Re: Interesting pre-Greek article

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.
And Glen Gordon's "Indo-Tyrrhenian" as he peddles it in the
Cybalist and Nostratic-L mailing list is misguided.
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', and you can give a set of "sound changes" for *any*
single pair of words.  One cognate is no cognate.

Uralic is MUCH more similar to Indo-European, and I think it is
distantly related.

> [snip]
> >>
> >>Trouble is 'ante' too often gets confused with 'anti' (except by
> >>Americans who pronounce the two prefixes differently).
> >
> >
> > I pronounce them the same, but I think there's no confusion within the
> > linguistic context, since Anti-Greek clearly looks political.
>
> Quite so. Sadly I have come across overtly political slants in some
> linguistic contexts. Nearly always by people who want to claim "My
> language is older than yours, so my people have more right to be here
> than yours."
Yes.  Especially those who claim that their national language was the
purest form of the protolanguage of humanity or, worse, the "master
race".  Bad linguistics and worse politics often go hand in hand
in the world of crackpots.

>       Pre- has always seem to me a preferable prefix as it is
> less likely to be confused than ante-. But when we find pre- used in
> similar contexts in different ways......
>
> >
> >>I was using the term pre-Greek to mean simply "before Greek" some 30
> >>years ago.
>
> And I should have said its usage with this meaning is older than that.
> And after, if I see a title such as "The Pre-Greek Aegean" I would
> expect to read about the Aegean region _before_ the Greeks settled
> there. I would definitely not expect to read about early Greek
> settlements in the Aegean based on internal reconstruction of evidence.
> Why should linguistic use be different from archaeological use in this
> respect? It just causes confusion.
Yes.  But I have seen worse sources of misunderstandings.  Take,
for instance, the word "protolanguage" which means one thing in
historical linguistics, and an entirely different thing in language
origins studies.  This is especially bad because many people
(including some librarians) don't realize that historical linguistics
and language origins studies are two very different disciplines.
Accidents frequently happen here.

> >> When did the use of pre- to mean "first early form derived
> >>from internal reconstruction" come into use?
> >
> >
> > I was under the impression that it was an old term, since internal
> > reconstruction has been around a while, but it could be a CyBaLiSt
> > neologism AFAIK.
>
> 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; 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.  Similar problems with "pre-Greek".

> > Jeff
> >
> > PS I don't have detailed comments or time to write them, but I like what
> > you did with Plan B
>
> Thanks.
>
> >and am glad to see that Lin is back on the web.
>
> So am I   :)
Greetings,

Jörg.

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