Re: Renfrew's theory renamed as Vasco-Caucasian

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Octavià Alexandre <oalexandre@...>
wrote:

>
>
> --- 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 of
> 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, even

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 a 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", a

supposed

> Afro-Asiatic substrate language akin to Berber (but not to

Semitic!!!),

> probably linked to the spread of megalithism along the Atlantic

coast.

>

And I also recommend you to forget Marco Moretti and his pseudo vasco-
caucasic crazy reconstructions.