Lin. A crocus
From: Ivanovas/Milatos
Message: 338
Date: 1999-11-24
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<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">Pjotr, you wrote:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">>It's never a good idea to let your pet
theory make you blind to other >possibilities. You WANT the Linear A language
to be IE. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">You're absolutely right with this, and I
wasn't really looking for hints to prove Lin.A an IE language - I was looking
for the possible name of crocus.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">But in an IE discussion group it wouldn't
make sense to ask for other possibilities, would it? I don't see much chance to
'decipher' Lin. A by a method like Ventris' for Lin. B, but it is certainly
possible to find single words that make sense. And even an IE word here and
there wouldn't prove anything for the rest of the language as it might be a
loan-word from an IE neighbor! Gordon tried to prove Lin.A to be Semitic by
showing the occurrence of obviously Semitic words (sesame etc.), but to me that
just proves there are loan words.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">As for your acronyms, I seem to remember
there was a word for wild fig tree beginning with <EM>ni</EM> (which I don't
recall, sorry) and if I hear <EM>me </EM>for goat and<EM> mu</EM> for ox I'd
rather think of an onomatopoetic syllable ...</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">There are some more possibilities for
fitting acronyms that sound or look nice, E. Brown even attributed quite a
lot to possible Luwian parallels, but his suggestions are too far fetched in
most cases to be accepted (and Luwian is much younger, anyway ...)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">From finding an Anatolian explanation for
<EM>ra3 </EM>I'd rather suppose more close connections between Anatolia and
Crete in the Bronze Age than just the simple IE stamp on Lin.A. And for some
placenames I'd like to understand the connection between <EM>ra/la</EM> (may be
pronounced with a very dark <EM>a/o </EM>in Minoan) and a word for red would
really make sense.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">Well, ars longa...</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">Sabine</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>