The Finnic issue (Was Re: [tied] Re: w-glide)

>
> >
> > > So, under no circumstances can Finnic tribes have lived closer
> > > to where Tacitus places the Fenni?
>
>
> > GK: Ptolemy also places them pretty far north in his chapter on
> > Germania: in Scandia to be precise, north of the Gautae.
> > Schutte has a theory about the presence of "Finni" below the Goths
> > on the Vistula. He thinks that particular sequence applies to the
> > Baltic coast and was artificially positioned further south. I
> > don't particularly agree with this version, but there is something
> > else of value in his analyses. He has shown that the "Ptolemy
> > constructor" very frequently misplaces or "double
> > places" individual peoples (lots of examples). So independently of
> > the archaeological difficulties, one has to ask why the "Finni" of
> > the Vistula should be exempted from such an interpretation. Have a
> > look at his work and see which other alleged misplacements you
> > would disagree with.
> >
>
> These are the linguistic reasons I think there existed a 'Southern
> Finnic' group:
>  /cut for economy GK/
> ****GK: I don't question any of this. The problem remains as to
> whether Ptolemy's "Finni" south of the Goths represent such a group
> in a late time frame. Your linguistic arguments have no conclusive
> applicability here. They refer to a situation long gone, when those
> who had assimilated them were themselves being assimilated. 

Yes, we're talking origin here.

> The counterpoints are not only that Ptolemy also places Finns in the
> north, again very close to "Goths" (Gautae), but that 
> archaeologically the only cultures we know for that period south of
> the Vistula Goths are the LaTenized ones.

Okay.

> So we would need to hold that Ptolemy's "Finni" were somehow
> included.

Yes.

> Which means not only that these Finns had culturally nothing in
> common with Tacitus' Finns as discussed in Germania, but also that
> the groups whence they evolved had also abandoned similar or related
> cultures (to those described by Tacitus) for hundreds of years (the
> source cultures of LaTenized groups have no known affinities to
> those of the Finnic areas further north).

As now defined. In denying Ptolemy's southern Finnoi you are also denying Tacitus' Fenni. I can't follow you there. Also I don't understand why you want to apply Schütte's doublet reduction here if you don't believe in the results of applying it elsewhere?

Check out Lehr-Spławiński's arguments for Western Finnics in
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/64012

> A Ptolemean displacement seems more likely.

I disagree.

> Somehow I doubt the Finnic dialects were well enough known at that
> time for authors such as Tacitus or Ptolemy or others to recognize
> "Finns" akin to the less developed northern groups in LaTenized
> populations, and label them appropriately.*****

'Finn', because it contains an /f/, cannot be Finno-Ugric nor Balto-Slavic, and since it contains a geminate /n/ it's most likely Germanic, also since it exists in the Germanic languages today as the exonym of a Finni-Ugric speaking people. The 'labeling' was thus done by some Germanic-speaking neighbor of those Fenni/Phinnoi and not by Ptolemy, Tacitus nor any other Mediterranean writer. If we want to claim that 'Fenni' and 'Phinnoi' referred to a non-FU speaking people we will have to make a scenario for when Germanic *finn- switched either from meaning "non-FU speaking" to "FU speaking" in the case of today's Finns, or from meaning "FU speaking" to "non-FU speaking" in the case of the Fenni/Phinnoi. I don't have one.

BTW, since the group of Magyar invaders seem to have been polyglot, and since they untypically for a FU group were cattle nomads, one has to ask oneself why the FU language Hungarian came out on top? Were there residual FU speakers in Pannonia who found it easier to learn another FU language than an IE one? Some entries in UEW, mysteriously, have only cognates in Finnish-Estonian and Hungarian and none in the minor FU languages of present Russia.


Torsten