From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Message: 70262
Date: 2012-10-24
On Wednesday 24 October 2012 18:59:35 Brian M. Scott wrote:
> At 2:45:01 AM on Wednesday, October 24, 2012, Tavi wrote:
> [...]
> > As you've already made your mind,
>
> No, the evidence with which I'm familiar did that for me.
Indeed. Hittite and the other Anatolian languages are full of
regular correspondences with the other IE languages; there is
no point denying that. Yet, some of the features reconstructed
for Late PIE, such as the feminine gender and the three-way
aspectual opposition in the past tense, are absent from them,
so it seems that Late PIE innovated them after the Anatolian
branch went its own ways.
There really are no "preconceived ideas" involved here; it is
the result of scholarly endeavours into the relevant languages.
> You, on the other hand, appear to share with Shivraj a habit
> of ignoring anything that doesn't fit your preconceived
> notions, though yours are certainly very different from his.
Indeed. Tavi likes to speak a lot about "preconceived ideas"
which to fit others bend the facts, but it is actually *him*
who does that. Of course, handbook knowledge can be wrong
and it has been amended several times in the past and will
continue to be amended in the future, but it is meaningless
to claim bullshit about it the way Tavi does.
I wonder, though, what Tavi thinks about Shivraj's ideas.
I guess that in his model, Sanskrit is a native language of
India that got influenced by "Kurganic", but I don't know.
> > you spare myself from trying to convince you. My time is
> > too valuable to waste it with fruitless discussions.
>
> Your time is also apparently too valuable to waste providing
> evidence for your opinions, which is why no one takes them
> seriously. Considering how much time you waste spouting
> them in the first place, it's really quite remarkable how
> unwilling you are to support them; why, one might almost
> think that you couldn't.
Making a bold claim is cheap; buttressing it with evidence is
costly, and Tavi is not ready to meet that investment, probably
because he just doesn't have that evidence at hand. (He used
to spew a lot of nonsense about "Vasco-Caucasian" loanwords in
just about every language of Europe back when he was on the
ZBB, and he still does so on his blog.)
What regards my own hypotheses about the Old European Hydronymy,
the Linearbandkeramik culture and all that, I openly admit that
they are right now just *working hypotheses* which need to be
tested against the available evidence. It may well turn out
that the facts are unsupportive. This is difficult terrain,
and as historical linguistics is just a hobby of mine, and I
have plenty of other things to do, my work on these matters,
I have to admit, progresses only slowly, and I am not in any
positions to *claim* anything, which is why I don't.
My forays into the Old European Hydronymy so far seem to
indicate that there is a core area in central Europe where the
network of names is especially dense, and an extended area to
the north, west and south of that, where the network is less
dense. My hypothesis is that the language family reflected in
the OEH originated in the core area and spread into the extended
area later.
As the names do not show the "normal" phonological developments
of the IE languages in which they are attested (especially the
*/a/-dominated vocalism looks un-IE), they must have been adopted
from substratum languages spoken in the area before the IE
languages spread there.
The question is when the "OEH family" was established. I consider
it unlikely that the language family in question is earlier than
the Neolithic, because before the Neolithic, the conditions
necessary for the spread of a language family over such a large
area were not met in central and western Europe. So we get a
Neolithic time window for the "OEH family".
Now, the core area of the "OEH family" resembles the area of the
Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture of Neolithic central Europe.
Most archaeologists assume that the spread of Neolithic farming
in that area was demic, i.e., brought about by farmers moving
into lands previously inhabited by foragers, and assimilating
the forager population. Such a migration of course leads to the
establishment of a new language. This makes it likely that the
LBK people spoke the "Proto-OEH language". The spread of the
OEH into the extended area would have been by the expansion of
daughter cultures of the LBK culture.
What can be said about the OEH languages? Not much, I must
concede. Hans Krahe has proposed IE etymologies for most of
these names which, despite the fact that the names probably
were adopted from pre-IE substratum languages, mostly seem
to make sense. Thus, it looks as if the language in question
was related to Indo-European (which is compatible with the
prevailing view that the LBK farmers immigrated from the
east, probably from the lower Danube area, not far from the
most plausible homeland of PIE).
Of course, the original meanings of the names are *unknown*,
and can only be recovered where a particular name element
correlates with a salient feature of the objects named thus.
This is the case with about a dozen central European place
names which contain the element */hal-/ - and all denote
places where salt is produced or has been produced in the
past. This seems to indicate that we are dealing with the
LBK people's word for 'salt' here. (And it looks quite
similar to PIE *sh2al-, which is in agreement with the
"Para-IE" hypothesis laid about above.) Other name roots
still require research into such correlations.
There are alternative theories, most notably that of Theo
Vennemann, who proposed that the OEH was "Vasconic", i.e.
from languages related to Basque, but I have seen his
etymologies, and found that they are weaker than Krahe's
and mostly rely on brute force; also, the distribution of
the river names (according to a map I found in one of
Vennemann's own articles!) shows a gap between the Ebro
and Garonne rivers, i.e. exactly in the only area where
we know that Vasconic languages were spoken at any time.
This speaks against Vennemann; yet, such ideas must be
considered, and may only be rejected on the ground of
solid evidence speaking against them.
All this is just a beginning. The hypotheses I have laid
out above require further research. Which names correlate
with which geographical features? Are some roots or suffixes
regionally skewed? The next step, obviously, is to draw a
detailed map of the names in question. I am planning to do
that some day, but don't hold your breath for it.
OK. End of this digression.
> [...]
>
> >> Apparently you don't know what 'ad hominem' means -- unless,
> >> of course, the scare quotes are an indication that you're
> >> using the term in some non-standard sense.
> >>
> >> That's an accurate description of your posts. If you don't
> >> like it, blame your own incompetence and your insistence on
> >> putting that incompetence on display.
> >
> > Speaking in sporting terms, you're an unworthy opponent.
>
> In order to be an opponent, I'd have to take your
> pronouncements seriously, and I don't: you've never made a
> case for one of them. I suspect that you honestly believe
> that you have, which is rather sad but beside the point.
Well put. I for my part cannot take Tavi's challenge of the
main supporting pillars of Indo-Europeanist handbook knowledge
seriously. It just makes no sense. It is true that, for
instance, Pokorny reconstructed PIE roots for some words which
have areally skewed distributions and are thus uncertain to
actually be of PIE vintage; but I *did* work my way through
the items limited to "western" IE languages (Italic, Celtic,
Germanic, Baltic, Slavic), and found no phonological
peculiarities (such as unexplained */a/-vocalism) that would
point at substratum loanwords in most of them. They probably
were dialectal formations in Late PIE.
At any rate, the percentage of words without good PIE etymologies
is not negligible in most IE languages, and those words surely
provide a window on lost languages; but *all* IE languages
show a good quantity of roots and affixes that can be confidently
reconstructed for a common ancestor. Attempts at alternative
explanations have been made by people like Nikolai Marr (whose
theories, when dogmatized by the Stalin regime, conjured 20 years
of darkness upon Russian linguistics whose shadow still lingers
today); all of them turned out to be flawed. The revolution
Tavi is dreaming of will never happen.
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