Re: [tied] Evidences for a Mediterranean pre-IE Substratum?

From: Glen Gordon
Message: 12456
Date: 2002-02-24

David Sanchez:
>I am not saying that Basque, Etruscan or Iberian lack voicing because of a
>previous substratum. I am saying that all these languages have these
>caracteristic and that this caracteristic maybe an areal characteristic.

My view is that Etruscan comes from ProtoTyrrhenian, also ancestral
to Lemnian and Rhaetic. It seems to me that a reconstructed
ProtoTyrrhenian should indeed have lacked voicing contrasts for
stops. Instead, an aspirative contrast would have existed.
Further, I suspect that Tyrrhenian lacked *p in initial position,
which is strangely like Celtic and Basque.

However, for there to be "areal influence", it would be nice
to know what languages were beside what and which language
influenced which other language. In other words, we need a time
period to talk about and we need to know the languages involved
during this time period.

Etruscan is not contemporary with modern Basque, of course, and I
feel that Etruscan adopted its characteristic phonological system
from ProtoTyrrhenian, so I doubt that early forms of Basque were
affecting Etruscan per se. Personally, I suspect that there
could have been influence happening between early Tyrrhenian and
whatever was west of it during the Neolithic (Iberian? Language X?
Who knows?).

Added thoughts, anyone?

- love gLeN



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