Michael Smith napisał(a):
> Piotr, do any of Vennemann's Bascoid etymologies have any merit or are they all
> rather suspicious?
I'd take them all with a _very_ large grain of *sal-. There's an
excellent rebuttal by Peter Kitson (1996, "British and European river
names", _Transactions of the Philological Society_ 94: 73-118), where
Vennemann's analyses are thoroughly (if tactfully) demolished. Larry
Trask, in an 1995 article, wrote about numerous problems with
Vennemann's handling of Basque data and use (or rather misuse) of
Proto-Basque reconstructions. See also:
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/linguist/issues/15/15-1878.html
with references to Trask and Kitson and a nice summary of important points.
> In a previous post you also made a mention of proposed Illyrian
> etymologies (I can't remember if they were hydronyms or topomyns), are any of
> these suggestions to be taken seriously in your opinion?
The term "Illyrian" itself is so imprecise that it's difficult to take
it seriously as a linguistic label. It's just a cover name for anything
in or around Ilyricum that seems difficult to classify otherwise. It is
obvious that there are some Central European hydronyms which can't be
Germanic, Celtic or Balto-Slavic but apear to have IE etymologies
nevertheless. Their precise identification may be simply impossible,
since we have no direct information about any IE groups that may have
existed in the area only to be lost in prehistorice times. Rubrics like
"Illyrian" or "Old European" or "Venetic" are popular among
hydronymists, but are really nothing more than obscure labels for
"obscure origin".
To make matters worse, silly mistakes are only too easy to make is one
doesn't analyse the historical documentation of names. Imagine the
excitement of an "Old Europeanist" who finds a brook called <Aps> in
what is now Poland and used to be part of Germany. What we surely have
here is *Ap-s-, a well-known "Old European root" (*ap-/*ab- 'water,
river') with a common "hydronymic suffix" (*-s-). Then, alas, somebody
else finds out that back in the 19th c. the brook was locally known as
Abtsbach 'abbot's brook', and that there are also toponyms like 'abbot's
mill' nearby -- and there goes the Old European etymology. Even famous
linguists are prone to such mistakes if they take short cuts in their
research. I could cite here the discovery of several "Gothic" hydronyms
apparently containing Gmc. *-baki- in the Dniester and San systems.
Nearly all of them have turned out to be 100% Slavic, e.g. <z^olobok>,
which is not *z^olo-bok-, as originally segmented, but simply (one could
say, obviously) z^olob-ok < *z^elb-UkU, i.e. the East Slavic reflex of
*z^elbU 'gully' with a diminutive suffix. To realise this, it would be
enough to check how the name is declined, but if one knows it only from
a map...
Piotr