Re: Submerged Languages

From: Glen Gordon
Message: 975
Date: 2000-01-19

>>Glen (ME) wrote:
>>Indo-European seems _completely_ absent in Anatolia until the >>arrival of
>>the "Anatolian" lgs by the third millenium BC. That's >>reality.

>Sabine Ivanovas wrote:
>Now which 'reality' is that you're talking about? [...]

The kind of reality that doesn't find itself inhumanely caged in the
subjunctive like a horribly fabricated simile that lacks a point to its
existence.

>But IF it is, it might well be one proof for the Anatolian PIE >theory ...

Yes, yes, but if only. If only, alas, if _only_ it were true and supportable
with something, ANYTHING. Gee, Sabine, too bad for you, huh? Now back to
reality again... :)

The way I see it, there had to have been successive waves of IndoEtruscan
expansion out of the Pontic-Caspian, probably starting since 4500 BCE or
even a little earlier. The date is built of course on the Kurgan thing, but
only partially at least, since we aren't dealing with a migration of people
so much as a migration of a language which whose evidence won't be
succesfully found by digging up graves. Kurgan expansion however can still
be seen as a signal of the expansion of the language, afterall other people
are doing it and it looks like fun to pin the tail on the donkey bones.

Linguistically at least, I find it interesting that some view Etruscan to be
Anatolian and others not and some find Lycian and Lydian to be connected
closely to Etruscan/Lemnian and others not. I think progressive waves of an
IndoEtruscan dialect continuum can explain this best. Etruscan and Lemnian
for instance would be the first wave, followed by the exotic Anatolian
languages like Lycian and Lydian quickly followed by the rest of the
Anatolian languages.

It has to be all out of the Pontic-Caspian region because that's the option
that requires less explanation given what we _know_ on the language itself
and its similarities to other language groups of the north (Uralic, Altaic)
and the linguistic interactions that Sabine is ignoring to support her
"but-only-if" theory questioning my sense of reality with adventurous tales
about Linear A...

(I know I'm a jerk, but you just have to put up with me. :P)

- gLeN


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