Re: [tied] Ancient toponimy

I agree that this "toponymic alteuropäisch" is real enough, and I'd identify its most archaic stratum with the early IE dialectal continuum of (roughly) the fourth millennium BC, with later layers (more restricted geographically, but still "Old European" according to your definition, since they are hard to link to the historical languages) superimposed on it. I wouldn't agree with Krahe that Old European toponyms reveal a merger of *a with *o. This may be an illusion resulting from the fact that most of the names in question were more recently filtered through Germanic and/or Baltic/Slavic (not to mention more obscure groups like Illyrian or Dacian), in which those vowels had been levelled. My opinion is that the language(s) ancestral to Celtic and Italic were part of the "Old European" continuum.

For a variety of reasons I find Theo Vennemann's interpretation of Old European hydronymy in terms of an alleged "Vasconic" substrate completely unacceptable (T. Vennemann. 1994. "Linguistic reconstruction in the context of European prehistory". _Transactions of the Philological Society_ 92. Oxford: Blackwell. 215-284). Cf. Peter R. Kitson's rebuttal in "British and European river-names" (_TPS_ 94/2 [1996], 73-118).

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: Dr. Antonio Sciarretta

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 5:09 PM

Subject: [tied] Ancient toponimy

Ciao, I'm Antonio from Italy (currently from Switzerland), I'm 31 years old. I'm mainly interested in ancient toponimy of Europe (and romance toponimy of my area, the Abruzzi region, Italy) and hope to find some feedback in your group It's the first time I post a message. A question I would like to submit is: do you agree with the existence, of an IE language responsible for a large number of place-names all over Europe but different from the historically known languages (Celtic, Germanic, Illyrian for what we know about it, Italic languages etc.). The evidence of such a language (or people) was first proposed by Krahe that called it alteuropäisch (old european) and recently recovered by F. Villar (antiguo europeo). It should be a language without distinction between /a/ and /o/, as several IE languages but in contrast with celtic, latin, osco-umbrian etc. Several river-names are reconducted to this stratum, for example those showing the stems *ad- 'stream' (Adua fl., Italy), *ais- 'rapid' (Aesis fl., Italy, Aeso, Hisp., Aesura, Brit.), *al- 'flowing' (Alauna fl., Brit., Alentus fl., Italy), *al-to- 'flooded' (Altos fl., Illyria, Altinum, Italy) etc. This stratum is usually invoked when : i) the name could have an IE etymology but the historical languages cannot explain certain phonetic or morphologic features of the name ii) the name does not contain certain appellatives that are recognized as typical of specific languages (e.g. -dunum for celtic, -burgium for germanic, etc.) iii) the name contains certain stems as the ones above that are so widely spread across Europe and without substantial modifications, that cannot be attributed to different languages