Pre-Celtic/Non-IE words in Insular Celtic,Bell-Beaker people, etc.

Me govanen!

Lars Henrik Mathiesen tetent:
>
> > Date:         Fri, 8 Sep 2000 03:50:57 +0200
> > From:         =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg?= Rhiemeier <joerg.rhiemeier@...>
>
> > First, there are all those "Veneti" or "Venedi" tribes all over western
> > Europe.
>
> Yes, that's obviously Quendi.
Especially considering the fact that most likely, "v" was pronouced like
English /w/ in Classical Latin rather than /v/.  And I think an
etymology /kwendi/ > /gwantSe/ also makes sense.

> > Then, the words "iron", "silver" and "tin" seem to come from a non-IE
> > western European language, which can hardly be anything else than that
> > of the B-B people.
> > The latter two _could_ go back to something like *kjelep- and *tinko-,
> > and iron < Celt. *isarn- < *el-sarn "star-stone", i.e. "meteorite"???
>
> > OK, this sounds like complete hogwash, and it almost certainly is, but
> > it's fun to play with, and that's what we're doing all the time here...
>
> It's no less sound than much of the stuff seen on the Nostratic list
> of sainted memory.
Sainted memory?  What was that?

Actually, I have found so many obviously non-working etymologies being
seriously discussed that I made a joke about it: the German word
_Schellack_ (shellac)
is derived from Middle High German _scalplatlack_ "grammophone record
lac".
My knowledge of MHG is too limited to tell whether _scalplatlack_ would
be
the correct MHG word for what I suppose it to mean, but of course MHG
could
not have a word for "grammophone record", nor for the material they are
made of.

Recently, I have found a 300-page monography in which the author
disproved an IE etymology which was almost as ridiculous as the
_scalplatlack_ example above!
It was based on words referring to entirely different plants; one of
them was Danish _kvander_ which, according to the author, was a fairly
recent re-coinage of _kwann_ along words such as _oleander_ and
_koriander_, and another was an allegedly Irish word garbled beyond
recognition such that it could no longer be found out which word was
originally meant.  In fact, the quality of that etymology was
approaching that of all those fake trans-Atlantic etymologies from
people trying to prove the existence of Atlantis - from below.

I have also heard that the Celtic etymologies of "Londinium" currently
in circulation also were complete hogwash.  It seems that most try to
connect "-dinium" with _dunum_ "hill", I ask which hill?  To me, it
makes more sense that the name contains an element meaning "harbour",
and _lond_ would do the job.

>       Just claim that Tolkien had secret access to a
> collection of old beakers with mysterious writing on them, and that
> his development of Elvish was really his work in deciphering them.
This is pretty much my assumption; my idea is that he actually found
some Old English texts about the Elves and other stuff in Great Haywood
or somewhere else.

AFAIK, no inscriptions have been found on bell beakers yet.  Or are
there any inscriptions on bell beakers which are yet undeciphered?

Syld,
Jörg.