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

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)

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