Re: [tied] Re: IE, AA, Nostratic and Ringo

Dear Dennis,

Romantic philhellenism is basically a thing of the past, though I suppose some extremely conservative schoolmasters and academics will stick to their Classical guns till the end of their days. Historical linguists realise perhaps more clearly than specialists in many other disciplines that the modern world was not born in Greece.

I wonder why you say that IEists are especially likely to question your data. Is it because they are naturally anti-something-or-other [:(], or because IE studies teach one the value of strict methodology when approaching linguistic data [:)]? If your evidence is sound, any linguist, whatever his favourite family, will have to take it seriously. If it is flawed, and IEists criticise it on linguistic grounds, will you accuse them of being Eurocentric reactionaries holding back human progress? I hope not. If it’s unreasonable for a linguist or a historian to be philhellenically or Eurocentrically biassed, it’s equally unreasonable to be philafroasiatic or Afrocentric to the bitter end.

Civilisation as we know it was not built by any particular people speaking any particular language. Its development was a complex process lasting several millennia and involving innumerable ethnoi of three continents (and of the islands in between).

I fully sympathise with your rejection of the conquest myth -- the vigorous Greeks overcoming the passive if sophisticated cultures of the Aegean basin and revitalising their effete civilisation. Other versions of the same myth feature brave IE horsemen brandishing their battle-axes at the sedentary worshippers of Mother Earth in Bronze Age Europe. People like simple scenarios, don’t they?

Which said, let me comment on your data. The recognition of the Greek cultural dependence on the Near East is a commonplace by now, which doesn’t mean that all etymologically opaque Greek words must be considered Semitic or Egyptian by default. Some of the words you quote are regarded as certain or probable Semitic loanwords by nearly all specialists. These include khru:sos ‘gold’, khito:n ‘tunic’, li:ta ‘linen’ and elepha:s ‘ivory’. While one may question the derivation of Thebes from any of the three sources you offer (and needless to say only one of them, at most, can be the true one), Semitic (< Egyptian?) *t-b-t (sometimes dissimilated to *k-b-t) underlies Greek thi:bis ‘basket plaited from papyrus’ and kibo:tos ‘chest’.

There are many other Greek/Semitic equations regarded as uncontroversial by linguists (including IEsts). Laburinthos has been connected with Akkadian dalabanati (pl. of dalbanu ‘passageway in a palace’ -- via metathesised *dabulintHo-). Foodstuffs like se:sama ‘sesame’ and kumi:non ‘cumine’ have Semitic names, as do various textiles, metals, precious stones, weights and measures, monetary units, plants, musical instruments and architectural elements. I’m perfectly willing to accept these linguistic facts.

However, we should always be on our guard against false friends. A number of connections once regarded as safely established have been abandoned in recent years, e.g. Gk. pelekus and Skt. paras’u ‘axe’ are no longer derived from Akkadian pilakku ‘spindle(!)’. It’s all too easy to be allured by phonetic similarity, especially if one uses Semitic or Egyptian consonantal skeletons ignoring the vowels altogether and if one is satisfied with rough correspondences.

For example, in your list Greek s and ks correspond to *s, *S or *s_ in the source languages without any consistency (BTW, if a Semitic initial or intervocalic fricative ends up as Greek s, the loanword must be more recent than the Greek change *s

> h/zero). Given so much phonological latitude, the Egyptian

Also the semantics of the comparison strikes me as rather loose -- as in popular (rather than scholarly) etymologies. Why should the name of Salamis mean ‘peace’? What’s Neit got to do with Athens? (the derivation looks almost like an attempt to interpret Tottenham as ‘the home of Thoth’). And any linguist who knows his job will reject an arbitrary association like ‘net’ > ‘chariot and tackle’ unless you have some really compelling corroborative evidence up your sleeve.

Talking of Egyptian: one cannot discuss Egyptian etymologies without taking into account recent revisions of Old Egyptian phonology. For example, traditional /3/ is now thought to have been an original rhotic [R], with a rather complicated pattern of historical and dialectal reflexes, and traditional /d_/ has been reinterpreted as an ejective postalveolar affricate [tS’] rather than a voiced affricate or a palatal stop.

You claim that there are no accepted IE etymologies for any of the items in question. Leaving aside possible but speculative interpretations (some of the proper names in your list belong to this category), let me just comment on the following items:

(1) se:ma, skhe:ma, haima

All three words contain the IE suffix *-mn(-t), so the elements to be etymologised are actually se:-, skhe:- and hai-. The first corresponds via regular sound laws to Skt. dhya:-ti ‘think’; the second probably contains the nil grade of IE *segH- (Gk. ekho:, skhein); hai- is the most problematic of the three, partly because it could derive from more than one pre-Greek form, but Hebrew hayyim is a mere lookalike.

(2) kudos (a neuter s-stem)

As demonstrated by Émile Benveniste more than thirty years ago, and as Guillaume has pointed out, this word is cognate to Slavic *

(3) kse(i)nos

A few different IE etymologies have been proposed. None of them is generally accepted, but what we have here is embarras de richesse rather than shortage of ideas. BTW, the oldest Greek form was ksenwos, which makes the alleged Afroasiatic connections look really desperate.

(4) che:ra:

This word cannot be divorced from the adjective che:ros ‘bereaved’ and the adverb/preposition cho:ri(s) ‘separately, without’. All of them are relatable to Skt. ha:- (jaha:-ti, pp. jahita-) < *gHeh- ‘forsake, abandon’. Native origin accounts for the observed ablaut pattern much better than the assumption of an Egyptian loan.

Regards,

Piotr