Miguel:
>Different <w-n-s^>.
Alrighty then. I'll take your word for now. No biggy.
Miguel:
>[...] /x/ before a front vowel (*wanaxi- ?, cf. PKartv. *wenaq->"grape").
Not sure whether I can buy your analysis of pre-Egyptian given what you have
already said on pre-IE. Your views on pre-IE seem honestly to me to be very
counterintuitive, using research from other people whose views are
frightfully amateurish.
For instance, your views on the origins of IE laryngeals from earlier stops
(which I remember you mentioning a couple years earlier on the Nostratic
List) is not something that many of the prominent Nostraticists have
concluded. Take note of I-S, Dolgopolsky or Bomhard. Their views are that
the Nostratic laryngeals begat the IE laryngeals. I don't see what benefit
there is in going against this straight-forward sound correspondance in
favor of something that offers more chaotic connections to faraway Egyptian
grammar.
But... On another topic, Kartvelian *wenaq- seems to be a clue to the
ultimate origins of the "wine" word... but what is it saying? What is the
*-q- at the end supposed to be? Is it somehow comparable to Etruscan /vinac/
"vineyard"?
Hey, here's a scary thought... What if Miguel is partially right? What if
the "wine" word is not exactly IE but rather ultimately Tyrrhenian?
Tyrrhenian would be a protolanguage _related_ to IE, the parent language of
Etruscan, Rhaetic and Lemnian. I position Tyrrhenian on my website's
linguistic map within the Balkans around 6000 BCE. We could speculate a
Tyrrhenian protoform *wei-na meaning exactly the same thing as Miguel
explains for IE *weino-. All Tyrrhenian words would have initial stress
accent and *e would have been pronounced as a schwa (as would have been the
case for Early and Mid IE).
In this scenario, there would even be valid derivatives like *weina-kWe
(*-kWe is related to the similar IE suffix and ultimately an attached
relative pronoun similar to the English suffix "-like"). So *weinakWe would
have the immediate meaning of "wine-like", "wine-related", "wine-coloured",
but probably used as a word for "grapes". The words would be borrowed by
surrounding languages like IE (hence *weino-) and also into the nearby
Semitish language stationed in West Anatolia (*wainu "wine", *wainaqu
"grape"). Via this language, we might attribute Kartvelian *wenaq- "grape"
and Semitic *wainu "wine".
Finally, Etruscan /vinac/ in this scenario would be an inherited and native
word! As for the supposed pre-Egyptian *wanaxi-, if we were to play along
with this reconstruction, we might derive it somehow from the Semitish's
second-hand term *wainaqu "grape". The final Semitish *-u, by the way,
appears to act more like a schwa sound than a fully sounded /u/ based on the
behaviour of these words in IE and Kartvelian. Thus *s^ikTu "six" would have
been pronounced */s^WIkT@/ and adopted into Mid IE as *swekse (=> *sweks).
Miguel:
>2) In Indo-European, the word is either thematic masculine (Grk.
>oinos) or thematic neuter (Lat. vi:num). In either case, one expects
>the word to be found most often as object (of the verb *poh3-/*piph3-
>"to drink", for instance) and thus as *woinom. The Semitic word is
>*wainu (West Semitic *yaynu) in the construct state, but the free form
>was probably *wainum (if Akkadian mimation in the singular is
>original).
Given IE *septm, the magical *-m suffix is probably ancient in Semitoid
grammar. Hmmm, how diabolically clever you are. So, I guess you see the
following scenario:
IndoEuropean *weino-m ===> Semitic *wainu-m
On the other hand, it can still go the other way...
Semitish *wainu-m ===> IndoEuropean *weino-m
Or now, maybe even more like...
Tyrrhenian *weina ==> Semitish *wainu-m
==> MidIE *weine (NOM)/*weine-m (ACC)
(IE *wein-o-m)
(The thematic vowel should have been lost in Late IE unless *weino- was
indeed understood as a passive with *-no- as Miguel said in the first place.
Perhaps the underlying meaning of "twisted" or "pressed" was ALSO adopted
and understood from related Tyrrhenian *weina. The final vowel of *-no- was
kept despite the tendency for loss of vowel due to analogies and grammatical
misinterpretations by its native speakers within the Mid IE period, that
I've already mentioned in detail in previous posts...)
The advantage with this scenario would seem to be that we can explain all
the variants of the word (*weina AND *weinakWe) as analysable within
protoTyrrhenian grammar, and almost so in IE grammar, without having to make
unlikely claims that the IE speakers had invented wine and thereby ripping
them away from their rightful North Pontic homeland where the proper mixture
of pastoralists, agriculturalists and nomads resided. We also have outlined
the paths of all these words found in Kartvelian, Semitic and maybe even
Egyptian in a way that it is satisfying in terms of both timeframe,
archaeology and common views on the positions of IE (North Pontic), Semitic
(Palestine) and Kartvelian (South Caucasus). Thoughts?
Joao:
>Thanks. I thought Etruscan cezph was pronounce like Latin ce- ci-, >as /s/
>or /ts/.
>Is Basque Z pronnounced as /s/ ? Was not /th/ ?
I don't know a huge amount about Basque variability but luckily there's
a page with a sample of Basque speech in .aiff format (playable with
RealAudio):
http://www.teleport.com/~napoleon/basque/audiosample.html
The speech is rapid but as I listen carefully, I cannot hear a difference
between this speaker's pronunciation of "s" and "z" - both sounding like
English "s". But anyways, there you have it. It can't be commonly pronounced
"th" (unless one is prone to lisping) from what I read but Miguel would know
better.
- gLeN
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