Re: V-, B-

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

>
> [...]
>
> I've been reading lately a book a the kind linguists shouldn't.
> Joz^ef S^avli — Matej Bor, 'Unsere Vorfahren, Die Veneter'.
> It belongs to the recent tradition that the Slovenians were really
> Veneti, and that the Slavs thus were there all along. They do have
> some intriguing facts. How they account for the Slavic languages

being

> so similar and for the Eastern Slavic territory being without
> onomastic material pointing to *wenet- I don't know.
> 'Alles spricht dafür, daß die Veneter in der Aussprache mancher
> Buchstaben ziemlich unsicher waren, wie es übrigens den Slowenen vom
> Küstenland (Primorska) noch heute ergeht. Sie haben leicht /v/

mit /b/

> verwechselt (Betatismus), z. B. 'vog' anstatt 'bog'.'
> "Everything seems to indicate that the Veneti were rather uncertain

in

> their pronunciation of many letters, as still today it happens to

the

> Slovenians of the coast land (Primorska). The easily confuse /v/

with

> /b/, eg. 'vog' instead of 'bog'."
>
> Now that's not linguist talk, but it seems fairly clear that

Primorska

> Slovenian has /b/ > /v/. So I wondered that if one reinterpreted
> S^avli and Bor to be about a Venetic substrate in Slovenian instead
> that this 'betatismus' could be used as an indicator of Venetic
> presence (outside Spain, obviously), eg. the Bec^ names for Vienna,
> and the Be^lák, Beljak, Bljàk names for Villach?

I am pessimistic that betatismus by itself could be used this way,
since so many languages fail to distinguish /b/ from /v/. Slavic
expansion started around 500 CE. With Paleo-Venetic or whatever you
choose to call it we are talking about 2000 BCE or earlier. Even if
the immediate pre-Slovenian substrate can be shown not to have
distinguished /b/ from /v/, it hardly constitutes evidence that the
substrate was descended from Paleo-Venetic.

It would make more sense to look at non-Slavic words in Slovenian
(apart from recent borrowings, of course) and non-Slavic elements in
river-names and place-names.

DGK