Re: Ligurian

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Bhrihskwobhloukstroy <bhrihstlobhrouzghdhroy@...> wrote:

>
> Bhrihskwobhloukstroy:
>

Did you know your hashes (-) cause Yahoo web engine to *crash* whenever I reply to your messages if I haven't erased them before?

> If You think that the Orobic form has /F/, how do You explain its
> rendering as [p] (same for Pliny's name, Plinius Caluos, with caluos =
> Lithg plynas; The Elder Pliny was born on the Larius)? And how would
> You explain [p] in neighbouring Parre (Pliny's Parra), whose
> phonological context (like Porcobera's) doesn't fit Your rule?
>

In the same way we've got a Latinized form Complu:tum from Celtiberian *Comblu:tom, with the labial conserved.

It looks like the loss of Proto-Celtic *F didn't happensimultaneously in all Celtic languages, and some of them retained it in the /bl/ cluster long enough to appear in writing (e.g. Gallaecian Bleitasama), and Goidelic has also -bl- intervocally. But in the case of Celtiberian, analogy with -br- < IE *-pr- could have also been involved.

The case of Porco- in Porco-bera is different, as it doesn't look to be Celtic at all. You can't simply assume all the toponyms from a given area belong to a single language (either Celtic or not). And even compounds toponyms can got their members from two different languages (e.g. Ipon-uba). Villar explains this in more detail.

> PIE was a 'diasystem', diatopic constraints affect the varying
> territorial distribution of the word along time, diachronic
> constraints only mean that somtimes somewhere the word has gone out of
> usage, but as a product of the language system it has always been in
> existence at least from the beginning of the PIE phase.
>

As I see it, the "PIE" reconstructed by IE-ists represents a later stage (and certainly not a real protolanguage) within the IE family whose antiquity is Late Neolithic at the most (in some cases it's even more recent), so it it can't valid for older stages.

I'm afraid this is an intrinsic limitation of the comparative method when only internal IE data is used as input. In order to get further back in the past, you need also comparative data from other families such as Altaic.

> "Español" is a Castilian word,
>

Likely borrowed from Occitan, as we would expect a native form *españón instead.

> > I've seen serious proposal of deriving Basque and Burushaski from PIE
> > in despite of they not being IE languages. Even assuming there was no
> > language replacement anywhere IE languagas were historically attested (a
> > most unlikely scenario), the monolithic PIE model can't go further back
> > than late Neolithic. Anything which happened before can't be explained
> > by that model.
>
> I agree with the theories of the IE affiliation of Basque and
> Burushaski (and this is certainly not part of a "Traditional Model"),
>

You can't be *serious*!

> as for the rest I don't subscribe the "Traditional Model", I believe
> that after an initial monolithic PIE (spoken in Early Upper
> Palaeolithic by a few hundreds thousand people) there have been
> hundreds of regional PIEs. Stating that "the monolithic PIE model
> can't go further back than late Neolithic" means that it's You that
> subscribe the "Traditional Model", for this matter, but this is Your
> right. Stating that "Anything which happened before can't be explained
> by that model" is simply falsified by me. This is the end of Your
> negationism.
>

Not really. You're simply projecting traditional "PIE" outside its chronological scope many millenia into the past, instead of replacing it with a new reconstruction valid for that period.

> I know very well (You write an average of 20 messages per day)
> that Your model is different, but You CAN'T deny that my model works
> at least as well as Yours. You may don't like it, but it works, unless
> You demonstrate that my model is *internally* incoherent. Until You
> limit Yourself to write generic negations, You are in fact implicitly
> admitting that I'm right.
>

Your model relies on a bunch of unwarranted assumptions such as the absence of prehistoric language replacements or that PIE morphology existed in the Upper Paleolithic.

> (...) PIE *mh2k'- 'raise, grove' is a sufficient cognate.
>
> > Even if you
> > were right (I don't think so), this along won't explain why the Celtic
> > word acquired the specific meaning of 'son' regardless of what other IE
> > languages did. Perhaps you might remember I had a similar discussion
> > with Brian regarding De Vaan's etymology of Latin vitrum 'glass, woad'
> > from IE *wed-ro- 'water-like'.
>
> 'raised' (*-wo-PPP) > 'son'. Too hypothetical?
>

What about the other IE languages?

> > AFAIK, Celtic isn't
> > a Vasco-Caucasian language, so there's no possible gentic link.
>
> Thank You very much for Your precious piece of information! Do You
> think I'm claiming that Celtic is a Vasco-Caucasian language?
> Consider for instance Catalan and English. Catalan isn't a
> Germanic language nor is English a Romance language. Nevertheless,
> there are genetic links between the two. These links are called
> Indo-European. Similarly, Celtic isn't a Vasco-Caucasian language and
> Basque isn't a Celtic language; nevertheless, there can be genetic
> links other than directly in a same language class. I call these links
> Indo-European or, hypothetically, Nostratic; You (and many others)
> refuse an IE affiliation of Basque, do You refuse a genetic link
> between Vasco-Caucasian and IE? If yes, Your statement is right (in
> Your model); if no, it's wrong (even in Your model).
>

I don't refuse any genetic link apriori, but you must be aware of the limitations of the comparative method as regarding *distant* relationships. The intrinsical flaw of "Nostratic" theories is they posit genetic relationships on the basis of loanwords, because they're unable to differentiate them from *inherited* lexicon.

> (...) Anyway, how would You explain *makwo-s (with just one /kw/)?
>
> > Which language is this supposed to belong to? All we've got is Goidelic
> > *makk-o- and P-Celtic *map-o-.
>
> So, You don't even accept that P-Celtic /p/ reflects PIE */kw/
>

For that matter, I don't think we're dealing with an IE word.

> (otherwise You would have understood, wouldn't You?). Are You assuming
> that I'm making a gross mistake in deriving - at least as a working
> hypothesis - *mapos from *makwos? And that IE studies are grossly
> wrong? Is this diachronic possibility wrong?
>

How would explain then the geminate -kk- in Goidelic? Your hypothesis of this being an IE word is most unlikely.