Re: Hachmann versus Kossack?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "fournet.arnaud" <fournet.arnaud@...>
wrote:

>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
> > ========
>
> If he believes out of principle that there were no languages between
> Celtic and Germanic, you can hardly use it as evidence that he finds
> Celtic/Germanic etymologies in that area? As Brian's examples
> showed, it is difficult to guess the original form of so short a
> toponymic element.
>
> Torsten
> ==========
>
> The author does commit herself to any hypotheses of that kind.

OK, so she doesn't say outright that there are no languages between
Celtic and Germanic. That doesn't mean that she doesn't believe there
are no languages between Celtic and Germanic; the whole NWB debarte
started more or less in 1962 with Hachmann, Kossack and Kuhn's
'Dreimännerbuch', 'Völker zwischen Germanen und Kelten'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordwestblock
(it seems the authors haven't even yet got their own Wikipedia
entries) and the idea is still not considered mainstream. So unless
she has stated expressly that there were languages between Celtic and
Germanic I will assume that she believes there weren't.

> My next point is we are looking for PIE languages between Celtic,
> Italic and Balto-slavic.

You mean IE languages.

> Germanic being a family coming from somewhere else far away,

That is your claim, and all you've offered to back it is proposed
etymologies in common with Siberian (Uralic and Yeniseian) languages.
According to my scenario, Proto-Germanic was spoken in the Przeworsk
culture, which must have been in contact with para-Germanic and other
cultures further east. How do you know that the cognates you propose
aren't loans in Germanic?

> languages between Celtic and Germanic include about all PIE, except
> Anatolian and Tocharian.

If that is so, how did the Germanic speakers make their way past all
those the-rest-of-IE speaking peoples, and when? What archaeological
culture do you identify them with?

> NWB if it exists is a kind of para-celtic western PIE dead branch,

There is nothing particularly Celtic about NWBlock. The *kW > *p rule
you adduced as proof takes place in Germanic and Italic besides
Celtic.

> and it remains to be determined what the substrate in western
> Scandinavia could be (PIE or not).

What is 'western Scandinavia'?

> And another point is the difficult of analysing toponyms is not a
> proof that any hypothesis is acceptable.

I think what you want to say here is that the difficulty of analyzing
toponyms is proof that not any hypothesis is acceptable? That would
make sense, unlike your statement as it stands. On the other hand,
that's what I said in the previous post, so what's your point?


Torsten