Re: Interesting pre-Greek article

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> R A Brown wrote:
>
>
>>Paul Kretschmer, who was most certainly a German speaker and used the
>>term 'Indogermanisch' for what most of now call Indo-European,
>>distinguished between Urindogermanisch and Protindogermanish. The former
>>was used to mean what we call PIE, and the latter denoted a putative
>>ancestor of both Urindogermanisch and Rätotyrrhenisch
>>(Raeto-Tyrrhenian). From the latter, according to Kretschmer, was
>>derived Raetian, Etruscan, Tyrrhenian and Pelasgian.
>>
>>In other words his Protindogermanish was an early fore-runner of
>>Nostratic  :)
>
>
> Yes.  I used to think of Etruscan as a language distantly related
> to Indo-European as well, but after reading _The Etruscan Language_
> by G. & L. Bonfante I abandoned that view.  There are NO lexical
> cognates, nor does the morphology resemble Indo-European in any
> meaningful way.  The languages are utterly different.
Exactly! I have no doubt at all that Etruscan is non-IE.

> And Glen Gordon's "Indo-Tyrrhenian" as he peddles it in the
> Cybalist and Nostratic-L mailing list is misguided.
Yep.

> He seems to have built it around a single "cognate set", namely
> PIE *kWetWor- `4': Etr. _huth_ - but the latter probably meant
> `6', not `4',
IMO it did mean 6. The argument for _huth_ = 4 is very weak.

>and you can give a set of "sound changes" for *any*
> single pair of words.  One cognate is no cognate.
You can - and when you remember that Y.R. Chao showed how /ni/ --> /A/
is one of the Chinese 'dialects', almost any sound change can be
demonstrated for a single word. I agree, one cognate is NO cognate.

[snip]


>>
>>Perhaps someone will enlighten us. Meantime, I've got rather used to
>>'pre' = "before".
>
>
> The term "Pre-Indo-European" is ambiguous.  Some authors use it for
> an ancestor of Proto-Indo-European reconstructed internally;
That would seem to me a very tentative language. But what was before
ProtoIE was not, by definition, IE   :-)

Before ProtoGreek one had various IE dialects spoken by settlers,
traders or whatever around and in parts of the Aegean, and non-IE
language(s) in most of the Aegean area. It was from the meeting of these
languages that Greek developed in the Aegean area; ProtoGreek means "the
first form of a language we can start to call Greek (as distinct from
other forms of IE)".

Similarly, how are we to know the different strands or threads which
came together to give rise to the ProtoIE dialects in the first place?

>however,
> the more common usage is to refer to the linguistic landscape of
> Europe or some other area that existed before the spread of Indo-
> European.
Logical - tho I just use the term pre-IE.

>Similar problems with "pre-Greek".
Unfortunately so  :=(

--
Ray
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