burroughs does for memoir writing.

You know what? Sod this. Let's invite some youtube commentators and linguistic professors into this forum to see what they think. I think it would make for an entertaining day.

Now that would be a show. The linguistics professors, no doubt, would tear Octavià's ideas into bits and grind them to powder.

WeepingElf, post some more Alpic. At least you approach this whole "pre-Indo-European Europe" a bit more soberly.

Albic, that is. But Albic is just a conlang which interprets my ideas about pre-Indo-European Europe in a creative way. It is just a possible and hopefully plausible pre-IE language, but without any claims to truth. Even the underlying hypotheses are something which ought to be taken with a grain of salt - it could have been that way, but it may have been otherwise. I have already posted some ideas, but they quickly got drowned out by Octavià's rants.

Goatface, let's get a beer.

Goatface may be a bit roughshod and uncharitable, but he is basically right. And he is also someone who knows his historical linguistics well.

[Morrígan]

Goatface, let's get a beer.

Goatface may be a bit roughshod and uncharitable, but he is basically right. And he is also someone who knows his historical linguistics well.

I feel I should apologize for my lack of decorum. I've been under stress from working on a paper for the phonology of Tainan Hokkien, and I'd consumed copious amounts whisky at that point. I intend this as an explaination, not an excuse, to be perfectly clear.

As hard as the work is to do in these long-range and more speculative fields, there is clearly a lot we can get out of it. I find it profoundly frustrating to have these discussions derailed by a manwhose hypotheses are entirely untenstable and seems to think that occam's razor is all one needs to do scientific investigation.

[Neek]

I find it profoundly frustrating to have these discussions derailed by a manwhose hypotheses are entirely untenstable and seems to think that occam's razor is all one needs to do scientific investigation.

Considering his inability to admit that *leb and *lab are from the same roots, I'd say that Octavio thinks Occam's razor is for shaving chins.

[Neon Fox]

[
Albic, that is. But Albic is just a conlang which interprets my ideas about pre-Indo-European Europe in a creative way. It is just a possible and hopefully plausible pre-IE language, but without any claims to truth. Even the underlying hypotheses are something which ought to be taken with a grain of salt - it could have been that way, but it may have been otherwise.

Speaking of Albic, do you have a thread or a webpage where you talk about its underlying hypotheses? I'd be interested in seeing the info all together.

(Personally I suggest that we just shun Octavià. Don't mention him, don't read his posts, don't respond to anything he says. It's working pretty well for me so far.)

[WeepingElf]

Albic, that is. But Albic is just a conlang which interprets my ideas about pre-Indo-European Europe in a creative way. It is just a possible and hopefully plausible pre-IE language, but without any claims to truth. Even the underlying hypotheses are something which ought to be taken with a grain of salt - it could have been that way, but it may have been otherwise.

Speaking of Albic, do you have a thread or a webpage where you talk about its underlying hypotheses? I'd be interested in seeing the info all together.

A set of web pages about the family is under construction. So far, there is a grammar of Old Albic on FrathWiki. That grammar is partly out of date, but only details have changed since then. A further set of web pages is under preparation about my theories about prehistoric European languages. So far, there is a brief summary of my hypothesis again on FrathWiki.

Basically, the idea is thus:

1. About 10,000 years ago, a people lived somewhere north of the Caspian Sea. They were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. They spoke Proto-Indo-Uralic, an agglutinating head-final active/stative language.

2. One group of these people moved westward and settled on the northern shore of the Black Sea, which at that time was a freshwater lake, with a level lower than today. Their dialect became Proto-Europic, while the dialect of those who stayed behind became Proto-Uralo-Siberian, the common ancestor of Uralic, Yukaghir, Chuktoko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo Aleut.

3. The speakers of Proto-Europic acquired Neolithic agriculture from the Near East, probably via the Caucasus. Many Near Eastern loanwords entered the language at that point.

4. When the ocean level reached the Bosporus threshold about 8,000 years ago and the sea level in the Black Sea rose by several meters within a few decades, the speakers of Proto-Europic fled north and west along the great rivers, probably travelling per boat (the wheel wasn't invented yet). Those who moved north along the Dniepr river founded Proto-Indo-European, those who moved west along the Danube founded Proto-Hesperic.

5. The Proto-Hesperic speakers brought agriculture to central Europe (Linearbandkeramik) and established many geographical names, including the Old European Hydronymy.

6. Later, Hesperic groups moved north and west and expanded the Old European Hydronymy.

7. The Hesperic languages were mostly replaced by Indo-European languages starting about 3000 BC, with the last Hesperic languages surviving in the British Isles until about 500 BC, in some small enclaves perhaps even longer.

8. The Hesperic languages of the British Isles shifted from a head-final to a head-initial word order, and exerted a substratum influence on the Insular Celtic languages. The British Isles were the site of the highest cultural development in the Hesperic sphere, spawning the Germanic and Celtic traditions of Elves, and the Greek traditions of Hyperborea and Atlantis.

(Personally I suggest that we just shun Octavià. Don't mention him, don't read his posts, don't respond to anything he says. It's working pretty well for me so far.)

That's perhaps the best strategy to deal with him. Debunking him was fun when it began; now it has turned stale, and we should no longer feed that troll. He thrives on the attention we give him.

[roninbodhisattva]

8. The Hesperic languages of the British Isles shifted from a head-final to a head-initial word order, and exerted a substratum influence on the Insular Celtic languages. The British Isles were the site of the highest cultural development in the Hesperic sphere, spawning the Germanic and Celtic traditions of Elves, and the Greek traditions of Hyperborea and Atlantis.

I like this little detail a lot. How do you get the head-final > head-initial shift going, though? Is it just internal, or is it from yet another substrate that was there before Hesperic that you don't even bother with?

[WeepingElf]

8. The Hesperic languages of the British Isles shifted from a head-final to a head-initial word order, and exerted a substratum influence on the Insular Celtic languages. The British Isles were the site of the highest cultural development in the Hesperic sphere, spawning the Germanic and Celtic traditions of Elves, and the Greek traditions of Hyperborea and Atlantis.

I like this little detail a lot. How do you get the head-final > head-initial shift going, though? Is it just internal, or is it from yet another substrate that was there before Hesperic that you don't even bother with?

I haven't yet decided on the cause of that shift, though I lean towards an internal explanation. The language has verbs agreeing with both subject and object, so the relevant NPs were at one point reanalysed as appositions, which were moved to the end of the sentence, with the verb now being placed first. This reordering of the clause prompted a corresponding reordering of the NP. There are traces of the old head-final order in Old Albic, though. Compounds are head-final, and some case endings evolved from postpositions - and as is well known, according to Thomas Givon, "today's morphology is yesterday's syntax".

I did indeed consider yet another substratum, even an Afroasiatic one, but that turned out to be a horrible kludge. That the British Isles were Hesperic-speaking is indicated by the presence of the Old European Hydronymy; that the language that was spoken there before Celtic was head-initial is indicated by the substratum influence on Insular Celtic, which underwent a total restructuring of its syntax within a few centuries. So there is evidence for a head-initial Hesperic language in the British Isles. There may have been a kind of cline in pre-IE Europe, with head-final languages in the south and east and head-initial languages in the northwest.

[zompist]

Octavià was banned but evaded it by using another account. As he promised to behave better, I accepted this a) so long as he behaves and b) so long as people in this thread were happy to continue debating him.

It's clear that he's overstayed his welcome. I don't hear anyone who really wants more of his hypothesis; on the contrary, there's a consensus that he's disruptive and interested only in a one-way conversation.

There's already a medium for that; it's called a blog. Go and use it rather than abusing a discussion forum.

[Octavià]

Listen, Octavio, when you came here earlier I gave you some good advice. You want people to take your bullshit seriously, and I told you to approach your theory with a scientific mind, knowing that ANY criticism will help shape your theory into a valid, sound one. You haven't listened and you haven't changed.

I think yours was a wise advice, but you know, I'm an idiosincrasic individual.

This thread is entertaining, don't get me wrong. You do for linguistics what Augusten Burroughs does for memoir writing.

I don't happen to know him, but I guess his work must be awful, isn't?

[WeepingElf]

Octavià was banned but evaded it by using another account. As he promised to behave better, I accepted this a) so long as he behaves and b) so long as people in this thread were happy to continue debating him.

It's clear that he's overstayed his welcome. I don't hear anyone who really wants more of his hypothesis; on the contrary, there's a consensus that he's disruptive and interested only in a one-way conversation.

There's already a medium for that; it's called a blog. Go and use it rather than abusing a discussion forum.

Right. And indeed he already has a blog. He doesn't need this forum at all.

[Octavià]

It's clear that he's overstayed his welcome. I don't hear anyone who really wants more of his hypothesis; on the contrary, there's a consensus that he's disruptive and interested only in a one-way conversation.

Don't forget I've also made a reasonable criticism to WeepingElf's "Hesperic", and he has even accepted some of my remarks. But I also appologize for being a little too harsh at times.

There's already a medium for that; it's called a blog. Go and use it rather than abusing a discussion forum.

I take your advice seriously.

[Neek]

Listen, Octavio, when you came here earlier I gave you some good advice. You want people to take your bullshit seriously, and I told you to approach your theory with a scientific mind, knowing that ANY criticism will help shape your theory into a valid, sound one. You haven't listened and you haven't changed.

I think yours was a wise advice, but you know, I'm an idiosincrasic individual.

Something is to be said about the fact that you do remember the advice I gave you. That works for something!

This thread is entertaining, don't get me wrong. You do for linguistics what Augusten Burroughs does for memoir writing.

I don't happen to know him, but I guess his work must be awful, isn't?

On the contrary; he's an immensely good writer, just that when it comes to writing creative non-fiction, he's a little too creative and takes the term "non-fiction" very loosely; I hope that clarifies the comparison.

[jal]

like the rabid beast

Can you believe I actually read "rabbit beast", and wondered what the poor bunnies had done to you to be compared with Octavia? :)


JAL

[jal]

However, since we do not know, or at least have no sound proof of, what went on inside the neolithic mind,

I suppose you've never studied anthropology, haven't you?

You mean to claim that studying anthropology will give one sound proof of what went on in the neolithic mind? Now that's an interesting claim.

My complaint is about the mistake of assuming ancient people used to think the same way we do, something which is utterly false.

Based on what evidence? I would pose that for lack of evidence, assuming that people that were obviously of the same species as us do think the same way we* do, is the one and only valid assumption.

*In a broad definition, including other cultures, not mere "western" people.


JAL

[jal]

It's clear that he's overstayed his welcome. I don't hear anyone who really wants more of his hypothesis; on the contrary, there's a consensus that he's disruptive and interested only in a one-way conversation.

Although I agree with the general gist, I do think that what seems to be implied, viz. that another ban is in order, would be a bit too harsh. Though I wouldn't miss him when gone, that's for sure.


JAL

[Octavià]

BTW, Sino-Tibetan *tɬep is 'lick' and so possibly related to IE *lab-.

Here's the problem of credibility again. You maintain semantic drift between a range of widely divergent meanings, but not such a possibility for 'lip' and 'lap'.

Yes, IMHO these are two different mechanisms, respectively semantic drift and semantic contamination.

Whether or not mushroom/lip/buttocks are or can be shown to be semantically related is no longer interesting. What's interesting is your stubborn refusal to accept that 'lip' and 'lap' could be semantically similar in light of your readiness to accept much larger semantic leaps.

I think the key doesn't relies on how "larger" or "shorter" is the gap but rather on the underlying conceptual image. If we picture the lips as more or less rounded protuberances made of soft tissue, then the drift to 'mushroom' or even 'buttocks' is readily explained, something which doesn't occur with 'lick'. Therefore a different mechanism is needed to explain the coalescence of these two concepts.

[Octavià]

I feel I should apologize for my lack of decorum. I've been under stress from working on a paper for the phonology of Tainan Hokkien, and I'd consumed copious amounts whisky at that point. I intend this as an explaination, not an excuse, to be perfectly clear.

Hip, hip, hurray!

As hard as the work is to do in these long-range and more speculative fields, there is clearly a lot we can get out of it. I find it profoundly frustrating to have these discussions derailed by a man whose hypotheses are entirely untenstable and seems to think that occam's razor is all one needs to do scientific investigation.

Not exactly. I used Occam's Razor only once for cutting an innecessary hypothesis of WeepingElf's theory.

Also, everyone is extremely leery about Starostin's PNC reconstructions which you always pull out as though it was definitive proof of anything other than your flawed and amaturish methodology.

Well, not exactly everyone. As our Russian colleague Basilius pointed out, it looks like Starostin's PNC is actually an older entity than commonly thought and thus it's closer to the actual Proto-Vasco-Caucasian. Also Starostin's work (although by no means error-free) has been and still is for me an invaluable tool to study the pre-IE language landscape of Europe.

[Åge Kruger]

Whether or not mushroom/lip/buttocks are or can be shown to be semantically related is no longer interesting. What's interesting is your stubborn refusal to accept that 'lip' and 'lap' could be semantically similar in light of your readiness to accept much larger semantic leaps.

I think the key doesn't relies on how "larger" or "shorter" is the gap but rather on the underlying conceptual image. If we picture the lips as more or less rounded protuberances made of soft tissue, then the drift to 'mushroom' or even 'buttocks' is readily explained, something which doesn't occur with 'lick'. Therefore a different mechanism is needed to explain the coalescence of these two concepts.

[/quote]
This will be the last thing I will say on the matter, since we're going round in circles.

We're not talking coalescence, but divergence.
Lips are part of the mouth.
The tongue is part of the mouth.
They're both parts of the mouth.
They're both used in similar contexts.

Fin

[Octavià]

This will be the last thing I will say on the matter, since we're going round in circles.

On the contrary, you're helping me shape my own line of thought.

We're not talking coalescence, but divergence.
Lips are part of the mouth.
The tongue is part of the mouth.
They're both parts of the mouth.
They're both used in similar contexts.

This is a different conceptual image of 'lip' than the one I mentioned above. This means that they can change across different languages and cultures. Also the fact now we've got the conceptual image of 'lip' as a part of the mouth doesn't imply speakers of other languages (present or past) might have different ones.

[Legion]

Octavia > STOP TALKING

Other people > STOP TALKING TO OCTAVIA

GOD