Re: Ligurian

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

>
> > AFAIK, nobody has ever insinuated Iberian could be an IE language.

In

> > fact, it looks more similar to Basque than to any other language.

(...)

>
> Precisely. You already know that I find convincing the proposal of

an IE

> affiliation of Basque and therefore of Iberian. You already know that

You

> more than strongly disagree. I've said that just in order to explain

why

> I'd insinuated Iberian could be an IE language
>

You've got to face the *hard* evidence that neither Basque nor Iberian
are demonstrably IE.

> Apart from Etruscan, whose arrival in Etruria may be relatively
> late (according to the everlasting debate about its origin from
> Anatolia - be it an Indo-European language or not), the linguistic
> colonization of Europe in Prehistory is in no way a single-place trip;
> every language can have taken part to the first anthropization of the
> Continent.
>
> > You should have said the *successive* colonizations of Europe,

because

> > they were two of them (Aurignician and Gravettian) in the Upper
> > Paleolithic, followed from a more recent one in the Neolithic.
>
> I teach these matters and I know the succession of colonizations. A
> collective singular "colonization" for "all colonizations" should be
> understood by everybody, but the fact that you have misunderstood it

raises

> a suspect. In that case I was compelled to say "colonization" without

-s

> because - you will agree - if I had said "the linguistic colonizations

of

> Europe in Prehistory are in no way a single-place trip" my sentence

would

> have lost much of its logic: since it's you who appeared to maintain

that -

> shortly said - "if VC, then no IE", I've simply notied that already

the

> Aurignacian colonization can well have brought more than a single

language

>

Unfortunately, this is utterly indemonstrable. However, what really
matters is your apparent *emphasis* on the first colonization, which
implictly minorizes the impact of the following ones. By contrast,
Villar states that the Aurignacian episode wouldn't have left any
detectable linguistic traces in Europe. And although I won't go so far
as Villar, I've got to recognize that linguistic impact of the
Gravettian and the Neolithic colonization episodes was much more
important than the Aurignacian one.

> > Tavi: I've given several reasons which lead to that conclusion, and

this

> > is precisely why my own model is closer to Villar's than to Alinei's

or

> > your own.
>
> anyway Villar is closer to me than to you, and the three of us are
> equally far from Alinei
>

Not really, because Villar's model consist of a very early "paleo-IE"
which fragmented into several paleo-dialects detectable in the ancient
topoponymy and hydronymy. Only much later the historical IE languages
emerged, arising from the "explosive" (in Villar's own words) expansion
of the Steppes dialect in the Chalcolithic-Bronze Age, replacing other
linguistic varieties which acted as substrates.

> > The only real language IE-ists' "PIE" can at best approximate is the
> > paleo-dialect of the Steppes,
>
> this is the classical hypothesis of, among many others, Marija
> Alseikaite Gimbutiene and James Patrick Mallory. Mere hypothesis.
> I agree (against Alinei) that Kurgan peoples probably spoke PIE
>

Not "PIE" but a paleo-IE dialect.

> with Renfrew, I think that PIE was spoken also before them, for

instance from

> Anatolian agriculturalists;
>

I don't think Anatolian farmers spoke IE but most likely VC languages.

> which apparently acted as a superstrate to other paleo-varieties in
> the genesis of the historical IE languages.
>
> with this I agree (although my agreement in no way makes more

probable

> this hypothesis)
>

Unlike Villar, I think paleo-IE dialects aren't exclusively detectable
in the ancient toponymy and hydronymy but also in the IE (not "PIE")
lexicon thanks to sound correspondences. In some cases, we've got
doublets (and even triplets) of unrelated "roots" in the traditional
model but corresponding to different paleo-dialects.

> > > You don't even consider a scenario in which
> > > Your hypothesis has 90% or 50% or 20% of probability, according to

the

> > > amount of other competing hypotheses.
>
> > I'm afraid this isn't a matter of quantity but rather of *quality*.

The

> > postulate of "all things being equal" doesn't hold here.
>
> Bhrihskwobhloukstroy:
> please state the unity of measurement for quality. Obviously, it

can't

> be your or mine taste
>

See below.

> > My model isn't actually "the opposite extreme" of yours. In fact, I

agree

> > with you that the last common ancestor of all IE languages was

spoken in

> > the Upper Palaeolithic, but unfortunately it has little to do with

the

> > "PIE" reconstructed in the 19th century by neogrammarians using the
> > comparative method.
>
> Many people would agree that PIE has never been spoken as such so
> remotely as in the Palaeolithic.
>

I must insist that "PIE" refers to the entity reconstructed by IE-ists
using the comparative method, but not to the actual "last common
ancestor of all IE languages", to which I'd prefer "paleo-IE" or, if
you prefer, "Paleolithic PIE".

> People - like you and Villar - who put PIE in the Palaeolithic

don't

> agree, on the contrary, with the usual reconstruction of it and assign

this

> latter to the Chalcolithic.
>

That's right. Conventional "PIE" is more like a transverse section of
the IE family at that time.

> Alinei, for its own, assigns PIE in its usually reconstructed form

(but

> without any trace of laryngeals) to Palaeolithic and no later.
> I assign PIE in its usually reconstructed form - with laryngeals -

to

> Palaeo-, Meso-, Neo- and Chalcolithic.
>

Both approaches are huge misrepresentations, involving a lot of
unwarranted (and most unlikely) assumptions and ignoring linguistic
data.

> On the other side, both you and I assign PIE to Palaeolithic, so
> where's the dogmatism? You propose a reconstruction and I propose

another

> one, which only happens to coincide with the one assigned to

Chalcolithic

> IE not only by any 'traditional' school, but by you as well.
> The difference is therefore that I postulate a longer duration of

PIE

> than you.
>

This is the part which *doesn't* work at all.

> > The problem is the amount of valid inherited etymologies in the
> > mainstream PIE framework is actually lower than expected, especially

in

> > the case Latin, thus indicating the model is inadequate.__.
>
> Please explain:
> 1) your criterion of validity
>

An *uncontroversial* etymology strictly obtained by derivation from
"PIE" using std sound correspondences.

> 2) (optional) a quantification of the expected amount of valid
> inherited etymologies, especially in the case of Latin.
>

Take for example Matasovic's or De Vaan's dictionary and try finding the
amount of "inherited" etymologies over the total. I bet you'll get lower
figures that expected, say 40%-60% and possibly less in the case of
Latin.