Re: Lusitanian --Bell Beaker?

--- dgkilday57 <dgkilday57@...> wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister
> <gabaroo6958@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > Reig Vidal over at Substrate, explained that
> > Lusitanian is linked archeologically to the Bell
> > Beaker Culture.
> > I'm not sure if he's on this list but I hope, so
> he
> > can elaborate.
> > Does anyone know that this link to be certain?
> > As we know, Lusitanian resembles both Celtic and
> > Italic but, unlike Celtic, maintained /p/. Until
> Reig
> > posted, my guess was that it came from somewhere
> > around the Alps, perhaps N. Italy before passing
> into
> > Spain and that it was probably the same language
> that
> > Coromines referred to as Sorotaptic and others
> > (including Lapesa, I think --unless he was citing
> > someone else) termed Ligurian or Illyrian.
> > Reig explained that Bell Beaker culture was from
> N.
> > Germany, Benelux, etc. and that's what I had seen
> but
> > Wikipedia has it all over W Europe.
> > The dates are about a 1,000 years earlier than
> what I
> > would have expected for Lusitanian. Given its
> > closeness to Celtic and Italic, I would have
> expected
> > that it entered shortly before Celtiberian was
> > established in Iberia. Maybe c. 1,000 BCE.
> > I'll you all answer this
> >
>
> Bell-Beaker culture spread so rapidly across western
> Europe that the
> starting point is hard to determine. If it started
> in the Low
> Countries, and if we accept Kitson's deduction that
> the Beaker Folk
> spoke "Alteuropäisch", the Indo-European language of
> Krahe's river-
> name system, then we might expect Kuhn's
> "Nordwestblöckisch" to be
> the language spoken by the descendents of those
> Bell-Beaker tribes
> who stayed at home, the NWB enclave being overrun
> first by Celtic,
> then by Germanic languages.
>
> Bell-Beaker remains found in historically
> Lusitanian-speaking areas
> do not necessarily mean that Lusitanian descends
> from Alteuropäisch.
> In fact B.M. Prósper, "The Inscription of Cabeço das
> Fráguas
> Revisited. Lusitanian and _Alteuropäisch_
> Populations in the West of
> the Iberian Peninsula", _Transactions of the
> Philological Society_
> 97:151-83 [1999] has argued that Lusitanian was not
> only distinct
> from Alteuropäisch, but borrowed basic elements of
> vocabulary from an
> Alteuropäisch dialect which, like most, converted
> PIE */o/ to /a/.

. . .

>

=== message truncated ===
What you have looks excellent, but you need criticism
from someone more knowledgeable than me.
A few things perplex me.
Alteuropäisch looks more and more like trying to nail
jello to the wall. On one hand, I've seen it described
as early Western IE, i.e. ancestral to Celtic, Italic
and perhaps Germanic.
On the other hand, it looks more like an IE vanguard
language that got over run by later IE languages from
the east.
You didn't address the relationship of Coromines's
Sorotaptic and other scholar's "Illyrian" and
"Ligurian" substrate in Ibero-Romance to Lusitanian
--although your relationship between Lustianian and
Illyrian implies such.
Lapesa and Menéndez Pidal, I believe, speak of
Illyrian and Ligurian elements in Iberian topography
and lexicon. And if you've read Blanca Prósper, you've
surely read them. Are they hopelessly outdated or do
they have a point that just needs to be updated in
regards to modern scholarship?
I remember on another list, substrate list, I think,
someone referred to IE elements in a substrate of
Pyrenees Ibero-Romance.
There are IE looking elements in Basque that are
non-Celtic, non-Latin/Romance. Some of them also seem
to show up in Sardinian, which suggests they may be
related to Lusitanian.