Re: Pre-IE languages in Europe

At 6:35 pm -0500 9/1/99, Hawksinger wrote:
>J. Barefoot wrote:
>>
>> Is Etruscan IE?
.....
>It is conservatively considered a Language Isolate although efforts
>to analyze and relate it abound.  With a good, long Rosetta Stone
>equivalent, it may remain that way.
I guess you mean "without a good, long Rosetta Stone ...."  :)

I agree entirely.

There have been attempts to show that Etruscan is of IE origin, usually by
those scholars who attempt to show that nothing non-IE existed in Europe
before the FennoUgric migrations into Finland & Hungary.  Their motives, it
seems to me, are more to do with outmoded (and IMHO now discredited) racial
theories than to do with linguistics.  I just cannot see how what we do
know of Etruscan can possibly be of IE origin.

And at 4:52 pm -0600 9/1/99, Tom Wier wrote:
........
>Well, I left Etruscan off my first list on purpose, because I think I read
>something somewhere which seemed to indicate a possible noneuropean
>origin for them, most likely in North Africa.  Of course, this could very
>well be one of those crackpot theories to which you made reference;  I
>wouldn't be surprised.
I think it is.

Etruscan, being spoken in the north of Italy, must be included as a
European language.  What its affinities are and whether its origin is
outside of Europe, we simply do not know.

>Oh, one other I left off the first list was Linear A, depending on whether
>you can call Crete European (I guess it's safe to assume this).  Much
>has been done to decipher Linear B, but that work was much easier
>because it was early on shown to be just a very early dialect of Ancient
>Greek, and Linear A certainly was not.
And the Ventis-Chadwick decipherment of Linear B, tho generally excepted,
certainly had its critics and was not universally accepted among all
scholars.  I don't know whether there still remains any serious opposition
to the decipherment.  It seems to me the decipherment has now stood the
test of time and can reasonably be accepted.

I agree the language of the Linear A inscriptions is not Greek nor, indeed,
IE.  Attempts to decipher it as a Semitic language (Cyrus Gordon was one of
the earliest scholars to claim this) have so far convinced few except their
authors.    It looks like another language isolate and without another
'good, long Rosetta Stone equivalent' I fear it must remain undeciphered.

>I believe there may have been some late Roman Empire inscriptions
>to Isis in Iberian languages, but AFAIK the data on those languages
>is so scanty that just about any analysis is as good as any other.
Yep - I forgotten the Iberian inscriptions. I don't recall the details, but
I seem to recollect that the language does not show any obvious
similarities to Basque.

Also at 4:20 pm -0600 9/1/99, Eric Christopherson wrote:
>Raymond A. Brown wrote:
.......
>> This, alas, is all too true.  I doubt that there is any natlang to which
>> some crank has not tried to prove a relationship with Basque!
>
>Perhaps we on this list could be the first to prove a relationship
>between Basque and a conlang :D
It would not surprise me one bit if this had not already been done  ;)

Ray.