Re: Old Albic (was: DECAL: Examples #2: Phonotactics)

Hallo!

On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 07:21:46 +0000,
Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

> On Thursday, January 13, 2005, at 05:34 , Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>
> > Hallo!
> >
> > On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 18:28:51 -0800,
> > Sai Emrys <saizai@...> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> >> Q5: Motivation / reasoning / goals behind this?
> >
> > As with the phoneme inventory, personal style and also plausibility
> > as a pre-Celtic language of Britain (not much of a constraint as we
> > know next to nothing about what those languages were like)
>
> I was under the impression that we know nothing - not next to nothing -
Yep.

> unless, of course, it was the Hamitic substrate that gave rise to the
> 'Semitic' features of insular Celtic    ;)
>
> > and distant cousin to Indo-European
>
> Aw - does it have to be even remotely a cousin of IE?
The justification for Albic being a distant cousin of IE came from
the fact that it fits the style I was intending for the language:
a language with a "classical" feel, like Latin, Greek, Sanskrit
or Quenya, with some deviations from that such as the fluid-S
argument marking.  And then I found that there is some (admittedly
obscure and weak) evidence that Pre-Proto-IE was somewhat like that,
too (see, for instance, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov, _Indo-European and
the Indo-Europeans_).

The question when IE came to Britain is still an open one.
What kind of language did the Bell-Beaker people speak, for example?
It could be

 ( ) Celtic
 ( ) Indo-European but not Celtic
 ( ) not Indo-European but related
 ( ) not Indo-European and unrelated

I picked the third option.  The Bell-Beaker people, who were the
ancestors of the Elbi, were descendants of the neolithic farmers
who colonized central Europe between 5500 and 5000 BC.  Those
farmers probably were refugees from the Black Sea Flood.
That event is too early to explain the distribution of Indo-European,
I think; what was spread back then, in my humble opinion was a wider
stock of which Indo-European is a part.  Proto-IE was one of the
languages that evolved from the neolithic settlers' original
language; Proto-Albic was another one.

>       Why must Basque &
> Etruscan remain the only European isolates?
The second of my Pre-Celtic families, Pictic, is not related to
Indo-European.  It is an isolate which is related to Basque by
some scholars and to Afro-Asiatic by some others.  I haven't
worked it out yet; what I already know, however, is that it is
ergative and shows at least some of the "Insular Celtic" features;
see my lostlangs post about the British Isles linguistic area:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lostlangs/message/72

My idea is that Pictic arrived on the British Isles earlier than
Albic; Pictic entered from the south and Albic from the east.

Greetings,

Jörg.