Thanks Hakan for your posting,
and I will get the book and read it.
I have to admit I also find many
of Bernal's etymologies less than convincing, and in general find his sections
on the historical scenario, i.e. the later chapters of vol.2 more
plausible.
Nevertheless, I would comment on
a couple of points.
It has taken some 200 years of
intensive research to arrive at "true etymology" for IE, and there are still
areas of contention. It also had its birth in "eye-catching" similarities
between German, Greek and Sanskrit that have only been systematised by dint of a
lot of hard work. The question is, is there enough prima facie evidence to
undertake this kind of research with Egyptian/Greek?
The rejection of Thebes/Tebah
based on Lin.B teqa presupposes that Lin.B is an accurate reflection of the
pronunciation.
There are instances of
hesitation in Lin.B between q/p, for example hippos is normally rendered iqo,
but there is a "ipopoqoi" interpreted as "hippophorgwoihi", as well as
alternate forms pereqota/qereqota and opeqa/oqeqa, and q/k qoukoro = gwoukolos
< gwoukwolos, or kunaja=gunaia, alongside qouqota, suqota, ouqe. There are
various explanations of these anomalies, but it is also possible that the
sound changes that produced the complete elimination of labiovelars by the
earliest alphabetic texts, were taking place during late Mycenean times, and
this produced a certain amount of hesitation in the spelling. So teqa could even
be a hypercorrection, a phenomenon that can be observed in late and medieval
Latin.
If we must observe a strict
one-to-one relationship in the phones of borrowed words, how would
one explain such English borrowings from French as cavalry/chivalry,
guard/ward, push/dress? Obviously, the answer is that they were borrowed at
different times or from different dialects. I have read that the radical
sound changes of Late Egyptian compared with classical Middle Egyptian of the
hieroglyphs was due to a different dialect coming to prominence in the New
Kingdom. So, can't this same process be applied to Egyptian and
Greek?
Piotr, I can't see how you can
put "Ne Boh odno Tsar" in the same category as the very real possibility of
Egyptian loans into Greek.
But I would like to ask you, in
all seriousness as a professional linguist, why is the sequence
a:nai/a:na extracted from Muka:nai and Atha:naia better explained as a
unitary suffix? Are
there any other examples of this suffix?
So, all in all, we are no
further forward. We still have no idea where the name Athene comes
from.
Cheers
Dennis