Re: Juvenile fooleries (was Re: Neanderthal and PIE (Long!))

To put it tersely, this must be the most fascinating account of a
con-Atlantis that I've ever read. -boggle

Eugene

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 8:46 AM, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>wrote:

> On 2008-10-16 Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
> > The island of the Dhastem was destroyed
> > somewhere around 700BC, a cataclysm suffered by
> > the whole world (and probably the origin of
> > various Flood legends). It was not moral
> > corruption that destroyed the island, nor failed
> > Dhastem experiments.
>
> My Atlantis -- called rather daftly Äthlåm,
> although the Indo-Europeanly inclined may note
> that the Äthlåmtl (Atlantean) language had /tl
> thl dl/ phonemes corresponding to the traditional
> PIE phoneme combinations with *þ (now identified
> as *tk *dhgh *dg) because I had grocked that (a)
> *þ was problematic and (b) modern Icelandic and
> some North American Indian languages (as I called
> them) had sounds roughly like /tl dl/ and (c) I
> wanted to create a connexion between PIE *kþôn
> 'earth' (now *dhghjo:m) as well as Germanic _land_
> and _Atlantis_ -- didn't submerge due to moral
> corruption, but due to a natural seismic
> cataclysm. It was the later TÄthlåm (Titan) god-
> dictator Dyaus who pushed the moral corruption
> hypothesis.
>
> I looked up my old notes -- most of them in neat
> typescript rather than Latin or Äthlåmtl
> handwriting! -- and it seems that I in stages
> abandoned the Mid-Atlantic island location. First
> I decided that the earliest and most important
> colony in what they called The Great Lands (echoes
> of Tolkien) was Äthlåmtls (Atlas) in North
> Africa. I read or cobbled together from different
> sources a theory that prior to the ruin of
> Äthlåm and the end of the Ice Age the Nile flew
> east across the future Sahara and out into the
> Atlantic, and inevitably the North African colony
> eventually *became* Atlantis! I even had picked up
> the native name of ancient Egypt _k(e)m(e)t_ and
> decided that it derived from -- you guessed it --
> Tlåmät! Thus Atlantis dried up rather than
> submerged, and it *was* outside the Pillars of
> Hercules *and* related to Egypt.
>
> There are some late (dated) notes on the
> language, the lexicon of which was heavily
> influenced by such PIE as I had picked up,
> although all such correspondences were explained
> as loans from various descendant Atlantean
> languages into PIE itself and early IE
> languages. I was of course able to borrow from
> Egyptian too, and had apparently grokked that an
> _e_ in modern transcriptions of Egyptian could
> correspond to several different vowels or zero.
> Interestingly the PIE word *kmtom '100' "comes
> from" the name of the Atlantean Senate
> Thlämtlom, which had 100 members.
>
> The vowel inventory of Äthlåmtl was suspiciously
> similar to that of Swedish; I created linguistic
> connexions by letting _å ä ö ü_ correspond to
> different vowels among _a e i o u_ or zero in the
> 'dialects': å > a/o, ä > a/e/i/Ø, ö > o/e/Ø,
> ü > u/i. I obviously hadn't realized that what I
> called 'pure vowels' could change just as much as
> 'mixed vowels'. Length and stress marking is
> confused and erratic.
>
> Consonantal changes were curiously centered around
> the /tl thl dl/ sounds, although stops and
> fricatives could change into each other along the
> axis pattern t -- th -- dh -- d, and fricatives
> could change into each other along the axis f --
> th -- s -- sh -- kh. I had no idea about the
> difference between aspirates and fricatives
> (calling them all _spiranter_). I had obviously no
> idea about the regularity of sound change: the
> notes bristle with statements like "In Dleivic thl
> for lte most part became ksh" and "ts usually
> became k in Åthlümpic". The chain of changes
> between thl and khth is thl -: tsl -: ksl -: kthl
> -: kth -: khth! :-) To my credit it should be
> noted that Dleivic and Åthlümpic were not names
> for Sanskrit and Greek, but for the Atlantic
> 'dialects' influencing each of them.
>
> Äthlåmtl had a rich derivational morphology but its
> grammar was almost completely isolating. Even
> tense inflection was done with auxiliaries: wäz
> was both past tense marker and a kind of
> suppletive past tense of äz 'to be', created with
> a prefix o/å--a/ä meaning 'old' and found also
> in the word Äthlåm. Similarly vu vacillated
> between future tense marker, suppletive future of
> 'to be' and a separate verb 'become' or noun
> 'future'. There was no deep thought behind this
> except fore some half-undertood reading about the
> roots that became 'to be' in Germanic.
>
> /BP 8^)>
> --
> Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>  "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
>  à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
>  ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
>  c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)
>

Reply