From: Dr. Antonio Sciarretta
Message: 10880
Date: 2001-11-01
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.
There are two things I would add:
i) in countries where Celtic or 'Italic' languages were spoken during historical times, we can find both /a/- and /o/- representers of a given IE root. Some example could be the names Ollius fl. (mod. Oglio, northern Italy) or Olontigi (Baetica) from a root usually given as *el-/ol- 'to flow', in contrast with e.g. Alentus fl. (Italy) Alausa fl. (Gallia) etc. The former should be Celtic, the latter could belong to that unknown IE language (Old European) to which historical language superimposed.
But this language should be an /a/ language, otherwise Celtic and Italic speakers would have preserved the /o/ pronunciation.
ii) it could be, as proposed recently by F. Villar, that /a/ languages represent the older IE layer, while the separation of /o/ being a later development in Celtic, Latin etc. In this case, the real IE root would be *al-/el-. I am not expert of phonetics, so I would like to know if this suggestion has found agreement among scholars.
By the way, in Olontigi I see an hybrid toponym, formed by a substratum IE (Celtiberian) name *Olontium or something similar (cfr. Alontium in Sicily), plus a basque ending -egi/-tegi 'top' that could explain several endings in -igi/-tigi (just with this characteristic alternation of the basque suffix after a dental or not) in the southern Spain region. This since I think that basque could be a superstratum language to IE languages in Hispania and Aquitania, rather than a substratum.
Antonio