Re: languages of pre-I.E. Europe and onwards

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Wed, 21 Jan 2009 12:31:15 +0000, R A Brown wrote:
[snip]
>>       Whether
>> all them would have been is a different matter; but I agree that such
>> evidence as we have does point to a greater prevalence of the ergative
>> model in the pre-IE period.
>
> Very likely.  Today, Europe is almost entirely accusative, but that
> is only due to the spread of Indo-European and Uralic.  Basque and
> most Caucasian languages are ergative; that of course doesn't mean
> that *all* pre-IE European languages were ergative (Etruscan, at
> least, wasn't), but some certainly were.
True - Etruscan shows no signs of ergative structure. I suspect we would
find a variety of structures in the neolithic languages of Europe.

[snip]
>> There are also vocabulary items. There is set of non-IE words common to
>> Germanic & Celtic (e.g. *landa, *comba), but also a set of non-IE words
>> found only in Germanic and another set found only in (insular) Celtic.
>
> Yes.  I have a list of non-IE Germanic words which I have
> extracted from an etymological dictionary of German, and
> another I once found on a web site which by now is gone;
> I would be *hotly* interested in a list of substratum
> words in Insular Celtic for my Albic project.  Do you have
> one, or can tell me where I can find it?
I do not & cannot. I feel sure someone (if not some ones) must have done
work on these lists of substrate words. I must make a serious search.

[snip]
>>       There
>> are theories that posit an IE origin for Etruscan! And I guess you have
>> come across the 'IE Pelasgic' theory.
>
> Sure.  There are some vexing similarities between IE and Etruscan
> in the morphology, but by far not enough to establish a relationship.
> Indeed, Uralic is even more similar to IE than Etruscan.
Agreed.

[snip]
>
> An IE-Etruscan relationship hypothesis is also peddled by a
> certain Glen Gordon of the Nostratic-L mailing list, but his
> evidence is extremely shaky; he always cites the same "cognate
> pair", namely IE *kWetWor- '4': Etr. _huth_ (which he claims
> was '4', but actually probably was '6').
Groan - I would be a very rich person, I think, if I could be given a
pound/euro/dollar for every theory based on supposed cognates of one or
two words where the meanings are dubious at best    :)

Indeed, Etruscan _huth_ is (almost) certainly '6'. On Roman dice the
opposites sides add up to seven as, indeed, the do on modern dice. Are
we to assume that on the Etruscan dice where the numbers are written as
words, that while one pair, namely 2 ~ 5, did add up to 7, while the
other pair of opposites were 1 ~ 4 (= 5) and 3 ~ 6 (=9)??

Normally such a suggestion would be laughed out of court. The only the
reason that some claim that _huth_ = '4' is that according to Stephen of
Byzantion the Attic place-name  _Hytte:nia_ means 'Tetrapolis'
(Four-city), and _Hytte:nia_ is assumed to be of Tyrrhenian origin. But
this argument commits a serious methodological error: it is assumed that
Hytte:nia_ is derived from a language related to Etruscan to derive the
meaning of Etruscan _huth_, and then the supposed Etruscan _huth_ = '4'
is used to 'prove' that _Hytte:nia_ is derived from a source related to
Etruscan! 'Tis a vicious circle.

IMHO any theory based Etruscan _huth_ being a cognate of IE *kWetWor- is
worthless.

>>       What Kretschmer would have
>> made of the Nostratic theory/theories, i don't know.
>
> He would perhaps have considered "Protindogermanisch" to be
> a branch of Nostratic.
I suspect he would.

> Note also that Allan Bomhard considers
> Etruscan to be Nostratic without giving evidence - he takes it
> as given that it was an aberrant branch of IE, which is of
> course bogus.
     LOL!

[snip]
>> The first chapter of my "Evidence for Pre-Greek Speech on Crete from
>> Greek Alphabetic Sources" (Amsterdam, 1985) reviews  several strange
>> pre-IE eurolang theories, most of which give ample scope for the LLL  ;)
>
> Yes, there are many strange theories about the linguistic
> landscape of pre-IE Europe, simply because so little is known
> about it.
Yes, and the certitude by which these theories are posited seems to be
in inverse proportion to the evidence available.

Now, I must get on with my mesolithic grammar........
       ;)

--
Ray
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