Re: Pre-Greek loanwords

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:

>
> > Besides Thracian/Pelasgian, IE sources would include also Phyrgian. For
> > example, it has been suggested that Greek dithúrhambos contains
> > Phrygian *dithúr '4' < *kWetwer-. See this article by Fred
> > Woudhuizen:
> > http://www.talanta.nl/pdfs/08-Fred_C._Woudhuizen-Frits_Waanders.pdf
>
> That is incompatible with what we know about Phrygian phonology, and ignores the form <lathurambos> (Etym. Mag.) which appears to come from a different Pre-Greek dialect.
>

Ok, this evidence rules out a Phrygian oirign.

> I agree with the connection between *-thur- of the Pre-Greek words and the zero-grade of PIE *(kWe)-twer-, also between *thri- of <thriambos> and the zero-grade of PIE *trei-.
>

I'd tentatively link this *kWe- to Vasco-Caucasian *q'Hwä '2'. IMHO PIE '2' would be a borrowing of the prefixed NWC form.

> As you may recall, in 2008 I argued that this is a "mid-range" connection and Pre-Greek belongs to a "Para-IE" group.
>

Yes, your "West Pontic", whose stop system is largely similar to Georgiev's Thraco-Pelasgian.

> I am not sure that this is the best way to proceed. It might make more sense to redefine "Indo-European" downward, as was effectively done when Sturtevant's "Indo-Hittite" model was scrapped in favor of an Anatolian branch of IE. [...] The branching between Pre-Greek and our usual PIE requires a greater time-depth than the Anatolian split.
>

IMHO traditional PIE mostly reflects the dialect of the Steppes, which underwent a quick expansion in the Chalcolithic-Bronze Age period in a series of language replacement processes resulting from acculturation by élite dominance, which I call "kurganization". This is reflected as a superstrate in most of what later emerged as the historical IE languages. But under this superstrate they survived to a variable extent parts of the replaced languages in lexicon, morphology and phonology. That is, IE languages are actually hybrid or *multi-layer* (a concept I myself adpated from Georgiev).

Pre-Greek would reflect one or more languages directly descending from the ones spoken in Neolithic Europe which survived to kurganization. One of these survivors was Etruscan itself.

But as suggested by Villar's and my own researches, both "Kurgan" and "pre-Kurgan" IE branches would be part of a larger Eurasiatic phylum which included Altaic (and possibly other families such as Eskimo-Aleutian), and whose common ancestor was spoken in the Upper Palaeolithic.

> At any rate I find Georgiev's Pelasgian unacceptable, since too many ad-hoc assumptions are made in order to force comparanda.
>

While I think many of the proposed (either Georgiev's or not) Pre-Greek IE etymologies are flawed, others might hold. For example, Greek eláia 'olive' < Mycenean *e-laiwa can be linked to a root *(s)leib- 'to slip, slippery' vel sim, although surely mediated by a non-IE language (e.g. Minoan). This calls for prehistoric
language replacement and/or contact processes.

BTW, I think the practice of reconstructing PIE "laryngeals" from every Greek prothetic vowel is rather absurd.

> If this is the same Woudhuizen who derived Etruscan <ci> '3' from PIE via *tri- > *kri- > *ki-, keep the salt shaker handy.
>

Yes, this guy thinks Etruscan is a "colonial Luwian dialect", which is simply another version of the "Etrusco-Anatolian" hypothesis of which IE-ists such as Georgiev and Adrados were so fond.