From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 197
Date: 1999-11-07
----- Original Message -----From: tommy.tyrberg@...Sent: Saturday, November 06, 1999 11:38 PMSubject: [cybalist] Re: IE Lithuanian-Mediterranean connectionsmarkodegar-@... wrote: original article:
"ivanovas/milatos" wrote:
The poll (your opinion) about Lithuanian being the 'oldest' IE language (as a linguistic non-professional I didn't take part of...) made me think:For reasons I cannot fathom, this posting shows only two blanks and a less-than symbol in both the email version and in version you read on the web; but if you hit reply on the web version, it *does* show up. Bizarre.My house is near one of the (ceramically determinating for this phase, cf. Kanta) LM III A/B graves of Milatos/Crete, where a wonderful necklace of Baltic amber was found (this word reminds me of German 'Ambra', a product of the - dead - whale head produced by the sea, but in modern/ancient GR 'Elektron - with GR 'H', - a name also used for a mixture of silver and (more) gold in ancient - and later alchemist, too - times). The only connection I see is the golden-clear color of the material.
But there must be more - we are talking about an important part of north-south connection (trade) in the LBA (there are other finds of Baltic amber from - at least - Mycenaean Greece, too). I believe the language of Linear A to be a very early IE (and Etruscan too, by the way, on purely mythological grounds).
We know there is an archaeological connection about the 14th-15th century.
What about linguistical connections? (Bearing a Lithuanian-suffixed name myself I'd really like to know - I'm German, by the way - that's how wars make connections you can't imagine later ...)
The Baltic-Mycenaean (Minoan?) link is certain on archaeological grounds - how about linguistical contributions?
Yes, 'Electra' means 'amber'. It's also the root of 'electricity' because of the static charge it can build and the 'shock' it can give off. In Greek mythology, small pieces of amber were the tears of the gods. Aside from it's beauty, I suspect the electrical charge in amber gave it extraordinarily mythic properties: it was magic!
I've read of the Baltic amber trade, but cannot comment much. In later times (Mycenaean and later), the main center for the Mediterranean trade seems to have been at the head of the Adriatic Sea, somewhere at the mouth of the Po, or perhaps, at what is now Trieste, with the overland route taking over from there, either via Austria or Hungary, or right over the Alps into Bavaria. There was also an extraordinary trade in Polish salt in ancient times too (rock salt, for preserving food).
I cannot imagine a linguistic connection, not really; at least, I've not read of any. Still, at 1500 BCE, it might have been possible for a speaker of one of the more archaic Greek dialects, and a speaker of an equally archaic Balto-Slavic dialect to actually understand each other in some significant degree; there would have been only 1,000 years difference, depending on your view of when divergence occurred.
Everything I've read denies the IE-ness for any of the Aegean cultures until the arrival of the Greeks.
Mark Odegard
Actually several people who have worked on the Linear A language have claimed that it is an IE language belonging to or close to the Anatolian branch, but then it has been claimed to be Semitic too! What does seem certain is that the common and well-known "pre-greek" -assos and -nthos place names in Greece must be related to the -assa and -anda names in Western Anatolia. These mostly occur in areas where Luwian and/or languages descended from Luwian were spoken, and if they are Luwian then some language related to Luwian must once have been spoken in Greece as well. On the other hand these names may belong to a common pre-IE language. There is also a few greek place names that look very IE, but non-Greek, e. g. Pyrgos and Strymon (I live next to a river named Strömmen i. e. "the Stream" in Swedish), but of course these may be Macedonian or Thracian rather than pre-greek. All in all I think we shouldn't rule out the possibility that the pre-Greek language (Pelasgian, or whatever You call it) may have been IE: Tommy Tyrberg
Just a comment on 'amber'. Both 'amber' words (amber proper and ambergris, or the sperm whale secretion) are the same. They are derived from Mediaeval Latin ambar < Arabic 'anbar 'ambergris', hence 'brownish-yellow'. The technical Polish word is bursztyn (a German loan), but the mineral is also known as jantar (ultimately an East Baltic word, cf. Lithuanian gintaras, Latvian dzitars). I've no idea if an etymology has been proposed for it. The Old Prussian word was still different, gli:sis, cf. Latin gle:sum (in Tacitus' report of the Aestii). The etymology of Greek e:lektron is obscure (at least to me at the moment), but it looks IE, with the 'instrument' suffix *-trom.
The so-called Amber Road was an important trade route leading from the southeastern coast of the Baltic to the Gulf of Venice. It was very busy at the time of the Roman Empire, but I it had been established much earlier, in the Bronze Age. It had two main branches, one via the Moravian Gate, the other across the Oder and up the Elbe. Both crossed the Danube and met at Aquileia or thereabouts. My personal conjecture is that the trading posts along the route were established and maintained for a long time by the ancestors of the historical Veneti, then mostly taken over by the Celts.
Piotr