The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

Off the top of my head, just the nom.pl *-es and the *o of *potis. I can confidently say that neither ablaut - the former because it is never subject to reduction, and the latter because it does not undergo Brugmann's law. Positing an ablaut variant *petis specifically for Indo-Iranian is ad-hoc, due to a lack of any other e-grade cognates. Now, it is possible that the e-vowel of the reduplication syllable could also be traced back to Pre-PIE *i, but I would consider this uncertain.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

KathTheDragon wrote:Off the top of my head, just the nom.pl *-es and the *o of *potis. I can confidently say that neither ablaut - the former because it is never subject to reduction, and the latter because it does not undergo Brugmann's law. Positing an ablaut variant *petis specifically for Indo-Iranian is ad-hoc, due to a lack of any other e-grade cognates. Now, it is possible that the e-vowel of the reduplication syllable could also be traced back to Pre-PIE *i, but I would consider this uncertain.
That's rather meagre evidence, I must say. Which of course doesn't mean that it is of no relevance. A phoneme should occur in more than one single morpheme (though Arabic shows that this is possible; but then, that may be artificial because the morpheme in question means 'God'). Another question: how can one tell in your model whether an *a was short or long? One would expect two different ablaut patterns, which I am not aware of.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

I am aware it's slight, and there may well be more evidence I just haven't found yet. However, I do not know of any other way to explain the nom.pl *-es; the *e should either have syncopated or been changed to *o (cf. the s-stem nom.sg) if it were historically the same vowel as the ablauting vowel *a.

As for vowel length, in nouns the vowel of the nom.sg is a good indicator, while I don't have a good method for verbs yet.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Tropylium »

KathTheDragon wrote:Like you, I am very skeptical about Kloekhorst's conclusion that PIE must have had *t: *t *t' simply because Anatolian does; I see no reason why we can't have *t *d > *tʰ *t > *t: *t, even if I can't pluck any attestations of it out of the air.
Kloekhorst's argument in favor of an initial gemination distinction is particulary strange: in Hittite *tj *dj > /ts s/ (z š), and he proposes that this means *(t)tj > *(t)s. But an at least as natural explanation would seem to be that originally also *di > *dzi, then *dz > *z (as in e.g. most of Slavic) > s.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

A lot of Kloekhorst's arguments on various points are suspect - for example, he claims an e/i alternation in three verbs (among others), teripzi, sarāpi, and karāpi, even though not one of these verbs is capable of showing the distinction (as the RE/I and E/IP signs are ambiguous), so he argues this on purely etymological grounds. A fourth verb, wekzi, also has the alternation claimed, again on etymological grounds, for while it could show an alternation, it's only ever spelt with e.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

KathTheDragon wrote:A lot of Kloekhorst's arguments on various points are suspect - for example, he claims an e/i alternation in three verbs (among others), teripzi, sarāpi, and karāpi, even though not one of these verbs is capable of showing the distinction (as the RE/I and E/IP signs are ambiguous), so he argues this on purely etymological grounds. A fourth verb, wekzi, also has the alternation claimed, again on etymological grounds, for while it could show an alternation, it's only ever spelt with e.
Yes, Kloekhorst is sometimes very adventurous. His interpretations of the PIE2 stop grades owes a lot to Beekes, I think, who also taught at Leiden. Also I have my doubts against a system which has the most common and obviously least marked grade of stops being geminates, at least in medial position (I think initial geminate stops are right out because they are hardly audibly different from non-geminates).

And as for the alleged typological oddity of the standard model of the PIE stops: How much can we say on that at all? Breathy-voiced stops are so rare outside the Indian subcontinent (where we know the culprit) that typological generalizations about this class of phonemes are hardly possible. Yet, it seems as if in some earlier stage of PIE, the *T and *Dh sets formed a class as opposed to the *D set, and the *D set were highly marked and of a kind where constraints against 1) a labial member, 2) two of them in a root and 3) any of them in a suffix made phonological sense. But I think I am just repeating myself and stating the obvious here.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Zju »

Has anyone established a connection between *bʰergʰ- to safeguard, to protect; to preserve and *bʰerǵʰ- to rise; high, lofty; hill, mountain? WIktionary gives one more meaning for the latter - [fortified] elevation - but this is in an etymology section of a germanic word and the fort/castle sense seems to be present only in the germanic branch, so some level of lexical contamination may be responsible for the semantic shift.
But anyway, I can see how the meanings of *bʰergʰ- could arise from those of *bʰerǵʰ- - something that is on a hill or high up is easier to defend, but also in other ways. Could this be a derivation that due to later cheshirisation only shows up in the PoA of the dorsals?

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Zaarin »

Zju wrote:but this is in an etymology section of a germanic word and the fort/castle sense seems to be present only in the germanic branch
If I'm not mistaken, isn't this sense also preserved in Armenian and Ancient Greek? Or was the Armenian borrowed from Germanic via Syriac burgā, like Arabic burj?
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Tropylium »

Zaarin wrote:Or was the Armenian borrowed from Germanic via Syriac burgā, like Arabic burj?
So how is Syriac in any way closer to Armenian than Germanic is?

Guus Kroonen proposes in his Germanic etymological dictionary that the Balto-Slavic cognates suggesting *bʰergʰ- would be actually loans from Germanic. There's also Indo-Iranian *barǰʰ- 'to honor', but that could be not cognate.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Zaarin »

Tropylium wrote:
Zaarin wrote:Or was the Armenian borrowed from Germanic via Syriac burgā, like Arabic burj?
So how is Syriac in any way closer to Armenian than Germanic is?
Perhaps because the Armenians are Oriental Orthodox Christians who consequently inherited a great deal of vocabulary from Syriac, whose patriarch they recognize as the primate of Christianity in the East? Any language influenced by non-Chalcedonian Christianity is going to have a large number of Syriac loans; even Arabic has a large number of Syriac loans (including such significant words as Qur'an, among non-theological borrowings like burj < burgā < an Indo-European source). Theological associations aside, however, I'm not aware of Germanic incursions into Central Asia or the Caucasus; meanwhile, Syriac missionaries established significant communities in both India (which have persisted to the present day as the Malankara Syriac Orthodox Church) and at least as far east as China (where they were eventually snuffed out by state persecution). Syriac loanwords in Armenian should come as no surprise; direct Germanic loanwords would.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Tropylium »

Whoops, sorry, I misphrased that. How is Syriac any closer to Germanic than Armenian is? The first two are at least both IE, the latter seems to be in the wrong direction entirely to look as a carrier of Centum-type loanwords.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Zaarin »

An excellent question, and I suspect a Greek or Latin intermediary. I do know that burgā came from an Indo-European source and that burj came from burgā, however. Syriac doesn't have many Latin loans but it's pretty suffuse in loans from both Ancient Greek and Middle Persian, so I suspect those are the likeliest suspects.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

I am still thinking about the glottalic theory, but this time leaving Uralic and the rest of Mitian aside. The matter I shall discuss here is the pathway on which the "glottalic" system of stops transformed into the traditionally reconstructed system.

So let's assume that PIE1 (pre-ablaut) had stop series of the type *t *t' *d (*t' = emphatic stop, i.e. glottalized, pharyngealized or whatever), and PIE3 (Post-Anatolian) has *t *d *dh. Or maybe PIE1 had *t *t' *ð (with a voiced fricative grade), and PIE3 *t *d *ð. So what was the PIE2 (pre-Anatolian) system like? I can think of two pathways:

Pathway 1 (my old idea)
PIE1 *t > PIE2 *th > PIE3 *t
PIE1 *t' > PIE2 *t > PIE3 *d
PIE1 *d > PIE2 *d > PIE3 *dh
Five changes in total.

Pathway 2 (as suggested by Kortlandt and others)
PIE1 *t > PIE2 *t > PIE3 *t
PIE1 *t' > PIE2 *d' > PIE3 *d
PIE1 *d > PIE2 *d > PIE3 *dh
Three changes in total.

Obviously, Pathway 2 is more economic, especially as it leaves the voiceless stops alone and doesn't require the "there and back again" change of Pathway 1.

One help could be the testimony of Anatolian - if we knew what the Anatolian stops were phonetically. What we know is that the antecedents of *d and *dh merged into something usually transcribed d, while the antecedent of *t gives t. What we don't know whether the difference between the two was one of voicing (which would speak for Pathway 2) or one of aspiration (which would speak for Pathway 1) - or yet something else (see for instance Kloekhorst's gemination proposal).

There is also the hypothesis, usually going by the name "Pelasgian", of an IE substratum language in Greek with an Armenian-like stop system. This could have been a Para-Anatolian (i.e., more closely related to Anatolian than to non-Anatolian IE languages) language which has preserved the system of Pathway 1 PIE2. Alas, there are problems with this, and most scholars reject the idea by now. For starters, it would have rotated the stops, relative to Greek proper, in the wrong direction. We have such doublets as okto- ~ ogdo- 'eight', but "Pelasgian" would give us **okhtho- instead. Hence, I no longer entertain that notion. Most etymologically unexplained words in Greek aren't such matter-of-articulation doublets anyway, but frankly non-IE.

So while I had been a supporter of Pathway 1, I am now more and more leaning towards Pathway 2.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by KathTheDragon »

I favour pathway 2 as well, though with a specific starting point of implosives rather than ejectives or pharyngealised stops or what have you. Indeed *ɗ > *d is a very natural change

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

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WeepingElf wrote:I am still thinking about the glottalic theory, but this time leaving Uralic and the rest of Mitian aside. The matter I shall discuss here is the pathway on which the "glottalic" system of stops transformed into the traditionally reconstructed system.

So let's assume that PIE1 (pre-ablaut) had stop series of the type *t *t' *d (*t' = emphatic stop, i.e. glottalized, pharyngealized or whatever), and PIE3 (Post-Anatolian) has *t *d *dh. Or maybe PIE1 had *t *t' *ð (with a voiced fricative grade), and PIE3 *t *d *ð. So what was the PIE2 (pre-Anatolian) system like? I can think of two pathways:

Pathway 1 (my old idea)
PIE1 *t > PIE2 *th > PIE3 *t
PIE1 *t' > PIE2 *t > PIE3 *d
PIE1 *d > PIE2 *d > PIE3 *dh
Five changes in total.

Pathway 2 (as suggested by Kortlandt and others)
PIE1 *t > PIE2 *t > PIE3 *t
PIE1 *t' > PIE2 *d' > PIE3 *d
PIE1 *d > PIE2 *d > PIE3 *dh
Three changes in total.

Obviously, Pathway 2 is more economic, especially as it leaves the voiceless stops alone and doesn't require the "there and back again" change of Pathway 1.
Some scholars reconstruct the canonical voiceless /t/ series as being voiceless aspirated. This helps explain the constraint on roots containing both a /dʰ/-series voiced aspirated stop and a /t/-series voiceless stop; the aspiration would have to be lost from one of the two stops, the choice of which may be due to a preexisting pattern we are no longer able to reconstruct, but which nevertheless reliably left the proto-language without a root containing two aspirated stops of either type. (Note that reflexes in attested languages of roots canonically reconstructed with two voiced aspirates also drop the aspiration from one of the two, the choice of which seems to also vary from one language to another, hinting at the existence of a process that was still active even after PIE began to splinter.)

In the Germanic branch, voiced aspirates behave identically to canonical voiceless stops in both Grimm's and Verner's shifts, which strengthens the theory. Aspiration of voiceless stops is present in many European languages today as a suprasegmental feature. Meanwhile, branches such as Celtic, Italic, and Balto-Slavic lost the aspiration distinction in voiced stops, and may well have also lost the suprasegmental aspiration in voiceless stops as they did so.

Under this theory, it's also possible to reduce the number of changes in your list above to just three:

PIE1 *t >> PIE2 *tʰ
PIE1 *t' > PIE2 *t > PIE3 *d
PIE1 *d >> PIE2 *dʰ

The appearance of aspiration must have preceded the loss of the ejective quality of the glottalic series.

However, this theory must assume that this non-distinctive aspiration was secondarily lost in other branches, such as Greek, where we cannot assume that the voiceless stops retained aspiration because they clearly contrast with true voiceless aspirates. The situation is similar in the Indic branch of Indo-Aryan.
PIE1 *t' > PIE2 *d' > PIE3 *d
Is a universal change of voiceless ejectives into voiced implosives attested anywhere? I see that step as the primary weak spot of that theory.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

KathTheDragon wrote:I favour pathway 2 as well, though with a specific starting point of implosives rather than ejectives or pharyngealised stops or what have you. Indeed *ɗ > *d is a very natural change
Implosives are a possibility, though they tend to lack the velar rather than the labial member. Hence, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov posited ejectives. But such typological generalization are best handled with care. Gamkrelidze should just look at his native language, which has roots with two ejectives, and also a labial ejective, as the k'op'e in his kitchen aptly shows ;) However, the constraints on which they based their glottalic theory are indeed in place in Akkadian, which lacks /p'/ and does not allow more than one "emphatic" (probably ejective) consonant in a root. These constraints, however, are an Akkadian innovation: other Semitic languages do have roots with two emphatics, though lack of a labial emphatic consonant is a Semitic family trait.

I simply have no good idea what exactly those consonants were, so I use the agnostic term "emphatic". The absence or near-absence of a labial emphatic stop may be a hint at ejectives, but it could just be an effect of whatever kind of sound changes produced this class. I already speculated that *t' could come from PIU or Mitian *ts, and *k' perhaps from 'q - while nothing effected in a **p'. There is perhaps no way knowing from IE alone; we must find external cognates.

As for the *t' > *d change, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov claim to have found that in Nakh, a branch of Northeast Caucasian, where apparently, Bats ejectives sometimes correspond to Chechen and Ingush voiced stops (Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, p. 45). This, however, is a conditioned change which did not affect all ejectives, and maybe it is Bats, not Chechen and Ingush, that innovated here. I indeed see no way this could come across in a single step, hence the two proposed pathways.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Šọ̈́gala »

Tropylium wrote:
Zaarin wrote:Or was the Armenian borrowed from Germanic via Syriac burgā, like Arabic burj?
So how is Syriac in any way closer to Armenian than Germanic is?

Guus Kroonen proposes in his Germanic etymological dictionary that the Balto-Slavic cognates suggesting *bʰergʰ- would be actually loans from Germanic. There's also Indo-Iranian *barǰʰ- 'to honor', but that could be not cognate.
By the way, Biliana Mihaylova (https://www.academia.edu/32719444/The_P ... _Revisited ) proposes that Gk. πύργος (which Wiktionary gives as a likely source of Syriac burgā) is part of an Indo-European substrate in Greek which had a phonology very similar to Thracian. Thracian phonology has some commonalities with Germanic. This was discussed a little while on Languagehat, beginning here: http://languagehat.com/down-with-palata ... nt-2665141

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Zju »

Could the Pregreek substrate be related to the P(B)Sl substrate named as Temematic? It also had a plosive shift.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Zju wrote:Could the Pregreek substrate be related to the P(B)Sl substrate named as Temematic? It also had a plosive shift.
Temematic has a different shift - but the right shift to explain forms like ogdo- 'eight'! As I observed earlier, Pelasgian with its assumed Armenian-like shift would rotate the stops in the wrong direction for that (its word for '8' would be *okhtho-), but Temematic, if real, rotates them in the right direction. Of course, Temematic is right now just a controversial idea.

There may have been both an IE and a non-IE substratum in Greece, of course. At least, we know that once non-IE languages were spoken in Greece (since we can easily dismiss the Paleolithic Continuity hypothesis); alas, we know hardly anything about them, and Beekes's reconstruction of the (in his opinion) non-IE Pre-Greek language is not without problems. It is even possible that the branch of IE that would become Greek came into contact with two different IE languages - one with the Armenian-like shift (Pelasgian), and one with the reverse shift (Temematic) - on its way into Greece, besides non-IE languages.

Alas, this is hardly more than speculation which needs further evaluation by examining etymologies.
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Šọ̈́gala »

Is English "eight" (< P.Germ. /ˈɑx.tɔːu̯/) irregular for having /t/ rather than /θ/, or is that a regular exception to Grimm's?

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Sumelic »

The /t/ is regular. The usual rule I've seen is that Grimm's law did not affect a plosive preceded by an obstruent. The main examples of this are clusters of /s/ followed by a plosive (/sp/, /st/, /sk/), and clusters of an obstruent + /t/ (e.g. pre-Grimm /pt/, /kt/ > post-Grimm /ft/, /xt/). Other types of obstruent + plosive clusters were rarer so I don't know of any examples, although Ringe says there are some.

See From Proto-indo-european to Proto-germanic, Don Ringe, p. 113

It does seem to have affected plosives before /s/, as Wiktionary gives "*sehs" as the ancestor of "six", but the modern English and German pronunciations have hardened *h back to a plosive in this context.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Šọ̈́gala »

(not that this is very informative, but fwiw) Carrasquer Vidal, in his glottalic theory paper (https://www.academia.edu/8605000/The_glottalic_theory ), states that the "early PIE" system (voiceless-implosive-voiced) "can easily have developed out of an earlier (let’s call it ‘Nostratic’) system with voiceless, ejective and voiced stops" but does not expand on how so. I thought I recalled seeing more discussion along those lines in the Kümmel paper he cites (https://www.academia.edu/1538887/Typolo ... o-European ), but I don't see it there now.

Carrasquer Vidal additionally comments "The ‘early PIE’ system, with its diachronically unstable phonemes *ɠ and *ʛ must have necessarily been short-lived ...". The premise that a given trait was diachronically unstable so that's why it's typologically unusual and fails to be preserved in daughter languages is never a very satisfying answer, but logically it cannot be ruled out.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

The idea of developing ejectives from tone contours in a way that precludes two ejectives in a root is interesting; I haven't considered that yet. Thanks!
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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by Richard W »

Soap wrote:Early PIE didnt just have labiovelar stops, it also had rounded bilabials and rounded coronals. These arose through a process of dissociation where previously existing rounded vowels spread their roundedness onto surrounding consonants, as has happened in Micronesian, Aranta, and probably the Caucasian languages which are geographically right next door. It simply happened that the rounded bilabials merged with the plain ones unconditionally early on, and are unnecessary to reconstruct for PIE proper. The rounded coronals probably merged either with labiovelars (which is attested) or with bilabials (which is also attested).
A more interesting idea is that rounded labials mostly merged with rounded velars, but occasionally just delabialised. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal brought the idea to my attention. It's one possible explanation of *p ~ *kʷ alternations in IE, such as English oven, wolf and liver. (The initial of the latter is seen as a rare development of *lʲ, with conventionally reconstructed PIE *y being the usual reflex.) He backed up the latter with AA *lib 'heart'. I'm not sure if the curious Egyptian i̓b supports initial *lʲ.

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Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Post by WeepingElf »

Two thoughts today.

1. On the hypothesis of Pre-PIE glottalic stops coming from tone contours:

As interesting the idea is, as long as we don't have any evidence backing it up, it is not worth much. One would have to check against the nearest kin of IE - but we don't know what that nearest kin is, though Uralic is the best candidate. And Uralic does not show anything that looks as if it could be cognate to the proposed prosodic features (nor does it show plausible segmental counterparts of the three grades of PIE stops!). Yet, what this shows is that one should perhaps look beyond segmental phonology when looking for an explanation.

2. On Temematic:

I have read Georg Holzer's thesis Entlehnungen aus einer bisher unbekannten indogermanischen Sprache im Urslavischen und Urbaltischen (Vienna 1989) where he proposed it. He bases his hypothesis on 45 Balto-Slavic words with difficult etymologies, claiming that his etymologies were better because they involve longer roots, with fewer synonyms, with more specific meanings, etc., thereby less likely to be chance resemblances. Those criteria are nice, but positing an entire hypothetical language to account of a few dozen difficult words is a rather bold move (though I shouldn't complain about that, positing a hypothetical language - Aquan - myself!).

Holzer formulates six sound changes characteristic of Temematic; most notably the PIE voiceless stops merging into the voiced stops, and the PIE breathy-voiced stops becoming (plain) voiceless stops. (The language is named for theses changes: tenuis > media, media aspirata > tenuis.) These changes look a bit weird: one would expect a neutralization of a voicing oppositio in stops to result in voiceless stops, not voiced ones, and the shift from breathy-voiced to plain voiceless doesn't really look as if it could happen in one move. However, I have found a different solution: 1. The feature [+voice] is neutralized, resulting in the voiced (unaspirated) stops merging into the voiceless stops, and the breathy-voiced stops becoming (voiceless) aspirated stops. 2. The resulting unaspirated/aspirated system then shifts to a voiced/voiceless one.

Finally, Holzer tentatively identifies his Temematic language with that of a historic people, the Cimmerians, a people whose language is unknown (though Iranian and Thracian dialects have been conjectured). He posits Temematic etymologies of the name of the Cimmerians themselves (Tm. *ḱmera- < PIE *dhǵhm-er-o-), of the Ancient Greek name Tanais of the Don River, and a few more.

I don't know what to think of all this. I cannot evaluate Holzer's etymologies in relation to the conventional ones, as I know too little about Balto-Slavic. As I said, positing a hypothetical language is quite bold, but I can't say that it is illicit. It is at least not worse than the Semitic substratum some people seriously claim for Insular Celtic! Also, the Greek numeral elements hebdo- '7' (e.g. in hebdomos '7th') and ogdo- '8' look as if they were borrowed from Temematic. There may be others, but I don't know anything about that. But at least, one could make a lostlang of all this ;)
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