--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:
>
> > > You surely weren't expecting useful discussion from Tavi,
> > > were you? He doesn't want to do linguistics: he wants to
> > > make grand, sweeping claims about prehistory, which he then
> > > 'supports' with pre-scientific pseudo-linguistics.
> >
> > No more than Gimbutas, Mallory, Anthony & Co. with their warfare
Kurgan
> > PIE-speakers who were supposed to have conquered most of Europe with
the
> > aid of horse-driven chariots. See for example the introduction of
this
> > recent (2012) article by Guus Kroonen:
> >
http://www.academia.edu/2604857/An_Akkadian_loanword_in_Pre-Greek_on_the\
\
> > _etymology_of_Greek_and_garlic
>
> The evidence upon which an /a/-prefix in Pre-Greek is erected is not
particularly convincing. The Greek words for 'lightning' with a- may
simply have been folk-etymologically influenced by _aste:r_ 'star'.
Elsewhere in Europe, both OHG _aruz_ 'ore' and Latin _raudus_ look like
forms of IE 'red', _raudus_ probably from Illyrian or Japygian with the
simple /o/-grade (PIE *h1roudHo-) found in OE _re:ad_, etc. Pre-Gmc.
*arud- looks like zero-grade (PIE *h1rudH-) in a language which treated
initial preconsonantal laryngeals as Macedonian did, with _abrouwes_
'eyebrows' (Hes. -ou- for -u(:)-; -t- ms. error for -w-) against Grk.
_ophru:s_ (PIE *h3bHruh{x}-). Likewise OHG _amsala_ 'ousel, blackbird'
against Lat. _merula_ suggests an IE root *h{x}mes- with the same
laryngeal treatment in the Pre-Gmc. IE lg. The alleged connection
between Gallo-Latin _alauda_ and OE _la:werce_ (etc.) is, as they say,
"del tutto campata nell'aria".
>
In my opinion, this a- and other prothetic vowels (mostly found in
Greek) amount to an old prefix containing a "laryngeal". I've
indentified some of these prefixes in other languages families and
especially in names of plants and animals.
Also the IE 'red' word you quoted comes from a 'copper' Wanderwort
(Sumerian urudu) which underwent a semantic shift from 'copper/red
metal'to 'red'. Actually, most color names are *derived* from concrete
nouns and not the other way around.
> It seems to me that Schrijver, Kroonen, and their ilk should be
putting more effort into identifying and characterizing Indo-European
substrate languages before shoehorning everything without an obvious
etymology in attested languages into a Pre-IE substrate.
>
Contrarily to Beekes, which (rather naïvely) considers Pre-Greek to
be a *single* language, I think they're several substrates, both IE and
non-IE. One of these is Georgiev's "Pelasgian", roughly equivalent to
your "West Pontic". Unfortunately, one can't expect these an other
ortodox IE-ists to made significant advances unless there's a change of
paradigm in IE studies.