Re: [tied] "Satem" Law

17-07-03 14:57, Daniel J. Milton wrote:

> I seem to remember discussion of all this a few months ago.
> Anyway, Golab's "Origin of the Slavs, a Linguist's View" (1991) lists
> 45 old kentum words in Proto-Slavic, many relating to cattle
> breeding, wooden constructions, tools, and social terms. After some
> pages of discussion I couldn't really summarize, he concludes:
> "we can hypothesize that the Proto-Slavs seem to be the
> descendants of a satemized earlier kentum population of the northern
> half of the so-called Tripolye culture. That earlier kentum
> population could in its turn represent some indoeuropeanized
> descendants of the oldest non-IE ethnic layer of the primary
> Tripolye culture."
> Reasonable or unreasonable to our experts?
> Dan

Golab's historical hypotheses are too speculative for my taste. It seems
evident that the ancestors of the Balts and the Slavs maintained
contacts with some non-Satem IE-speakers, but the identity of the latter
is impossible to establish (beyond the known Germanic and Celtic
horizons). I'd counter-speculate that (judging from shared vocabulary
and diffused grammatical features) non-Satem influence came mostly from
Central and Northern Europe. Lost dialects related to Italic and Celtic
may have been part of the picture -- words like *kárwa: 'cow' (< 'horned
animal') look "Celtoid" to me.

Piotr