John:
>I would agree with that, but couldn't Etruscan be from South of the
>Caucasas? In that way Indo-Eutruscan could have been a proto->language
>family that straddled the Caucasas (God help us, another >language family
>that straddles the Caucasas!!!)
There seem to be far too many languages stuffed in this Caucasus without any
to the north. As far as I am concerned, Uralic is the be-all-and-end-all
here. Uralic and IE may or may not have been in contact with each other (not
talking about Satem IE dialects and FinnoUgric contacts which are proven),
however the languages must be tied to a common origin further back. IE being
tied to the steppes means that IE would have to have travelled from them to
down into the Caucasus through Caucasian languages like NWC, NEC and
Kartvelian.
But doesn't this seem like a very cramped location for such a succesful
language group? One would expect that they had room to spread but Anatolia
can't be this place since I have yet to see links between IE/Etruscan and
these Caucasian and Hattic languages to substantiate all this wild
speculation. Whether we use Anatolia as the source of IE or of Tyrrhenian,
we come up with the same need for linguistic evidence to support this.
I'm a language man. I need linguistic evidence of some kind... anything.
>I fully agree that there is no possibility for IE spreading from
>Anatolia, but what about Etruscan. There is plenty of evidence that
>Etruscan spread from that direction in both linguistic and classical
>sources.
Examples? Perhaps only from Western Anatolia.
- gLeN
______________________________________________________