>Just to clarify my approach: I am NOT asserting a genetic >relationship
>between Nakh and Etruscan. I do not believe one exists.
Phew! :)
>I am talking about substrates. I am talking about non-genetic
> >inheritances.
Ok, cool. That's always a fun topic.
On /den/:
>I'll allow you Indo-Iranian. Nakh is full of all sorts of stuff,
>including Indo-Iranian, Arabic, Turkish, and Georgian.
Exactly, it has a very long and turbid history and so it's very important to
be ultra-cautious when connecting NEC to other languages, making sure that
the words one is dealing with are truely native.
>But if Nakh den was borrowed from Russian it would probably be dieni
Alright.
>[...], so I am quite capable of recognising what might be a loan from
> >Russian.
Well ya goofed on that one >:P
>What most of 'these books' do, in fact, is suggest that Etruscan
>is an isolate. And while Etruscan is absolutely full of IE loanwords,
>the problem is the core vocabulary just doesn't fit.
I beg to differ. True, Etruscan is often viewed as an isolate, the lazy
linguist's answer to a question that requires thought. Etruscan does contain
some relatively recent Latin loans (suplu "to blow", macstrev "magristrate")
and Greek loans (lechtum "vase", qutun "pitcher"). There are also Semitoid
loans which I believe occured in prehistory (s'a "6", semph "7", s'ar "10").
Who knows, there may have even been Anatolian ones (mal- "offer") too.
>In my opinion Etruscan originated in Anatolia. It was probably a bit >of a
>mixture even by the time they left there, thoroughly >contaminated by IE
>Anatolian languages, and Hurrian, Hattic, Semitic >and who knows what else.
>Then it was inundated with Greek and Italic >words too, during the journey
>and during the several hundred years >they lived in Italy before they
>started writing.
So we agree.
>BTW, isn't this just a little bit pot calling the kettle black? You
>assert that there is a genetic relationship between Basque and NEC,
>yet all experts in Basque reject this theory absolutely.
Well if the Vasconicist Larry Trask is any indication, with whom I had a
chance to speak on subjects like these, Vasconic studies close themselves
prejudiciously to the thought of any outside relationships. He claimed that
zazpi "seven" could be better explained as a native compounding of
*bortzaz-pi "five-two" even though a Semitic explanation is so much less
troublesome (also Basque /sei/ "six", another clearly Semitic word). It
still blows my mind to this day.
Certainly, any relationship between Basque and NEC must be seen as remote
regardless - we're talking at least 10,000 years or more. However there do
appear still to be some strong indications of this relationship:
Basque pNakh | pDeneCaucasian
(Starostin) | (me)
--------------------------------------|----------------
"eye" begi (Chechen b`�rg)| *m-xutL
"ear" belarri (Chechen lerg) | *m-lir
"I" -t *so: | *ti
"we" gu *L� | *tLu
"you (pl)" zu- *s^u | *Lu
"four" lau (AvarAn *l^ob- "3")| *limu
"rodent" sagu *ca:rgWy: | *cark?u
"mouse" "weasel" |
VascoCaucasic (as well as DeneCaucasian) appears to have word-class prefixes
much like Swahili such as the *m- prefix used for body part terms.
- gLeN
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