Re: V-, B-

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

>
> > > > The notion that Indo-Iranian-speakers inhabited pre-Celtic
> > > > Britain might be jarring to some; hopefully stiff upper lips
> > > > can be kept.
> > >
> > > I don't think a-vocalism alone is enough to characterize
> > > Alteuropäisch as Indo-Iranian. On might imagine early IE

dialects

> > > in Europe not having undergone ablauting (*a > e, o, zero), or
> > > gone ablauting > de-ablauting like Indo-Iranian. Note that the
> > > Vandals (with non-ablauted /a/) at the mouth of the Oder (cf.
> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vineta
> > > ) are connected archaeologically with Vend-syssel (with
> > > ablauted /e/)
> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendsyssel
> > > and that the Langobardi, when they lived west of the Elbe were
> > > called Vinnili (with Germanic *-en- > *-in-, from

ablauted /e/).

> > > From that it seems ablauting was dialectal in
> > > Alteuropäisch/Venetic.
> >
> > Who gave the Vandals their name?
>
> I don't think there's any indication it's an exonym.

They lived near Sarmatia, so if their name is indeed equivalent to
Venelli or Venetuli (i.e. 'Little Veneti', separated from the rest),
it could be an Iranian deformation, with /a/ substituted for */e/.

On the other hand the British Damnii had a town called Vandogara or
Vanduaria (now Paisley), so perhaps the Vandali are based on a
different root, e.g. *wendh- 'to turn'. If we cannot be certain
about their name, we cannot blithely assume that the Vandali were
Veneti who merged */e/ (and presumably */o/) with /a/.

> > They spoke an East Germanic language, so they were not
> > LINGUISTICALLY Veneti,
>
> Nope. The only reason their language, of which we know nothing, is
> classed as East Germanic, is that they lived in the eastern part of
> the later Germania. One thing we do know, however, is that their
> archaeological culture, that of the Lugii, is different from the
> Przeworsk one, but similar to that in Vendsyssel etc. I think that

at

> least as the two cultures can be discerned as separate, they were
> Venetic-speaking.

Perhaps, but since they failed to write their names on their pots, we
cannot know what language they cursed in when they dropped one.

> > just as the Slavic Wends of Lusatia were not.
>
> They were too. I think the Slav languages expanded westwards with

the

> Ariovistus campaign.

MUCH too early. Before the Huns, the Slavs were not likely to have
enlisted in foreign armies. The great westward expansion of Slavs
got going 50 or 100 years after the depopulation of the Restgermanen
(which in my opinion points to a great plague, ignored by Byzantine
historians since it occurred far inside barbarian lands; I cannot
fathom ALL East Germanic peoples abandoning perfectly good lands).

> > The Germans evidently retained a folk-memory of *Weneto:s between
> > the Oder and the Vistula, just as other *Weneto:s west of the

Elbe

> > were remembered as Vinnili, and in the place-names noted by Hans
> > Kuhn.
>
> Not just in Germany.
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/49754
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/1061
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absalon

Like the Volcae, whose name in various forms became attached to
completely different peoples.

DGK