Odp: Goliath and Uriah the Hittite as IEs.

junk

----- Original Message -----

From: Mark Odegard

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Friday, December 03, 1999 11:08 PM

Subject: [cybalist] Goliath and Uriah the Hittite as IEs.

Piotr quips -- "Goliath as an Indo-European warrior..."
If we're to accept Goliath as historic, then it's not improbable he was Indo-European -- Greek even. Think of him as the biblical Big Ajax.

Precisely the personage I had in mind.

What was Uriah the Hittite's mother-tongue: Hittite? Luvian? Lycian? Carian? Phrygian? Proto-Armenian? Indo-Aryan?

Perhaps non-IE Hattic or Hurrite, given the vagueness ancient writers usually show in such matters.

... But to suggest that Hebrew has a serious IE substrate ... well; we'd have heard about it long ago. At the same time, only a fool would deny that the Hebrews of the first half of the 1st millennium BCE were familiar with IE-speakers, and that somewhere, someplace, a stray borrowing might be adduced -- but again, I think we would have heard of this. It's the kind of thing that certain of the less respectable Christian groups would have bored our ears off with.

Well, not necessarily if the substrate in question were not a language immediately recognisable as IE -- and Palaic isn't. I mean it has IE inflections and function words but most lexical roots do not look familiar. The loanwords one would have to look for would not be items like 'eat', 'good', 'what' or 'sky'. Very likely, many of them would not even have IE etymologies -- Palaic itself has a robust non-IE substrate. The question is whether we could assess the likelihood that, say, a given Hattic word in Hebrew was borrowed via Anatolian rather than via Akkadian or some other intermediary. Words transparently IE would be nice to find, but I agree that anything obviously IE would probably have been recognised by now. Still, life is full of surprises. Whole deposits of hitherto undetected early IE loans have recently been identified in Finno-Ugric. I'll have a look at whatever evidence there is and let you know if there's anything worth examining there.

Piotr