--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
> --- On Wed, 4/22/09, Francisco Antonio Doria <doriagen@...> wrote:
>
> > I wouldn't call Margalit Finkelberg an amateur.
>
> But you have not given us anything at all concrete to work with
> from her book. The -tt- and -nth- stuff has been bandied around
> since at least Palmer in the 1930s and I'm sure much longer. What
> new and useful information does she provide?
See Finkelberg's discussion of Greek -ssos and -nthos suffixes at
http://tinyurl.com/cas5mm
She writes that these suffixes can be accounted for as "typically Anatolian or, to be more precise, Luwian."
It has come to be widely accepted that Greek speakers were preceded in Greece by speakers of an IE language of the Anatolian branch, similar to Luwian, which would have been current in Greece in the 3rd mill. BCE, and which, as some scholars think, could even have originated as an offshoot of Proto-Anatolian at a time when the latter language was still being spoken in the SE Balkans -- namely, without requiring a prehistoric immigration of Anatolian speakers into Greece from Turkey; however, see the following reservations against Anatolian languages (and, the more so, Luwian alone) being a source for early loan words in Mycenaean Greek made by Anna Morpurgo-Davies in her paper "The Linguistic Evidence: Is There Any?," in G. Cadogan (ed.), _The End of the Early Bronze Age in the Aegean_, Leiden, Brill, 1986, pp. 125-137:
1) Greek -nthos suffix derived from Anatolian -nda (< -nd-/-nt-):
In the 2nd mill. BCE -(a)nda and -wanda place-names occur in the whole of the Hittite Empire, and they may be connected with PIE
*-nt- (and the omnipresent -nt- suffix of Hittite and Luwian), and ultimately with PIE *-went-. Morpurgo-Davies wonders why Greek would have borrowed Anatolian -nd-/-nt- in the form -nth- against the expected -nt- or -nd- (cp. E. Laroche's derivation of the Greek word elephas [gen. elephantos] `ivory' from the Hittite-Luwian word lahpa through the addition of a prothetic e- and with Greek -nt- possibly reflecting an Anatolian -nt- extension).
2) Greek -ssos/-ttos suffixes derived from Anatolian -(s)sa:
In the 2nd mill. BCE -(s)sa place-names occur in the whole of the Hittite Empire, and this suffix may be taken as the neuter plural of the Common Anatolian genetival suffix -(s)sa/i-, Luwian -assi- (perhaps from PIE *-osyo). Morpurgo-Davies states that the alternation -ssos/-ttos in Greek indicates that the earlier form of the Greek suffix must have been something like *-tsos, which does not match phonetically with Anatolian -(s)sa, the suggested source of the putative loan. She further states that there are Greek names which end in accented -ssos and others which end in unaccented -ssos, and that there are Greek -ssos names which have -ttos equivalents in Attic and Greek -ssos names which do not, the resulting impression being that one cannot compare the -ssos/-ttos names as a whole with the -(s)sa names of Anatolia.
3) Greek -unna/-unê suffixes derived from the Luwian ethnic-forming suffix -(u)wa(n)ni- > -un(n)i- (cp. Hittite -umana-):
Morpurgo-Davies states that this Luwian suffix is attested starting from the end of the 2nd mill. BCE only, so that it can hardly have influenced Mycenaean Greek names; the earlier, Common Anatolian form of the suffix, *-uwan- (< PIE *-wen-?), might in principle have been `Hellenized' as -unna/-unê, but this cannot be taken as an indication of a specifically *Luwian* influence on Mycenaean Greek.
Hope this helps,
Francesco