Re: Lusitanian --Bell Beaker?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...>
wrote:

>
> --- 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.

That was Krahe's original idea, "gemeinwestindogermanisch". Schmid
went even further, "gemeinindogermanisch", and Kitson seems to lean
that way as well.

> On the other hand, it looks more like an IE vanguard
> language that got over run by later IE languages from
> the east.

That is what I think, with Kuhn's NWB being one descendent. North
Picene may be another; I suspect that NP's immediate ancestor was
widely spoken around Italy and left some pre-Italic loanwords in
Etruscan as well as some toponyms in Italy.

> 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?

In much of the older literature "Illyrian" or "Veneto-Illyrian" was
used as a catch-all term for Indo-European which could not be
assigned to Celtic or the other major groups. I do not consider any
of those authors outdated. What we need to do in _this_ discussion
is to agree on names and diagnostics for the various groups.

> 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.

Yes, I think that one of the Paleo-Sardinian strata belongs with
Illyrian, Messapic, and Lusitanian. I suspect that Spanish <vega> is
from Lusit. *ibaica, and I think that this has a Sard. cognate,
though I cannot recollect the details. What I proposed needs a lot
of patching up, beginning with the diagnostics.

Douglas G. Kilday