European languages before Indo-European

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Whimemsz »

Shm Jay wrote:Uh-oh, let’s hope it’s not another Octaviano.
Better. It is Octaviano.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

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just his identical twin, i guess

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Soap »

Whimemsz wrote:
Shm Jay wrote:Uh-oh, let’s hope it’s not another Octaviano.
Better. It is Octaviano.
You are sharp, Whim. I'm not sure what logic you used to figure that out, but I'm as sure of it as you are.

That's not necessarily a problem, though. Perhaps Zomp will lift the ban.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Dewrad »

Soap wrote:
Whimemsz wrote:
Shm Jay wrote:Uh-oh, let’s hope it’s not another Octaviano.
Better. It is Octaviano.
You are sharp, Whim. I'm not sure what logic you used to figure that out, but I'm as sure of it as you are.
It's his picture, you tit.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by zompist »

Basically he was banned for childish behavior, and permabanned for more of the same (he decided to go vandalize the zompist.com article on Wikipedia). I'm always willing to consider evidence of repentance, but sneaking onto the board under a new name is pretty much the wrong place to start.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Travis B. »

How about those Basque monks, eh?
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Octavià »

zompist wrote:Basically he was banned for childish behavior, and permabanned for more of the same (he decided to go vandalize the zompist.com article on Wikipedia). I'm always willing to consider evidence of repentance, but sneaking onto the board under a new name is pretty much the wrong place to start.
Although the Board's Lord might think different, from Wikipedia's standpoint my edit isn't technically considered as vandalism: "Even harmful edits that are not explicitly made in bad faith are not vandalism. For example, adding a controversial personal opinion to an article is not vandalism, although reinserting it despite multiple warnings can be disruptive." I was expressing my disagreement with Zompist's administrative policies, although of course that wasn't the right place to do it.

As anybody can see from the User Control Panel, I registered under my former alias in 2005, but remained inactive for a long time. So when I rejoined the forum in 2010, I had to use "Octaviano", in despite of already using "Talskubilos" elsewhere. If I've put my photo as avatar is to make clear what my real identity is to everybody. So new name = new personality.

BTW, conlangs are cool! :)

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Re: These we at least know ...

Post by Octavià »

WeepingElf wrote: In the west, we have Iberian in a strip about 100 km deep along the Spanish Mediterranean coast, written in a script (with a northern and a southern variant) of whose letters we roughly know the sound values, but the language is not understood. Basque is not helpful here, the languages do not seem to be particularly close.
Well, Iberian texts can be read pretty well (provided of course the inscription isn't broken or damaged), although the language is by large still not understood. But this isn't very surprising, because Celtiberian, also written in an Iberian script, is only poorly understood in despite of being a Celtic language.

Thanks to the Ascoli Bronze (a list of horsemen engaged in the auxiliar troop "Turma Salluitana" to whom Caius Pompeius granted Roman citizenship), we can identify proper names in Iberian inscriptions. They're mostly compounds of two words, like my own alias, which I translate as Little alder's Eagle, from talks-ku 'little alder' and bilos 'eagle'. These names suggest Iberians were a warlike aristocracy, much like Celts.

IMHO, Iberian is a Vasco-Caucasian language like Basque, but probably from a different family/group.
WeepingElf wrote: Another language written in a similar script is Tartessian, in southwestern Spain and southern Portugal, also not understood. The celtologist John T. Koch has proposed a reading of the Tartessian inscriptions as a Celtic language, which fits the fact that many place names in the area are Celtic, but this is controversial.
Not place names, but anthroponyms. For example, Arganthonios (from Greek sources), the name of a legendary king of Tartessos which Koch interprets as a magistrate title 'the man of the sacred silver'.
WeepingElf wrote:The best-known of the fragmentary non-IE languages of Europe surely is Etruscan in Italy. The script can be read with few problems, but the language is poorly understood and unclassified, except that Rhaetic in the Italian Alps and Lemnian in the Aegean appear to be related, but these two are even less known.
There's evidence (see for example Beekes) that Etruscans were originary of NW Anatolia, as one of the Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt. It seems that around 1,200 BC they sailed to Italy, where they disembarked and conquered much of Central Italy to the Umbrians (300-400 cities according to ancient historical records). It's also possible that Rhaetic (a closely related language) arose from that colonizxation in the North, later cut off from Etruscan by the Celtic (Gauls) invasion of the Po valley.
WeepingElf wrote:On Crete, we have two undeciphered scripts (not counting the enigmatic Phaistos Disc), Minoan hieroglyphs and Linear A, and some inscriptions in Greek letters but an unknown language designated Eteocretan. The situation on Cyprus is similar, with an undeciphered Cypro-Minoan script and an unknown language recorded in the (readable) Cypro-Syllabic script, Eteocypriot.
It has been suggested (see for example Glen Gordon) that the pre-Greek languages of Crete and Cyprius are relatives of Etruscan, thus constituting an Agean family.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by WeepingElf »

So Octaviano is back.

I think we should give him a fair chance of reform. If this time, he behaves nicely, doesn't call people names and doesn't drive threads past the Godwin point, I see no reason banning him again. Weird hypotheses in historical linguistics alone are not something we should consider misconduct; it depends on how the author reacts on criticism which is sure to come.
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Re: These we at least know ...

Post by WeepingElf »

Talskubilos wrote:Well, Iberian texts can be read pretty well (provided of course the inscription isn't broken or damaged), although the language is by large still not understood. But this isn't very surprising, because Celtiberian, also written in an Iberian script, is only poorly understood in despite of being a Celtic language.

Thanks to the Ascoli Bronze (a list of horsemen engaged in the auxiliar troop "Turma Salluitana" to whom Caius Pompeius granted Roman citizenship), we can identify proper names in Iberian inscriptions. They're mostly compounds of two words, like my own alias, which I translate as Little alder's Eagle, from talks-ku 'little alder' and bilos 'eagle'. These names suggest Iberians were a warlike aristocracy, much like Celts.

IMHO, Iberian is a Vasco-Caucasian language like Basque, but probably from a different family/group.
Well, Vasco-Caucasian may be real, and Iberian be a member of it, but that remains to be proven. So far, we can say not much about the relationships of Iberian.
Talskubilos wrote:Not place names, but anthroponyms. For example, Arganthonios (from Greek sources), the name of a legendary king of Tartessos which Koch interprets as a magistrate title 'the man of the sacred silver'
Yes. That name is as Celtic as it could be.
Talskubilos wrote:There's evidence (see for example Beekes) that Etruscans were originary of NW Anatolia, as one of the Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt. It seems that around 1,200 BC they sailed to Italy, where they disembarked and conquered much of Central Italy to the Umbrians (300-400 cities according to ancient historical records). It's also possible that Rhaetic (a closely related language) arose from that colonizxation in the North, later cut off from Etruscan by the Celtic (Gauls) invasion of the Po valley.
This is at least possible, and many people think that way. It is indeed likely that Lemnian is the language of the stay-at-homes in this scenario; that is at least a simpler hypothesis as a migration of Etruscans (for which reasons? mercenaries?) to Lemnos.
Talskubilos wrote:It has been suggested (see for example Glen Gordon) that the pre-Greek languages of Crete and Cyprius are relatives of Etruscan, thus constituting an Agean family.
Possible, yes, but the Minoan hieroglyphs and Linear A have not been successfully deciphered, and the Eteocretan inscriptions are not yet understood. Same problems with the stuff from Cyprus. These languages could be related to Etruscan; we don't know, though.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Terra »

Most European languages have many words with unknown etymologies. In Greek, these make about a third of the vocabulary, and are often attributed to an unknown language called Pelasgian. The situation in Germanic and Celtic is not much different. The Insular Celtic languages also have undergone a thorough restructuring of their syntax. This is sometimes attributed to a substratum language, which some scholars assume to be related to Semitic, but most scholars reject that relationship.
I'm aware of many of such words in Germanic, but not in Greek. Do you have a list of such words?

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Re: These we at least know ...

Post by Octavià »

WeepingElf wrote:
Talskubilos wrote: IMHO, Iberian is a Vasco-Caucasian language like Basque, but probably from a different family/group.
Well, Vasco-Caucasian may be real, and Iberian be a member of it, but that remains to be proven. So far, we can say not much about the relationships of Iberian.
Well, there's still a lot of work to be done, but my preliminary research points in that direction. Also Etruscan and its presumed Aegean relatives possibly belong to Vasco-Caucasian.

In my former incarnation I said that thanks to macro-comparative work we can identify lost substrate languages, each set of sound correspondences corresponding to a different linguistic layer.

For example, the French Indo-Europeanist André Martinet, in his book Des steppes aux océans. L'indo-européen et les "Indo-Européens", quotes an European substrate root *kan(t)-/*gan(d)- 'stone' (e.g. Spanish canto 'pebble', hence canto rodado 'rolling stone'). This word can be linked to PNC *tɬ’anχχwV ‘ruins; cobble-stone(s)’, with the affricate lateral giving a velar stop (this correspondence is found in some NEC languages) and the uvular fricative giving a dental stop (probably through a velar intermediate). By contrast, Basque has legar 'gravel, pebblestone' (there're also the creek Leganitos and the town Leganés in Madrid) from the same root but with different sound correspondences.

It looks like this substrate is a very old one, possibly going back to one of the first human settlements in Europe in the Upper Palaeolithic (Y-chromosome I haplogroup). Although I think this is too old to be Vasco-Caucasian (whose spread I associate with J2 haplogroup), it could be a relative of it. Unfortunately, macro-comparativists ignore genetical data in their theories, so their proposed chronologies are too low.

Other European substrate words have parallels in Kartvelian. For example, Basque naba 'broad plain (between mountains)' (Spanish nava) is related to Kartvelian *neb- 'palm of the hand', from an Eurasiatic root *lVp'V ~ *nVbV 'flat'.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Tropylium »

FinalZera wrote:
Most European languages have many words with unknown etymologies. In Greek, these make about a third of the vocabulary, and are often attributed to an unknown language called Pelasgian. The situation in Germanic and Celtic is not much different. The Insular Celtic languages also have undergone a thorough restructuring of their syntax. This is sometimes attributed to a substratum language, which some scholars assume to be related to Semitic, but most scholars reject that relationship.
I'm aware of many of such words in Germanic, but not in Greek. Do you have a list of such words?
Check out this paper for some of them:
The Pre-Greek loans in Greek
It appears Pre-Greek had no voice contrasts, but did have palatalizaton everywhere (tho a few of these may be open to interpretation).
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Re: These we at least know ...

Post by WeepingElf »

Talskubilos wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:
Talskubilos wrote: IMHO, Iberian is a Vasco-Caucasian language like Basque, but probably from a different family/group.
Well, Vasco-Caucasian may be real, and Iberian be a member of it, but that remains to be proven. So far, we can say not much about the relationships of Iberian.
Well, there's still a lot of work to be done, but my preliminary research points in that direction. Also Etruscan and its presumed Aegean relatives possibly belong to Vasco-Caucasian.

In my former incarnation I said that thanks to macro-comparative work we can identify lost substrate languages, each set of sound correspondences corresponding to a different linguistic layer.

For example, the French Indo-Europeanist André Martinet, in his book Des steppes aux océans. L'indo-européen et les "Indo-Européens", quotes an European substrate root *kan(t)-/*gan(d)- 'stone' (e.g. Spanish canto 'pebble', hence canto rodado 'rolling stone'). This word can be linked to PNC *tɬ’anχχwV ‘ruins; cobble-stone(s)’, with the affricate lateral giving a velar stop (this correspondence is found in some NEC languages) and the uvular fricative giving a dental stop (probably through a velar intermediate). By contrast, Basque has legar 'gravel, pebblestone' (there're also the creek Leganitos and the town Leganés in Madrid) from the same root but with different sound correspondences.
With such "correspondences" (alveolar lateral affricate vs. velar stop, uvular fricative vs. dental stop) you can "relate" anything to anything, but you won't convince anyone unless you have a sufficient number of cognate sets to back it up, which I doubt you have. Especially if you invoke another "extinct branch" of "Vasco-Caucasian" whenever you hit upon a form that fails to comply with your "sound correspondences".
Talskubilos wrote:It looks like this substrate is a very old one, possibly going back to one of the first human settlements in Europe in the Upper Palaeolithic (Y-chromosome I haplogroup). Although I think this is too old to be Vasco-Caucasian (whose spread I associate with J2 haplogroup), it could be a relative of it. Unfortunately, macro-comparativists ignore genetical data in their theories, so their proposed chronologies are too low.
This scenario is not implausible (the first Homo sapiens entering Europe spoke a language, and the languages of prehistoric Europe must have come from somewhere), but so deep in the past that it is virtually impossible to reconstruct.
Talskubilos wrote:Other European substrate words have parallels in Kartvelian. For example, Basque naba 'broad plain (between mountains)' (Spanish nava) is related to Kartvelian *neb- 'palm of the hand', from an Eurasiatic root *lVp'V ~ *nVbV 'flat'.
How many correspondences between Basque and Kartvelian have you found? One cognate pair is no cognate pair.
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Astraios »

Talskubilos wrote:the uvular fricative giving a dental stop
I'm convinced.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Travis B. »

I for one have to say I find any suggested links between Vasconic and Kartvelian to be quite convincing...
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Re:

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WeepingElf wrote:
Soap wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_s ... _influence is one example of a theory that states that the Finnic peoples were in central Europe before the Germans were, though without seeing his dictionaries I cant know how well the evidence matches up. It's possible that the Germanic substrate hypothesis is true but that some other tribe of people was the substrate, possibly one that was completely overtaken by the Germanics and therefore left no independent survivors.
Kalevi Wiik's hypothesis is not widely taken seriously. The fact that Wikipedia mentions it doesn't mean that scholars consider it worthy of serious discussion. Wikipedia tends to say "...and then there is also that hypothesis" a lot, mainly because crackpots edit the relevant Wikipedia articles in that direction, and start bitter edit wars when a more sober and knowledgeable mind removes them. This is a well-known content quality problem with Wikipedia.

Those who think that the Germanic languages are "weird" compared to other IE language tend to overrate the Germanic sound shift; it is of course possible that that sound shift is due to substratum influence, but there really is no shred of reason to connect it to Uralic.
No actually, Wiik does kind of have a point there — there are several phonological similarities between Germanic and Baltic-Finnic. The problem is that many of these (such as the lack of palatalized consonants) are, from the Uralic viewpoint, innovations just as well, and are almost universally attributed to Germanic (and in some other parts, Baltic) influence.

And what really makes him a crackpot is the subscription to an extreme form of Paleolithic Continuity Theory: he holds that all modern-day language subfamilies (such as Greek, Germanic, Insular Celtic…) have been spoken where they currently are since the Ice Age, and that any relationships between them have arisen by "convergence".
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Re: Re:

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Tropylium wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:
Soap wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_s ... _influence is one example of a theory that states that the Finnic peoples were in central Europe before the Germans were, though without seeing his dictionaries I cant know how well the evidence matches up. It's possible that the Germanic substrate hypothesis is true but that some other tribe of people was the substrate, possibly one that was completely overtaken by the Germanics and therefore left no independent survivors.
Kalevi Wiik's hypothesis is not widely taken seriously. The fact that Wikipedia mentions it doesn't mean that scholars consider it worthy of serious discussion. Wikipedia tends to say "...and then there is also that hypothesis" a lot, mainly because crackpots edit the relevant Wikipedia articles in that direction, and start bitter edit wars when a more sober and knowledgeable mind removes them. This is a well-known content quality problem with Wikipedia.

Those who think that the Germanic languages are "weird" compared to other IE language tend to overrate the Germanic sound shift; it is of course possible that that sound shift is due to substratum influence, but there really is no shred of reason to connect it to Uralic.
No actually, Wiik does kind of have a point there — there are several phonological similarities between Germanic and Baltic-Finnic. The problem is that many of these (such as the lack of palatalized consonants) are, from the Uralic viewpoint, innovations just as well, and are almost universally attributed to Germanic (and in some other parts, Baltic) influence.
Perhaps the best way then of accounting of it is a non-IE, non-Uralic substratum language spoken along the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea in prehistoric times.
Tropylium wrote:And what really makes him a crackpot is the subscription to an extreme form of Paleolithic Continuity Theory: he holds that all modern-day language subfamilies (such as Greek, Germanic, Insular Celtic…) have been spoken where they currently are since the Ice Age, and that any relationships between them have arisen by "convergence".
This is indeed sheer nonsense. Neither Indo-European nor Uralic looks like a convergence area at all. Both are certainly families of languages descending from a common ancestor each. (Also, it is likely that those common ancestors were in turn related to each other, but that is difficult to establish.)
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Re: Re:

Post by Tropylium »

WeepingElf wrote:
Tropylium wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:
Soap wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_s ... _influence is one example of a theory that states that the Finnic peoples were in central Europe before the Germans were, though without seeing his dictionaries I cant know how well the evidence matches up. It's possible that the Germanic substrate hypothesis is true but that some other tribe of people was the substrate, possibly one that was completely overtaken by the Germanics and therefore left no independent survivors.
Kalevi Wiik's hypothesis is not widely taken seriously. The fact that Wikipedia mentions it doesn't mean that scholars consider it worthy of serious discussion. Wikipedia tends to say "...and then there is also that hypothesis" a lot, mainly because crackpots edit the relevant Wikipedia articles in that direction, and start bitter edit wars when a more sober and knowledgeable mind removes them. This is a well-known content quality problem with Wikipedia.

Those who think that the Germanic languages are "weird" compared to other IE language tend to overrate the Germanic sound shift; it is of course possible that that sound shift is due to substratum influence, but there really is no shred of reason to connect it to Uralic.
No actually, Wiik does kind of have a point there — there are several phonological similarities between Germanic and Baltic-Finnic. The problem is that many of these (such as the lack of palatalized consonants) are, from the Uralic viewpoint, innovations just as well, and are almost universally attributed to Germanic (and in some other parts, Baltic) influence.
Perhaps the best way then of accounting of it is a non-IE, non-Uralic substratum language spoken along the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea in prehistoric times.
If I'm not beaten to it, I plan to some day examine if the abundant Germanic loans into Baltic Finnic and/or Samic contain a statistically skewed amount of non-IE or substratal IE vocabulary. There are some oddities that could indeed hint at independant loaning from a 3rd source. Don't hold your breth tho.
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Re: Re:

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Tropylium wrote:
WeepingElf wrote:Perhaps the best way then of accounting of it is a non-IE, non-Uralic substratum language spoken along the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea in prehistoric times.
If I'm not beaten to it, I plan to some day examine if the abundant Germanic loans into Baltic Finnic and/or Samic contain a statistically skewed amount of non-IE or substratal IE vocabulary. There are some oddities that could indeed hint at independant loaning from a 3rd source. Don't hold your breth tho.
Yes, that would be interesting to explore. I'll try to find a list of Germanic loanwords in Finnic, and compare it with lists of possible non-IE loanwords in Germanic, when I find the leisure to do so.
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Re: These we at least know ...

Post by Octavià »

WeepingElf wrote:
Talskubilos wrote:For example, the French Indo-Europeanist André Martinet, in his book Des steppes aux océans. L'indo-européen et les "Indo-Européens", quotes an European substrate root *kan(t)-/*gan(d)- 'stone' (e.g. Spanish canto 'pebble', hence canto rodado 'rolling stone'). This word can be linked to PNC *tɬ’anχχwV ‘ruins; cobble-stone(s)’, with the affricate lateral giving a velar stop (this correspondence is found in some NEC languages) and the uvular fricative giving a dental stop (probably through a velar intermediate). By contrast, Basque has legar 'gravel, pebblestone' (there're also the creek Leganitos and the town Leganés in Madrid) from the same root but with different sound correspondences.
With such "correspondences" (alveolar lateral affricate vs. velar stop, uvular fricative vs. dental stop) you can "relate" anything to anything, but you won't convince anyone unless you have a sufficient number of cognate sets to back it up, which I doubt you have. Especially if you invoke another "extinct branch" of "Vasco-Caucasian" whenever you hit upon a form that fails to comply with your "sound correspondences".
As I said, the correspondence between lateral affricates and velar stops can be found for example inside the NEC family. If I'm not mistaken, the Russian linguist Trubetzkoy already discovered them in the '30s. So please don't judge me so badly :-)

This particular word must date back to the last glaciation, as it's linked to moraines.
WeepingElf wrote:
Talskubilos wrote:It looks like this substrate is a very old one, possibly going back to one of the first human settlements in Europe in the Upper Palaeolithic (Y-chromosome I haplogroup). Although I think this is too old to be Vasco-Caucasian (whose spread I associate with J2 haplogroup), it could be a relative of it. Unfortunately, macro-comparativists ignore genetical data in their theories, so their proposed chronologies are too low.
This scenario is not implausible (the first Homo sapiens entering Europe spoke a language, and the languages of prehistoric Europe must have come from somewhere), but so deep in the past that it is virtually impossible to reconstruct.
Unless of course these remote languages have relatives known to us. IMHO, Nostratic must be much older than postulated by std theories.
WeepingElf wrote:
Talskubilos wrote:Other European substrate words have parallels in Kartvelian. For example, Basque naba 'broad plain (between mountains)' (Spanish nava) is related to Kartvelian *neb- 'palm of the hand', from an Eurasiatic root *lVp'V ~ *nVbV 'flat'.
How many correspondences between Basque and Kartvelian have you found? One cognate pair is no cognate pair.
I don't think Basque is related to Kartvelian, but there's a bunch of substrate items in Spanish and other languages with Kartvelian parallels. For example:

Spanish (regional) a-barca 'rustical shoe' ~ Kartvelian *berq- 'foot, step'
Latin cartilāgo 'cartilage' ~ Kartvelian *ɣrt’il- (*xrt’il-) 'cartilage'
Latin curculiō 'weevil' ~ Kartvelian *k’rk’il- 'moth'
Spanish garganta 'throat, gorge' ~ Kartvelian *q’arq’ant- 'throat'
Latin gūrges 'throat' ~ Kartvelian *q’orq’- 'throat'

There're also other correspondences at PIE or regional IE level.

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Octavià
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by Octavià »

Astraios wrote:
Talskubilos wrote:the uvular fricative giving a dental stop
I'm convinced.
IMHO, IE *samHdho- 'sand' could be also related to this word, as the output of a lateral affricate can be a sibilant (e.g. in Semitic). Besides, some Nostraticists postulate a correspondence between Nostratic *tɬ and IE *s- (see Wikipedia).

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catberry
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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by catberry »

Talskubilos wrote:Besides, some Nostraticists postulate a correspondence between Nostratic *tɬ and IE *s- (see Wikipedia).
I sincerely doubt that Nostratic, if it even existed, is reconstructable.
You killed yourself. By waving a scientist around.
-is female-

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Morrígan
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Re: These we at least know ...

Post by Morrígan »

Talskubilos wrote:As I said, the correspondence between lateral affricates and velar stops can be found for example inside the NEC family.
We see a wide array of correspondences even with in the Lezgic subfamily. Doesn't mean the correspondences are probative; in fact, this should make us suspicious of any reconstruction claiming to go back to any lateral affricates or fricatives unless the correspondences are highly robust.

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Re: European languages before Indo-European

Post by TaylorS »

pwanlai wrote:
Talskubilos wrote:Besides, some Nostraticists postulate a correspondence between Nostratic *tɬ and IE *s- (see Wikipedia).
I sincerely doubt that Nostratic, if it even existed, is reconstructable.
I do think Nostratic sans-Afro-Asiatic existed, and is reconstructable as of now to a vague extent, but all the reconstructions out there are BS, way too many phonemes based on wishful thinking.

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