Re: Pre-Greek loanwords

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

>
> --- 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'Hw�
> <http://newstar.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&basename=/data/ca\
> uc/caucet&text_number=2315&root=config> '2'. IMHO PIE '2' would be a
> borrowing of the prefixed NWC form.

I have difficulty correlating 'and, moreover, indeed', etc. with the numeral 'two'. PIE *kWe-twer- and *pen-kWe probably acquired *kWe from counting rituals, and the discrepancy between *seks and *sweks might be due to dissimilation, *sweks-kWe > *seks-kWe.

> > 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.

Poor naming, since others have used "Pontic" differently. A better choice would be "Balkano-Danubian". The stop system in my model had five points of articulation, preceding the centum-satem business. Georgiev's Th-P was satem, with a much shallower time-depth.

> > 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
> �lite 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).

Most languages which have been studied in depth have stratification, but "hybridization" is a poor term for this process.

> 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.

Regardless, attempts to find a close relationship between Pre-Greek and Etruscan have failed.

> 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.

Do you have an opinion on Seefluth's Uralo-Eskimo?

> > 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
> el�ia '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.

Obviously, nobody has yet published a sufficiently large body of good comparanda to convince scholars in general.

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

It makes more sense than assuming arbitrary prothesis. My pet peeve is the failure to distinguish *h2 from *h4, and the knee-jerk assignment of Sanskrit tenues aspiratae to *h2.

> > 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.

Yes. A relic is the assumption by Beekes, Rix, Steinbauer and others that Etr. -i is a locative suffix, which yields some absurd textual interpretations.

DGK