Re: "Wife" (was: Homosexuality etc.)

Andreas Johansson scripsit:

> PAN? Proto-Austronesian or what?
Yes.  But I thought the association of "pie" with "pan" was a nice touch.

> BTW, I recently read a piece which suggested that Indo-European be renamed
> Indo-Anatolic, on the grounds that it's basically made up of two branches -
This "Indo-Hittite hypothesis" has been around a long time, possibly as
far back as the discovery that Hittite was IE-related.  I thought it more
or less died out in the 1940s, and I haven't heard of any new evidence.

I've always wondered what it was like to be Hrozny, staring at a cuneiform
text, seeing "nu BREAD-an ezzateni, watar-ma ekuteni" (where "BREAD" is a
known Sumerian ideograph) and suddenly intuiting that it meant something
like "now eat bread and drink water", not only IE but almost Germanic!

> What I find myself
> wondering, however, is why the "Indo-" bit of IE was chosen for "Indo-
> European" - there being rather more European than Indian branches of IE,
We call the Indic languages a single branch by convention, but there are
more (living) languages in it (296, by the Ethnologue's count) than in all the
other branches put together (only 147).

Traditionally the German name for IE was Indogermanisch, although from a
purely geographical standpoint Indokeltisch would have been more like it.

> "Euro-
> Anatolic" or similar would seem to be a more logical label, wouldn't it?
This is like the complaint that "Afrasiatic" is a bad label for a language
family because it doesn't cover all the languages of Africa and Asia.
Habent sua fata nomines.

--
There is / One art                      John Cowan <jcowan@...>
No more / No less                       http://www.reutershealth.com
To do / All things                      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
With art- / Lessness                     -- Piet Hein

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