Re: [tied] Re: Athene

From: Dennis Poulter
Message: 3334
Date: 2000-08-21

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