Re: Odp: Odp: Aesir and Vanir.

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1143
Date: 2000-01-25

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Glen Gordon
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2000 5:03 AM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Odp: Aesir and Vanir.

>         There is also Theo Vennemann's hypothesis about the Vanir >being 
>what he calls "Atlantiker" -- Afroasiatic seafarers and >megalith-builders 
>[...] this Atlantean hypothesis has been >circulated in serious journals 
>and post-conference publications and >has acquired some ardent enthusiasts.

I suppose it wouldn't have anything to do with Basque numerals "sei" and 
"zazpi" for instance, which despite Vasconicist Larry Trask's disapproval on 
the Nostratic List (Linguist.org), seems to be quite Semitic in origin? Of 
course, Larry Trask disapproved of such a Semitic influence on Basque mostly 
because of the time period involved and went for... (please, public, do not 
gasp at this frightful idea since he is often a reasonable and conservative 
man)... he went for awkwardly analysing "zazpi" as coming from *botzaz-pi 
thus meaning "two from five" which still has grammatical problems and 
doesn't speak for the origin of accompanying "sei". These words would need 
to have been borrowed in prehistoric times, before Latin influence took hold 
because of the native form of the words. The same numerals however are also 
found in Egyptian which is closely related to Semitic. I would propose that 
the forms "sei" and "zazpi" would come from slightly earlier forms *s^es^i 
and *saspi (that is, just before the Romans?)
You should really ask Vennemann about it, but I think he does believe in this kind of influence. His story is, in a nutshell, that before the coming of Indo-European and Finno-Ugric tribes all of northern, central and western Europe was occupied by only two families: Vasconic, the older of the two, which expanded all over the North European Plain as the Pleistocene glaciers receded, and which he claims is the source of the oldest European toponymy, and Atlantic (= Afroasiatic), which was brought to Iberia, France, the British Isles and Scandinavia by neolithic sailors from northwestern Africa, the carriers of Megalithic cultic practices. The Basques are the last surviving Vasconic people in an originally Atlantic area, and Basque can accordingly be expected to have been affected by Semitoid languages. Vennemann identifies the Picts as the last Atlantic Mohicans and reinterprets Germanic mythology in terms of an Afroasiatic substrate in Scandinavia.
 
Piotr