Re: Elamo-Dravidian and Nilo-Saharan

On Sat, 19 Oct 2002 00:31:43 -0000, "ardfilidh" <ardfilidh@...> wrote:

>so how does elamite fit in with language groups? is it grouped with
>summerian? if not is summarian an isolate?

Yes.

>several years ago i read secondary references to the early gaelic
>inscriptions in a script called ogham(prounounced several ways
>depending where you are) . this book claimed that there were roughly
>sixty early oghams that were not of an indoeuropean language, but
>said there were too few inscriptions to really tell.

These are the "Pictish" inscriptions.

>unfortunatly the
>author gave no examples or reasoning to support this. now it is odd
>that the first writing in the british isles would be alphabetic
>without a precussor of some kind of pictographic script so it might
>suggest that the script was introduced,but i know of no other ogham
>script from which it may have been introduced. these early oghams are
>sometimes given dates going back to skara brae and new grange,c. 3500
>bce. or possibly earlier.

No way. Ogham writing was inspired by the Roman alphabet (or just possibly by
other forms of alphabetic writing [Etruscan/North Italian, Greek] that may have
slightly preceded the Latin alphabet into the British isles). Ogham writing is
really nothing more than a kind "numerical" encoding of alphabetic signs (there
are examples of Germanic "secret runes" written Ogham-style, according to the
ordering of the Runic alphabet). So, B = /, L = //, V = ///, S = ////, N =
/////; H = \, D = \\, T = \\\, etc.
Ogham clearly does not encode the Latin alphabet in its traditional order (and
claims that the encoding is similar to the classification of the Latin letters
by ancient grammarians aren't very convincing either), so the ordering of the
letters was perhaps an independent invention (as in the case of the Germanic
futhark). Whether the signs were ever written "normal style" (and what they may
have looked like) is unknown: all that has survived is the Ogham "encoding".


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...