Re: peri-IE (was: Kentum/satem)

At 2:20 pm +0000 1/5/02, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
[snip]
 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   :)
>
>Well, Cyril Babaev has an article about Pelasgian on TIED:
>http://indoeuro.bizland.com/archive/article4.html
>
>It seems quite sane-headed to me, but I'm of course IEist. Was it this
>Georgiyev guy's work you were in contact with?
Georgiyev certainly!  I don't think there's any problem with it from an IE
point of view; that's one of the things they did well IIRC - deriving it
from PIE.  The chief weakness was (and is) the very scant 'evidence' that
was used to reconstruct a pre-Greek IE language in the Aegean area.  Most
people would view the fragmentary bits of evidence as co-incidence.

It's rather as tho, say, we looked for words in English that had no clear
etymology either from Old British, early English, Norman French, and later
Graeco-Latin borrowings, and with these odd fragments went on to
reconstruct a 'pre-Celtic IE' language for which there was otherwise no
evidence.

>> >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!
>
>I _think_ the connection was that since the Pelasgians lived in Greece
>before the arrival of the patriarchal and scientific Greeks,
>they logically
>must've been benign matriarchalists who possessed mystic wisdom from
>beginning of time.
{sigh} "logically"?  Don't these people use the grey cells they were born
with!  According to this theory, the Pelasgian _were_ 'nasty patriarchical'
IE speakers.  If - and it may have been so - the Minoans were matriarchal
(tho not possessing mystic wisdom from the time of Big Bang); but the
Minoans were most certainly not IE speakers. If they had been, Linear A
would've been deciphered years ago as would the later Eteocretan.  But
neither has been deciphered.

Methinks, from what you say, these New Agers are confusing Robert Grave's
"Pelasgians" with the very different "Pelasgians" of Babaev & Georgiyev.

Ray.





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   XRICTOC ANECTH
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