Mr Caws, not to be confused with Dr Claw (Inspector Gadget's
famous arch-nemesis), nor Mr Claus (also known as Saint Nick
or Kris Kringle):
>My issue with positioning Tyrrhenian in the Balkans so early is
>that I connect it with the Lefkandi culture, which came in from the east
>circa 2300-2200 most likely due to pressure from incoming IE groups. Coming
>from the east, it was probably Anatolian in origin.
It's a late date to be finally pushed by incoming IE groups, no?
What was the thousand-year hold up? :)
>My reasoning for this connection is admittedly a combination of
>evidence and intuition, though. The introduction of Lefkandi to Crete
>coincides roughly with palatial Minoan civilization, and seems to have
>intoduced a number of cultural innovations connected with Crete.
So you would claim that the creators of the Minoan palaces were
Tyrrhenian speaking? Crete was populated by the 6th millenium by
people of Asia Minor. Then a new wave of people came. Giving this
a linguistic perspective, that would be "First Semitish, then
Tyrrhenian".
Now, I'm no Cyrus Gordon, nor am I related to him in any way,
but I'm sticking with the idea that Linear A is a Semitoid
language of a certain kind while I'd say that the Phaistos Disk
is written in an Anatolian language. As for what language the
linear scripts were originally intended for, that's a real
caper and even _I_ don't have a solution... Although I'm
thinking ejective stops...
> Etruscan has always had peculiar similarities with Anatolia while
>definetly having Cretan and Aegean characteristics.
Define "Cretan and Aegean characteristics". Are you refering to
linguistic characteristics or cultural ones?
- gLeN
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