Man. I couldn't sleep a wink after 5:00 in the morning. Don't you just hate
that? That'll teach me to have coffee at night.
Me:
>>Regardless, a Nakh meaning of "three" means nothing because we are >>not
>>talking about a stage of NEC with which the Etruscans or >>Tyrrhenians
>>could possibly in one's wildest dreams have interacted.
>
>By 'connected to' you mean 'genetically related', right? I am talking
>about a substrate, not a genetic relationship.
Yes, I realize. "Connected to" meaning "one affecting the other". This is
why I terminated with the key word "interacted", which also should suggest
this interpretation...
... But then, do you mean a seperate _third_ party, that affected both
NEC/Nakh and Etruscan/Tyrrhenian? You're being very vague. How 'bout
splainin' yourself, Lucy?
First, when exactly?
Second, where??
Third, how???
However, even proposing a mysterious substrate that interacted with both
groups, in any likely period I can think of, would still invite copious
amounts of criticism from the typical linguist or archaeologist. Again, the
geography is a LARGE problem that you have so far ignored sucessfully.
>The lowest numbers in Etruscan are not IE (or insert favourite >language
>family). So they must have come from something else.
We are in disagreement with Etruscan /za-/ (IE *dwo-) and whether Etruscan
/thu/ and /ci/ are borrowed is highly assumptive so far, not borne out
clearly by the evidence you've provided.
>I was merely going on Greenberg in "IE and its nearest relatives":
>"I consider it [Kartvelian] not to be a member of Eurasiatic proper,
>in which I am in agreement with Bomhard and Kerns (1994)". (A
>reference to their "The Nostratic Macro-family", Berlin 1994).
Aaaah. It all makes sense now. Here might be the reason for your very
respectable confusion...
The Greenbergian and Bomhardian definitions of Eurasiatic are not the same
except for their name. First and most obviously, Bomhard doesn't put Ainu
anywhere in the Nostratic family (thank god!) and uses the term Eurasiatic
to designate a particular subset (IE, Etruscan, Uralic, Altaic, EskA, ChukK,
Gilyak) of a larger Nostratic family. He definitely _does_ include
Kartvelian within the Nostratic family as seen in his "Indo-European and the
Nostratic Hypothesis", 1996. See page 22, chart 1 entitled "The Nostratic
Macrofamily" for a tree diagram which, yes indeedy-do, includes Kartvelian
for all to see, located just outside Bomhard's Eurasiatic branch. He puts
Sumerian and ElamoDravidian one step more away from Eurasiatic than
Kartvelian (?!) but then no one's perfect.
Now, knowing this, we can see how Greenberg's Kartvelian-less "Eurasiatic"
might be said (rather deceptively) to agree with the Bomhard-Kerns camp.
Greenberg, in his senile years, would appear to pretend that his Eurasiatic
and Nostratic proper are equal and yet equal to Bomhard's version, much to
the confusion of every other budding Nostraticist on earth. So in other
words, while Bomhard and Kerns fully accept Kartvelian as part of the
Nostratic family, Greenberg is in reality opposed to this view, considering
it "pre-Nostratic" (or his "pre-Eurasiatic"), judging by the quote you give
above. The agreement here is only terminological, but there is no such
agreement in reality... but then, since when did Greenberg think in
realistic terms? :) (I know, I know. Another shameless ad hominem. I have
issues.)
This site gives a good, brief description of how Greenberg fits (rather
awkwardly) into the Nostratic scheme of things and how it's easy for anyone
to be confused:
http://www.webcom.com/petrich/writings/NostraticRefs.txt
>How do you think they went to Western Turkey? Car? Aeroplane? Anyway,
>it was probably even easier in ancient times because of there being
>less people in the way.
"They"? The Tyrrhenian-speaking population? They would be autochthonous to
the Balkans. From the adoption of agriculture and being in such a strategic
location, they capitalized greatly over at least a 500-year period between
5500 and 5000 BCE, and as such, their language spread in importance,
dominating the eastern Mediterranean, including W.Anatolia where a
previously Semitish speaking population would have existed. Or so says me.
Point is, language can spread amongst a population without anybody moving.
No trains, no planes, just mouths yipper-yappering constantly. Language is
kinda like a virus, in which case I contracted English as a child which left
me vulnerable to French infection. Later, Chinese got the better of me,
leaving me terminally tongue-tied and rather awkward at unilingual
get-togethers. But as a wise man once said, "Tang lang bu chan, huang que
dzai hou." Man, that's so true, so true.
Back to the topic, "Less people" hardly explains the immense rift between
the locations of NEC and Tyrrhenian. Further, after agriculture arrived,
people tended to be much more densly populated than nomadic hunter-gatherer
societies relying on game. You must try a little harder for your ideas to
take hold yet.
>And Hurrian. And, like I keep saying, not the *whole* of NEC. Just
>where a substrate of Nakh also once was.
We've gone over this. Again, Nakh is not contemporaneous with any possible
stage of Tyrrhenian so they can't interact, whether indirectly or directly,
can they?! Second, Hurrian had spread from east of the Tigris westward at a
late date, in the early 2nd millenium BCE or something. Its cousin,
Urartian, is situated closest to the HurroUrartian homeland in northEAST
Anatolia, just as far from Tyrrhenian as NEC is. Your dates and locations
are seriously out of whack.
Consult my map at
http://glen-gordon.tripod.com/LANGUAGE/index.html
Maybe there's something you (or I) have overlooked about the placement of
these languages.
>Yes, I agree with you on these ones. Would you like to hazard an
>interpretation?
For amusement I had tried for the first one, "The offerings of the people
have been given to Peruni, the sacred divine mountain." but with so little
to go on, any interpretation could be derived from it.
>>>I for one am sure there are a couple of Celtic ones in there.
>
>How about comparing 'erikian vepelie' with the Venetic inscription
>'porai vebelei'. In Manuel de la Langue Venete, Lejeune says the
>Venetic /porai/ is from *per. Taking the P- off it and adding an
>ending like -ikian sounds a bit more like Celtic than Tyrrhenian.
Venetic is an Italic language. (??) Why are you comparing Rhaetic to an
Italic language in order to compare it to a Celtic language??
>>>I don't think the sound shift -l < *-i is unreasonable, after all,
>>>there is evidence for it in archaic Etruscan.
>
>How about Lemnian /avis/?
It's related to Etruscan /avils/, quite certainly a more true-to-original
form. Semivowels don't usually, if ever, become laterals and I can think of
no language living or dead where this occured without question. Can you?
>>>There is evidence for prenasalisation in a number of Etruscan >>>words.
>
>You don't agree with Perrotin's examples, then?
Hmm, it doesn't look like it. I'm admittedly not aware of Perrotin but then
I don't read every book on UFO research and crop circles. Since I've never
seen "pre-nasalization" mentioned in any respectable literature on Etruscan,
I have a strong temptation to discount it at hand (which might prove a
reasonable thing to do). After searching instances of Perrotin I come to...
http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/Work/dhumbabstracts.html#dhumb622
... where it is says about a particular work of his: "This paper's goal is
to expose what is known about the relatives of Etruscan
(Rhaetic, Lemnian, Prehellenic A), and to explore the possible connections
between these tongues and Indo-European, which has often been --- and is
still being --- proposed as a likely parent of Etruscan"
These languages are definitely, as stated before by others, NOT considered
IndoEuropean languages by a majority (excluding the loonies)... so I wonder
how capable Perrotin is in providing reality-based theories. Until knowing
more about this "Prehellenic A" (Linear A??), I can't comment yet on its
claimed relationship to this language group, although I am in severe doubt,
especially when found amongst other colourful Dhumbadji company like the
wonderful Mr Hubey.
>>Nakh cannot connect to
>>Etruscan. Neither can NEC or any of its stages. End of story.
>
>You've still got this genetic fixation.
I'm talking about ANY connection (genetic, substrate, alien or otherwise)
between the two language groupings.
- gLeN
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