Re: Limigantes

> > > > It occurs to me, why are we discussing this kind of a topic
> > > > here at Cybalist specifically? The Substratum list would seem
> > > > to be more apt:
> > > > http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/substratumlanguages/
> > >
> > > This thread got into the subject of substrates about two
> > > postings ago. It occurs to to me that you are not interested in
> > > debating my proposals, but in shutting me down.
>
> > Your hostility at a suggestion to relocate, by which I mean "for
> > us to continue the discussion there" FYI, to a list specifically
> > dedicated to the current topic surprizes me.
>
> Your aggressive reaction to my suspicion that the purpose of the suggestion you made to take this dicussion elsewhere was that of similar suggestions made by others in the past, namely to shut me up in this forum does not surprise me.

Well we ARE off-topic, which is a good reason to shut up in this forum. Front page of the list:
"our policy is (…) to discourage off-topic chat"
which a discussion of substrates to Uralic clearly falls under. (Substrates to IE langs might too, but that's not for me to decide.)

And "aggression" now? Where are you getting this from? Do I need to add smileys or something?

> > (I do have the full right to withdraw from a discussion if I find
> > it to be of poor standard, or for any other reason, of course.)
>
> We all do, with the concomitant risk that people will think we lost the argument.

Who cares what people who think arguments have "losers" think? ;) Admitting having been wrong is no shame, it only means having learn'd something.

> > Saarikivi's layer has BF a ~ Komi a (generally without Udmurt
> > cognates). The possibly CC layer has BF a ~ Komi o (~ Udmurt u),
> > same as in words inherited from Proto-Uralic. So a word with
> > a ~ a is a good candidate for loaning from BF to Komi, but not
> > for loaning from CC to Pre-Permic (Proto-Permic proper is dated
> > to around the beginning of the 2nd millennium CE).

> > > > You may remember eg.
> > > > *kansa > goz.
>
> That would be relevant to our long discussion of the provenance status of *kans-

Yes, in the traditional model it would date to Proto-Baltic-Finnic or therearound. Not the only such one however. Quoting Saarikivi:
"Even older contacts between Finnic and Permian have been proposed by Koivulehto (1981; 1983:124â€"125; 1989; 177â€"178) who has argued that several Germanic and other early western Indo-European borrowings (e.g. katras ‘herd’, joukko ‘group; crowd’, otsa ‘forehead; end’, kypsä ‘cooked; baked’, ehtiä ‘reach; arrive in time’) have spread from Finnic and Pre-Finnic to Permian languages and Proto-Permian. He has argued that, in addition to a loan etymology from Germanic or other western Indo-European source, the irregular phonological correspondences between Finnic and Permian suggest that these words have spread as borrowings."

(Actually, they aren't quite that irregular. Koivulehto still thought *a > o was irregular, holding *a > u as regular, but the 2nd actually results from Proto-Uralic *ë, which in Finnic merges into *a.)

> > > > > > If you're talking about ALL the words (not just *lama),
> > > > > > the least problematic proposal is to keep them separate
> > > > > > so far.
> > > > >
> > > > > Yes, that is what I am talking about. Standard procedure in
> > > > > cases where words can't be united within the established
> > > > > sound laws for a given language family, but they are too
> > > > > close phonetically and semantically not to be related
> > > > > somehow is to ascribe them to a substrate.
> > > >
> > > > Feel free to substantiate this claim of "too close to not be
> > > > related" at any time.
> > >
> > > Your cluttered statements makes it difficult for me to answer,
> > > because I have to guess at what you mean. I was talking the
> > > general case; that is the procedure. You might mean that I have
> > > made such a claim for the the collection of similar roots in IE
> > > and (Western) FU meaning "lime; soft; bind", and yes, by
> > > implication I have done that. And of course I can't
> > > 'substantiate' my claim that they are phonetically and
> > > semantically similar, because there are no hard rules for what
> > > 'similar' is. In fact, you could deny that they were similar
> > > and make them were separate roots with no historical
> > > connection. Problem is, to any unbiased observer, those roots
> > > *are* similar, to a degree that any linguist would try to find a
> > > common ancestor for them if he saw them in some other language
> > > family.
>
> > I agree they're similar, insofar that they begin with *l and
> > contain a medial nasal or labial (so that part is certainly
> > possible to substantiate, see?)
>
> That's not 'substantiate' in the sense you used it in your previous
> posting.

No, but you only need a different kind of substantiation for the "too close" part, not the "similar" part.

> > Your wording "too close to not be related" (or "any linguistic
> > would try to find a common ancestor for them") however implies
> > that this being coincidental would be implausible. This you have
> > not demonstrated.
>
> Nobody does that. Saarikivi, eg., doesn't do that, and I don't think you should hold me to a different standard

I don't. The difference between you and Saarikivi is that he points out possible loan originals and explains why the attested words are derivable from them. You didn't, you just made an allusion to your usual "*tLa(n)k/p" bag-of-wonders without bothering to work out the details.

If you don't have the loan originals outright (as the case would be in the case of an extinct substrate) you'll need to either reconstruct some (which means you need systematical similarities, not just look-alike similarities), or do the statistics thing.

> > As for how to do it, if you're at a loss of methodology: you
> > could demonstrate regular derivational relationships among these
> > words. Or failing this, you could calculate how many different
> > words with semantics as similar as this, and a shared structure
> > as similar as *l-and-medial-nasal-or-labial, we statistically
> > expect to find in the languages you are taking into account, and
> > to sho that that number is much smaller than the number of forms
> > you listed considered to be separate.
>
> Nobody does that, so I won't.

All historical linguistics is based on regularly deriving words from one another. Inference from statistical properties of lexicons is indeed rarer (I've seen some examples, none of the precise scope I suggested there), but that doesn't render it an invalid method.

> Stop trying to send me on a wild goose chase.

If you are as correct as you believe, it wouldn't be futile: you'd gain an argument that would be convincing to many.

> > (BTW *lauSa at least has been compared to Germanic *lausaz.)
>
>
> > > > > > > > It's not "alternation", it's a regular dialectal
> > > > > > > > development l > v.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > It's not "is", it's "has been proposed to be"
> > > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Using "is" for statements of estabilish'd theory is
> > > > > > perfectly acceptable. "The Earth is the third planet from
> > > > > > the Sun, its mean distance from the Sun is 1.5*10^8 km,
> > > > > > and its mass is 6*10^24 kg".
> > > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Not in a situation in which a theory, established or not, is
> > > > > being discussed, where it amounts to bias.
> > >
> > > > We're not discussing Komi dialectology, we're discussing
> > > > substratal etymology.
> > > >
> >
> > > That sentence does not even begin to make sense. The above was
> > > a discussion of the theory of science.
>
> > So by "a theory" (three quotes up) did you mean "theory of
> > science"?
>
> No, of course not.

What then?

> > I took it to mean "in a situation where we are discussing a
> > particular field",
>
> What 'it'? 'A theory'? You took 'a theory' to mean "in a situation where we are discussing a particular field"?

Try taking things a bit less literally? :) I took "in a situation in which a theory, established or not, is being discussed" to mean "in a situation where we are discussing a particular field".

> > If you did not mean that, what you aim for with your "it's not
> > 'is'" comment remains opaque to me.
>
> I don't think it is, as is clear from your subsequent answer.

You just told my subsequent answer (the one about us not having been discussing Komi dialectology) makes no sense. So no, I most certainly am confused here about what you mean.

To thro out some hypotheses, you *could* have meant that you dispute the existence of said dialectal change, but since you had not said anything about Komi dialectology, I did not find this likely. You also could have meant that referring to any existing theory whatsoever amounts to a bias, but that's so nonsensical/non-sequitur I also did not find it likely. What I found most likely (albeit still baffling) was that you managed to forgot, or failed to notice in the first place, that your original point (about it not being "is") was aim'd at a statement that wasn't about our original topic of substrates. But it seems I was wrong there.

It will be easier for me to find out what you did mean, however, if you'd just elaborate a bit alreddy. You could even have done in the message I'm replying to here, y'kno.

> > > > > Anyway, Pekkanen has some data which might corroborate the
> > > > > scenario you mentioned.
> > > >
> > > (...)
> > >
> > > > > Pekkanen has earlier identified the Sulones as Suiones. That
> > > > > means that the Fenni were the eastern neighbors of the
> > > > > Suiones on the Baltic coast east of the Vistula, ie the
> > > > > Aestii might have been the Baltic Finns, later migrating
> > > > > north under pressure from the Balts arriving from further
> > > > > south, cf. the exonym Eesti.
> > > >
> > >
> > > >
> > > > Those are Proto-Baltic-Finnic / Pre-Permic times.
> >
> > > No, the time Pekkanen is discussing here is the centuries
> > > around the beginning of our era.
>
> > That *is* the timeframe where Proto-Baltic-Finnic is dated. The
> > most recend date I've seen, in J. Häkkinen's "Jatkuvuusperustelut
> > ja saamen kielen leviäminen" suggests about 150-300 CE in
> > particular, concurrent with Proto-Scandinavian.
>
>
> > > > The Vepsian/Karelian ("Ladogan") expansion and the separation
> > > > of the Komis from the Udmurts date to about a millennia later.
> >
> > > When?
>
> > The first centuries of the 2nd millennium CE.
>
> > > I was proposing that the situation Pekkanen describes
> > > corresponds to the situation immediately before the
> > > Vepsian/Karelian ("Ladogan") expansion which would then have
> > > been caused by (the pressure of) refugees from the Baltic
> > > Finnic speaking land of the Aestii.
> >
>
>
> > What arguments would support this?
>
> For the claim that at one time the Aesti spoke Venetic:

Sounds fine so far.

> Now for the idea that the previous language in Aestia was BF, note that the root *gl- of *gl-aN-s "translucent glob" occurs in IE as "freeze (coagulate)" and in Uralic as a word for "coagulated blood"

and so does the root *(j)iN- (approx.!) of IE and FU of the similarly constructed, thus possibly also Venetic, *iN-s "ice". The question of the identity of the language in Aestia prior to Venetic then hangs on the provenance status of these two roots within Uralic.

Zero-grade is an entirely non-Uralic phenomenon. So you're suggesting these roots 1) were taken from Uralic, after which 2) Venetic transform'd them into zero-grade? I suppose the alternation of Germanic *jek- vs. Baltic *idZ- (and remind me, was there a Venetian counterpart?) speaks for something like this.

For _glesum_ an origin from PIE *ghel- "glitter, yellow" seems much better than an Uralic origin. *käl- "blood clot" does not occur in Baltic Finnic or any other southern Uralic branch, and the appearence is also unlike. Amber being fossilized resin is a relativly recent discovery as well.

And the part I'd like to see some arguments for is why you would date the Karelian/Veps expansion a thousand years erlier than it normally is dated.

> > This is far off from the standard view. For starters, if the
> > speakers of Proto-Baltic-Finnic were the Aestii, then the
> > Vepses and Karelians descend from them, rather than being
> > contemporary with them.
>
> In part at least, it would seem.
>
> Torsten

The point is that, linguistically, they are entirely Baltic-Finnic, and thus they must postdate Proto-BF.

John Vertical