peri-IE (was: Kentum/satem)

At 1:19 pm +0100 29/4/02, Keith Gaughan wrote:
>From: Christopher B Wright [mailto:faceloran@JUNO.COM]
>
>> Jan van Steenbergen sekalge mein eti kentum / satem.
>>
>> Sturnan is most related to the kentum languages.
>>
>> I didn't realize that the Celtic languages are PIE daughters. I always
>> thought that Proto-Celtic (or whatever the name would be) was a PIE
>> sister language. Amazing what an odd (to me) orthography can do for a
>> language.
Odd orthography? Neither Cornish nor Breton look particularly odd.  I
suppose Welsh is odd to anglophones because it's so uncompromisingly
regular  :)

True, Irish & Scots Gaelic have a pecular and interesting system of their
own.  But there is, surely, great variety of orthographic conventions in
the modern so-called 'Celtic' languages (a term coined in the 18th cent and
no one has yet been able to give me any evidence that they are related to
the language spoken by the peoples the Greeks & Romans called Celts - but
that's another story).

Yep - these languages are well and truly part of the PIE progeny, as are
Hindi, Farsi, Albanian, Armenian, Greek, French, Romanian, English, Germab,
Faroese, etc etc etc.

>PIE sister languages? Huh? I didn't think there was anything like that?
Well. there must have been.  Some theorists regard "Hittite" (more properly
'Nesite') and related languages like Luwian as forming a
"peri-Indo-European' branch, i.e. descended from a near sister of PIE.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
At 10:42 am -0400 29/4/02, Muke Tever wrote:
[snip]
>The most common candidate I'm aware of for a PIE sister language is Etruscan's
>ancestor.  The label "Indo-Tyrrhenian" has been used before...
>
It has indeed - and often it has been linked with the "Hittite" peri-IE
group.  But IMHO the evidence is woefully lacking. Some of the earlier
theories were, I regret, basically motivated by now (and deservedly)
discredited racial theories: there proponents didn't want literate peoples
in Europe who were not related to the master race.

No one now AFAIK seriously claims that being an Indo-European speaker
denotes a 'racial type'.  By taking purely linguistic criteria, these
theories seem to me pretty groundless.
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At 10:33 am -0500 29/4/02, Danny Wier wrote:
[snip]
>
>But most likely the closest "sister" of Proto-Indo-European is either
>Etruscan
_Most_ likely? On what evidence?
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At 5:06 pm +0000 29/4/02, Andreas Johansson wrote:
[snip]
>
>And don't even try searching for "pelasgian".
Ah, Pelasgian!  That brings back fond memories of my M.Litt, researches in
the late 1970s and early 1980s   :)

The Pelagian I knew was supposed to be an IE language, exhibiting similar
consonant sound shifts as those found in the Germanic & Armenian languages,
and spoken in the Aegean area _before_ the arrival of the Greeks.  The
evidence upon which it was constructed was IMO very flimsy, but one had to
admire the efforts of the theorists; their 'reconstructed language' was
worthy of the best efforts of this list; fot IMO (and the opinion of many
others) what they had produced was a conlang   :)

>Apart from a TIED page I had
>already seen, I got mostly weird New Age sites
I can't imagine what the Pelasgian I knew can have to do with New Agers -
looks as tho this might be a different Pelasgian!

[snip]

>certain account ...), and a page "proving" that, since languages can't die
>out, Turkish is the descendant of every supposedly dead language in the Near
>East and neighbouring areas, including Pelasgian, Hettite, Akkadian,
>Sumerian, Aksumite and quite a few more.
Good grief!  What medication had its author been taking????

Ray.

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