Re: Old European-contact conlang

Hallo!

On Tue, 7 Oct 2008 12:11:59 -0400, ROGER MILLS wrote:

> If you're a reader of Cybalist (devoted to Indo-European), you may be
> familiar with Patrick Ryan, who claims to be reconstructing THE
> Proto-Language (as I gather, the ancestor of Nostratic itself). I don't have
> his URL but could find it. His work and theories are sufficiently
> off-the-wall that, as some of his detractors claim, "Proto-Language" might
> well be considered a conlang :-))))
And not even a good naturalistic one :(

> Another controversial participant there is Torsten Pedersen (sp.?) who often
> cites "Old European" material obtained (as far as I understand it) from
> materials by Hans Kuhn and perhaps others. It's difficult to tell, but I
> gather the time frame is prior to the IE-ization of Europe, and it's
> possible "Old European" is actually a dialect of IE. There's also mention of
> the "river-names" and "bird-names" languages (which may actually be Old
> Eur.), the evidence for all these lies in words that fail to exhibit
> expected sound changes in Germanic and/or Latin.
Indeed, you meet all sorts of crackpots and speculators in this
field.  The real scholars tend to be silent on the issue because
they are very aware of the fact that we know virtually nothing
about those languages and everything one could say about them
is necessarily speculative in nature.

The late, lamented Hans Krahe, who laid the foundation of the
study of the "Old European hydronymy" (a network of apparently
recurring river names spanning most of western Europe), assumed
that those river names were IE, but while there appear to be
IE etymologies for them that semantically even make some sense,
they seem not to have undergone the same sound changes as the
inherited words of the languages in which they are attested, so
they must be borrowed.  One phonological problem is that the
river names show the un-IE vowel /a/ where PIE has *e or *o.

Another scholar, Theo Vennemann, assumes the names are from
sister languages of Basque, but his etymologies are even more
shaky than Krahe's, and the Old European hydronymy apparently
shows a gap between the Garonne and Ebro rivers, i.e. in the
*only* area of which we *know* that Basque or something related
to it was ever spoken in history.

My personal hypothesis is that the Old European hydronymy is
from a sister language of PIE, which split off before the
system of PIE ablaut developed, at a time when pre-PIE had a
three-vowel system centred on */a/ (the other vowels were the
less frequent */i/ and */u/).

Of course, we as conlangers may play with these hypotheses.
My Albic conlang family is meant to represent a surviving
offshot of the "peri-IE" language of my hypothesis.

... brought to you by the Weeping Elf

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