--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:
>
> Sumerian _urud_ 'copper' (the -u is the Akkadian nominative suffix
from glossaries) is in my opinion borrowed from Balkano-Danubian *wrod-
'red',
>
Perhaps a better reconstruction would be *wrud-. However, it's anything
but easy to explain how the word could have reached Southern Mesopotamy
from the Balkans, unless you align yourself with Casule and his theory
of Burushaski being an offshoot of Paleo-Balkan IE.
> cognate with PIE *h1r(e)udH-.
>
As I said before, Greek e- in words such as e-ruthrós is a *prefix*,
possibly from a fossilized article *?i- (hence h1 = ?), so the bare root
would be *reudh- ~ *rudh- (please notice I keep traditional "voiced
aspirated" for the sake of clarity, not because I endorse them).
Otherwise, you'd have a hard time explaining sound correspondences of
the initial consonant.
> We are not talking about a specialized color like mauve or taupe. All
of us have cut ourselves and seen blood, and we label it red.
>
Are you suggesting the original meaning of the word was 'blood', later
shifted to 'red'?
> "Balkano-Danubian" is what I used to call "West Pontic" until I found
that other mid-rangers had already used "Pontic" in a different sense.
>
As an alias of classical PIE, for example.
> The borrowings of *wrod- into IE lgs. mostly mean 'rose',
>
Not really. This is a different root 'thorny bush' found in Italic
*ruTo- 'bramble' > Latin rubus and North Germanic *wruT-/*wrud-
'sweetbrier' > Norwegian ol, orr, erre, Swedish arre. Also Tuscan
dialectal forms such as rasa, ràzina, razzòla must derive from
Etruscan *rathia.
> 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.
>
> Georgiev's Pelasgian is a hypothetical satem language, which is not at
the same time-depth as my "West Pontic" (now "Balkano-Danubian"), a
sister language to Old PIE. [...] My view is that the Pre-Greek
substrate proper was Balkano-Danubian Chalcolithic, but some relics of
an earlier East Mediterranean Neolithic substrate are recoverable.
>
Actually, Georgiev's own chronology is Neolithic, so it's *older* than
yours, which leans towards the Kurgan theory. In fact, he regarded his
Pre-Greek IE substrate as descending from the languages spoken by
Mesolithic autochthonous hunter-gatherers, so in that sense he was a
"continuist", although certainly not in the same way than Alinei et al.
In my opinion, the problem lies on the misidentification of Pelasgian
with Thracian, an actual (although poorly attested) IE-satem language,
which nevertheless contributed (in the same way than e.g. Phrygian) to
Greek lexicon with some loanwords. This explains why most of Georgiev's
and Windekens' (especially the latter) Pre-Greek IE etymologies are
flawed.
> Pelasgian was effectively dismantled in a series of papers by D.A.
Hester.
>
Really? I never heard of this guy. Your statement sounds like
"Penicillin was discovered by A. Fleming", a well-known fact.
> The main problem I have with Beekes is his insistence (following
Furne'e, his former student) that Pre-Greek had a few-phoneme system.
This is a result of F.'s faulty methodology, by which regional
variations in PG words are treated haphazardly instead of being used to
develop PG dialectology. If F.'s method were applied to English, the
words _bludgeon_ and _truncheon_ would be regarded as continuing one and
the same Pre-English word.
>
> What actually happens with a few-phoneme substrate is illustrated by
Hawai'ian place-names. The phonemes remain few when the names are
adapted into English. Pre-Greek place-names look nothing like that.
But insistence on few phonemes has led Beekes to reject the Eteo-Cretan
inscriptions as something other than Pre-Greek, unnecessarily
complicating matters and throwing away good information.
>
Eteocretan isalabre 'goat cheese' can be analyzed as a compound
*isa-lawre, where *isa would be related to IE *aigJ-o- 'goat' and *lawre
to Greek tu:rós 'cheese'. In my opinion, this and other evidences
would suggest Minoan/Eteocretan was a *superstrate* to the actual
Pelasgian.