From: tgpedersen
Message: 49914
Date: 2007-09-16
>I am sure he has. He wrote briefly in this list.
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "fournet.arnaud" <fournet.arnaud@>
> wrote:
> >
> > The idea that Indo-Europeans might have come from Anatolia
> > is as old as the word "indo-european" itself.
> > and the link between Anatolia and Agriculture is old as well
> >
> > Renfrew said nothing new
> > He said something forgotten for 150 years.
> >
> I think Renfrew's was right in stating the spreading of agriculture
> through Europe was linked to the spreading of languages, but wrong
> in that languages were IE. He overlooks too much linguistic data for
> his theory to fit in what we know about IE. Nor he even considered
> other non-IE languages as candidates.
>
> The American linguist Johanna Nichols has made a lot of research
> about North-East Caucasian (NEC) languages. She has reconstructed
> (indepently of Starostin and Nikolaiev, who made their own in 1994:
> North Caucasian Etymological Dictionary) the basic proto-lexicon of
> this family, which shows it was an agricultural society. Hurrian and
> Urartian (grouped toghether as Hurro-Urartian), once spoken in
> Anatolian have been shown to be related to the NEC family (Diakonov
> & Starostin: Hurro-Urartian as an Eastern Caucasian language, 1986).
>
> Other works link Etruscan (alongside with languages such as Raethic,
> Lemnian, Eteo-Cretan, Eteo-Cypriot and pre-IE Greek) with NEC and
> Hurro-Urartian. So the chances are all these languages descent from
> the ones spoken by the first agricultors of the Neolithic. The
> Italian amateur Marco Moretti has even made a reconstruction of
> Proto-Vasconic lexicon which shows it was a (somewhat distant)
> relative of Proto-NEC.
> The so-called Vasco-Caucasian hypothesis puts the common ancestor ofCorded ware?
> Proto-Vasconic and Proto-NEC (and, in the Macro-Caucasian variant,
> even of Burushaski and North-West Caucasian) in the early Neolithic
> or late Mesolithic, making it a good candidate for the agricultural
> spreading theory. In this, Vasconic (comprising Basque-Aquitanian,
> Iberian and other extinct languages spoken in Sardinia and the Alps)
> would be one of the earliest Vasco-Caucasian branches, possibly
> associated with the spread of Cardial Ceramics.
> But other Vasco-Caucasian branches have also existed as well, evenFrom what do you derive that conviction?
> in the same Iberian peninsula. Possibly other substrata like the
> Nord-West Block or the pre-IE Germanic would fall in this. And I'm
> convinced that *akWa/apa isn't IE but Vasco-Caucasian.
> I also recommend you to forget Vennemann. He seems more aI didn't know that the Germans had a scholastic tradition of TV
> TV-predicator than a linguist (I think it has something to do with
> German scholastic tradition).
> The only thing I would spare is his "Atlantidic",'Atlantic', actually.
> a supposed Afro-Asiatic substrate language akin toVennemann calls it Semitic, not Berber.
> Berber (but not to Semitic!!!),
> probably linked to the spread ofI don't think he mentions that.
> megalithism along the Atlantic coast.