I'm going through the Swadesh lists for the Western and South Eurasian languages, in order to see if a shared origin (what makes sense from the viewpoint of Prehistory) can be supported with linguistic data of some sort.
By the moment I have gone through the Basque and Proto-Indoeuropean Swadesh lists (with some small sections taken off because they only seem to generate confusion, at least to me). And I notice that there are at least some rather clear cognates between Basque and PIE:
I compared 111 words, of which 20 look rather likely cognates and some other 13 or 14 are possible remote cognates. That makes c. 30% of possible cognates, what is surely well above my expectations (I had spotted some likely cognates earlier but did not expect so many).
The clear cognates are (eu-PIE):
(2) zu - *túh [you - sing.]
(4) gu - *wéy [we]
(5) zu(ek) - *yū [you - pl.] [notice that 2 and 5 are messed up in both Basque and IE]
(24) hiru - *tréyes (??) [three]
(49) suge - *h₂engwi [snake]
(65) hezur - *h₃ost-, *kost- [bone]
(76) aho - *h₁oh₁s- [mouth]
(77) hortz - *h₃dónts [tooth]
(86) heste - *eh₁ter- [gut]
(103) jaki(-n) - *ǵneh₃-[to know]
(149) izar - *h₂stḗr [star]
(168) hauts - *h₃és-no-, *h₃és-i- [ash]
(170) bide - *pent- [way, road]
(178) egu, egun - *h₂eǵh- [day]
(180) bero - *gʷʰer- [warm]
(184) zahar - *senh₁ó- [old]
(202) -n - (h₁?)en [in, on]
(207) izen - *h₁nḗh₃mn̥ [name]
Add to these at least the verb to be (not in the list): iza(-n) - *es(t)-
And add also two special cases from the list, yet quite clear:
(92) edan (to drink) - (93) *h₁ed- (to eat)
The change of meaning is quite acceptable, specially if we imagine the common ancestor to mean "to ingest" without liquid or solid connotations.
The other case is PIE (171) *gʷerh₃- (mountain), which I am almost persuaded it has something to do with Basque gora (up, upwards), which has a clear Basque etymology (goi-ra). It may be a coincidence or a strange case of lending but this has been haunting me for more than 20 years now since I learned some Serbocroat words, including gora (mountain) and gore (up, upwards). And now comes back in form of PIE reconstruction.
The less clear, potential, cognates would be as follow:
(28) luze - *dluh₂gʰós [long]. This I have generally suspected as a loanword from some IE language to Basque, but the main reason for this suspicion is that it begins like the usual IE words for long (long, largo, etc.) with an L-. There's nothing else, however the connection seems more real when you go to PIE.
(33) labur, motz - *mreǵʰú- [short]
(50) har - *wrmi [worm]
(57) erro - *wréh₂ds [root]
(62) azal - *pel- [skin]
(68) adar - *keg-, *ḱer- [horn]
(71) ile - *pulh₂- [hair] [this one seems to be related to 62, maybe *Vl(e) meant once skin and hair alike (or as conceptually highly related words) - we can still discern an open vowel (a/e) in 62 and a closed one (i/u) in 71]
(72) buru - *gʰebʰelo- [head] [where *gʰeb- corresponds with the other proposed root *kaput, and -bʰelo- would correspond with Basque buru]
(78) mihi - *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s [tongue] [probably not but still I do see some similitude]
(104) gogo(tu) - *tong- [to think] [here the Basque list reads pentsatu but this is no any genuine Basque word: gogo as noun means psyche, mind, soul, desire, and gogotu means to wish but also any other mental function, however it's been partly replaced by Spanish loan pentsatu for rationalist uses mostly]
(172) gorri - *h₁rewdʰós [red] [I have before mentioned the importance of the sound R in West Eurasia to describe the color red: it's not universal but it's much more common than in East Eurasia or anywhere else I could check]
(179) urte - *yeHr-, *wet- [year]. Check also (194) PIE *wed [wet]. In Basque urte is clearly related to the water (ur) cycle and watery (not wet but close enough) would be urti.
(180) lehor - *ters- [dry]
Now the disclaimer: this are nothing but a bunch of notes for my (and potentially also your) interest. No theory is proposed, no systematics is being used, it is just a free exploration.
However I was drawn to this exercise, which is just the first two rows of many others, because I suspect that West and South Eurasian languages (excluding Uralic and Afroasiatic, which are of different origins) may share a common origing c. 50 Ka ago. Specially if both IE and Dravidian infiltrated South Asia after the Neolithic.
On the contrary I dislike quite strongly pan-north-Asian conjectural superfamilies, specially Sino-Caucasian, which makes no sense whatsoever on light of all I know about Prehistory.
In any case, something to chew on.
Update: Octavià mentions a couple of references of other (presumably more knowledgeable) people who have in the past suggested a Basque-IE connection:
Arnaud Fournet, Comparing Basque and Proto-Indo-European: a preliminary phonetic survey. He finds some of the same connections I mention here but he goes further into terrains that are too obscure for me to assess properly.
Arnaud Etchamendy has a whole site dedicated to "demonstrate" that Basque is Indoeuropean (a bit too far in my opinion but anyhow).
I must say that, against my own expectations, a preliminary survey I made of Basque, IE, Dravidian and NE Caucasian, seems to reinforce the idea that Basque and IE are related, more than to the other considered languages. See comments section for some more details (all this is very raw and tentative admittedly).
Update: Octavià mentions a couple of references of other (presumably more knowledgeable) people who have in the past suggested a Basque-IE connection:
Arnaud Fournet, Comparing Basque and Proto-Indo-European: a preliminary phonetic survey. He finds some of the same connections I mention here but he goes further into terrains that are too obscure for me to assess properly.
Arnaud Etchamendy has a whole site dedicated to "demonstrate" that Basque is Indoeuropean (a bit too far in my opinion but anyhow).
I must say that, against my own expectations, a preliminary survey I made of Basque, IE, Dravidian and NE Caucasian, seems to reinforce the idea that Basque and IE are related, more than to the other considered languages. See comments section for some more details (all this is very raw and tentative admittedly).
Notably, all of your proposed cognates are pre-agricultural and lack obvious geographical affinities. This would point to hunter-gatherer substrate influences, rather than post-Neolithic borrowing by IE.
ReplyDeleteOf course, there is also the difficult task of showing that these are not borrowings by Basque from IE. If Proto-Celtic swadesh matches are closer than PIE matches, particularly on the same roots, a borrowing from Celtic rather than a common origin, would be supported.
I think your 50kya common origin is absurdly distant in time. This would be the time depth from Australian aboriginal languages to the oldest known languages of Europe (e.g. Basque and NW Caucasian, Sumerian, and Coptic). Presumably, all Eurasian languages are related at a time depth of 75000-100000 years, and all European languages (except perhaps Uralic) go back 50000 years.
The best case for PIE puts its genesis at the 4th to 6th millenium, presumably either as a highly diverged branch of a language somewhere in the vicinity, or as a creole of two or more languages (or more likely both) with new words for its own technological innovations related to horses, and I've never heard anyone make a case that it is older than the 10th millenium - with those theories relying on some dubious foundations. If there was a simple branching relationship to one other language fmaily, somebody would have nailed it by now. Uralic, Paleo-Siberian, Daubian Neolithicese, Elamite, Sumerian, ancient Anatolian, Pelaponese-Minoan, Basque, Etruscian and Caucasian languages, as well as Harappan, and perhaps lost hunter-gatherer languages of Europe could have been close enough in the right time frame to add to the stew.
Dravidian, to the extent that it is not Harappan in origins, is too young to contribute. There is no sign that Afro-Asiatic ever made it that far in that time frame. Likewise, there is no evidence of Altaic languages that far West in that time frame.
Basque is surely older than IE, and it is reasonable to assume that members of its language family were widely spoken in large swaths of Europe at some point in the pre-IE era, possibly into the Bronze Age for large swaths of territory. But, language drift even over say 18,000 years would be immense, and there are enough shifts in material cultures and population contacts with outsiders in that very long period that it is hard to provide any real solid reason to believe that it is even this old, let alone surviving across the population influxes of the LGM in any form remotely recognizable. I could easily imagine Basque being a mere 8,000 BCE or 6000 BCE era language, but recognize the considerations that argue for an older origin in Iberian fisher/coastal peoples. I could also see 12,000 BCE parallel to North Africa, as an inviting date.
I think that the jury is out on how persistent the ergative language feature is. My money would be on the oldest languages in the New World generally being ergative, agglutinative, having many cases (or many grammatic "genders") with semantic content, and producing toponymns, and having more than a bare bones combined consonant/vowel/tone/click/sound rule set. I also think that more than base ten numbers are linked to urbanization independent of a base ten number area (e.g. you see it in both Sumerian and Mayan), rather than common descent.
I'm sorry to disapoint you, but you're the 4th or 5th people I've known to compare Basque and PIE and the results are always nasty!
ReplyDeleteIn fact, almost all your comparisons are wrong (Basque isn't remoptely close to PIE), except bide, which is a loanword from *pent-. And gorri is also a loanword but from *kreuH- 'blood, gore'.
The main problem with this rather useless comparative work is the very concept of 'cognate', which is used so loosely that it loses all possible meaning or functionality. Sentences like "there are at least some rather clear cognates between Basque and PIE" are empty of meaning.
ReplyDeleteFirst, the professional linguists (thanks for visiting and commenting):
ReplyDelete@Octavià:
"I'm sorry to disapoint you, but you're the 4th or 5th people I've known to compare Basque and PIE"...
I was not aware. I have not found their work online...
"... and the results are always nasty!"
"Nahasti borrasti" (confusing mix in Basque) maybe - sorry could not help with the trans-lingual wordplay.
"In fact, almost all your comparisons are wrong (Basque isn't remoptely close to PIE)"...
That's what I'm not so sure about. However it may be substrate influence into PIE and not genuine phylogenetic stuff... but I do find a 30% of potential cognates a too high mark to ignore and disregard so easily.
"except bide, which is a loanword from *pent-. And gorri is also a loanword but from *kreuH- 'blood, gore'".
Via what? Orcish?! Neither word exists in Latin as such nor I think they do in Celtic. Ancient Basque and PIE never had any contact AFAIK: PIE existed in Samara Valley and Basque in SW Europe, tens of thousands of km. away from each other, not contacting at all until c. 2400 BCE when both cultural areas expanded at the expense of the troublesome "Danubians".
At that time PIE did not exist anymore but was already Western IE (root of Germanic, Italic, Celtic) what was contacting with Ancient Basque and Ligurian near Strasbourg and Aachen.
And the curious thing is that I do see many other candidates, not to mention that I forgot to list Hartz-Arctos, already mentioned here.
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@Jesús:
"The main problem with this rather useless comparative work is the very concept of 'cognate', which is used so loosely that it loses all possible meaning or functionality".
This criticism I may take as valid. I really meant: "possible cognate or words that sound similar and share meaning" (what implies likely cognate but obviously requires greater research to cut corners and make the whole matter consistent).
I'm not going to make these possible reconstructing efforts because that is work for the professionals, not the amateurs like myself. And anyhow I am not yet anywhere near such stage of understanding. These are just preliminary notes that I throw into shared human consciousness for whatever they are worth. Feel free to use or discard.
@Andrew:
ReplyDelete"Notably, all of your proposed cognates are pre-agricultural and lack obvious geographical affinities. This would point to hunter-gatherer substrate influences, rather than post-Neolithic borrowing by IE".
Absolutely. I hate to say this but you make better sense here than the linguists-with-a-pet-theory posting after you.
Why? Because of open-mindness. Which is exactly what brought me to make this effort first of all. I'm beginning to get bored of seeing plausible Basque-IE (often PIE but not Western IE) cognates and just ignoring them as "loanwords" (how?) or "coincidences" (too many).
"If Proto-Celtic swadesh matches are closer than PIE matches, particularly on the same roots, a borrowing from Celtic rather than a common origin, would be supported".
Absolutely as well. Actually one of the reasons was that I did take some time weeks ago (where did I put my notes?) comparing Basque and Celtic Swadesh lists. I only reached up to 100 before leaving the task but I do have such control (more later).
"I think your 50kya common origin is absurdly distant in time".
Yes but it's the actual oldest possible age for all West Eurasian languages' origins. In the IE/Basque case a Gravettian link is possible (c. 22-28 Ka) but this also applies to the NE Caucasian/Basque case, which may or not be related (NEC and PIE are from the same are, Basque is not).
"This would be the time depth from Australian aboriginal languages"...
Actually I'd say Australian colonization and languages is a bit older (60-70 Ka) but yeah.
Alternatively Vascoid languages could have arrived to the West in the Neolithic. This is something I do not know yet.
"... the oldest known languages of Europe (e.g. Basque and NW Caucasian, Sumerian, and Coptic)"...
Coptic is Afroasiatic, hence African by origin. My list of likely genuinely West Eurasian (not just European) is: Vascoid (Basque, Iberian, Ligurian), Tyrsenian (Etruscan, Lemnian), Hattic and its likely relative NW Caucasian, NE Caucasian and its likely relatives: Hurro-Urartean and Sumerian and Kartvelian (mysterious and isolated). Add Indoeuropean and Dravidian (and it's possible relative Elamite) but these have clear South Asian connections and maybe even ultimate origins. Afroasiatic and Uralic are not genuinely West Eurasian but "recent" (Epipaleolithic and Neolithic) arrivals from the Nile Basin and Siberia respectively, as far as I can tell.
"Presumably, all Eurasian languages are related at a time depth of 75000-100000 years, and all European languages (except perhaps Uralic) go back 50000 years".
I'd agree with that very roughly, yes. I think that it's more likely to find connections between languages existing in the same region (West Eurasia) for some 50 Ka. than between Basque and Mandarin, sincerely.
So if Bengtson can go all around claiming that Chinese and Basque are related (I am still trying to practice that theory with the Cantonese owners of the shop in front of my home... to no avail - they have learned to say "agur" but that's all), I do not see why I cannot explore a more reasonable hypothesis.
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ReplyDelete"The best case for PIE puts its genesis at the 4th to 6th millenium"...
Absolutely. Samara valley - archaeology strongly supports that.
"presumably either as a highly diverged branch of a language somewhere in the vicinity, or as a creole of two or more languages (or more likely both)"...
A creole would be an interesting idea. I can imagine that at such a crossroads (between the various Caucasian families, then surely spoken also in Ukraine and the Don basin), the Uralic peoples of the North and the mysterious Botai people by the east, it must have shared a lot. However as the archaeology of the are is ill-known before c. 5500 BCE, we cannot analyze the matter on material grounds further (pity).
"Dravidian, to the extent that it is not Harappan in origins"...
I think that Dravidian is "Harappan" (IVC) in origins. Otherwise it's hard to explain how some Balochi speak IE (Baloch) and others speak Dravidian (Brahui), while having exactly the same genetics. It does not look like the Brahui arrived from anywhere else but that they are Balochi who never got indoeuropeanized.
This makes a good case for Dravidian being a "Neolithic" language.
"Basque is surely older than IE"...
All languages are exactly the same age, as they all evolve from something spoken earlier up to the first uttered words ever.
But if you mean that Vascoid was extended by parts of Europe long before IE expanded, then I must agree.
"I think that the jury is out on how persistent the ergative language feature is".
It could well be a recent evolution. We have no evidence for ergative in Basque prior to early Modernity. On the other hand we have only scant evidence on Basque before that, no full texts or anything like that before the Huguenot Bible.
"I also think that more than base ten numbers are linked to urbanization independent of a base ten number area (e.g. you see it in both Sumerian and Mayan), rather than common descent".
To mathematics and astronomy rather than urbanization. I'm sure that the builders of Stonehenge must have used advanced numeral sciences, yet not a single city is known to have existed in all the islands until the Romans.
The issue is: how old is astronomy. Magdalenian evidence certainly supports at least some astronomy back then (solstice/equinox aligned caves, almost all that have any art, moon count calendars, etc.)
In any case for safety only numbers 1-5 should be compared (though I'd dare say that 10, 20 and 100 can be informative too in many cases, for example Basque hogei - Breton ugain, 20).
As for Celtic, I'm rescuing for this my notes which reach up to number 95, where I got really tired and dropped the matter.
ReplyDeleteSomewhat coincidental with the previous list are only:
- 2 and 5 (the "thou/you" stuff)
- 24 (only with Brythonic, which is closer to the Basque form: *kiru)
- 50 PC *k(w)irmi - PB *kar [this one could be directly related to har, specially as har should be originally *kar in Basque too]
- 65 *askurno (Bryt., but notice the similitude with horn/cornus)
- 68 adarc (Gael.)
- 71 PIE *puhl > *wolto > blev, blew (Bryt.) [not really closer to Basque ile]
- [76 *as (but only "Proto-Celtic", not really spoken anywhere - disergard as artificial linguistic construct)]
- 92 evañ, evet, eva (Gael. with the "to drink" meaning, interesting because it implies it changed meaning in Celtic too in the Basque direction).
That's all for the first 95 words: 4, 28, 33, 49, 57, 62, 72, 76, 78 and 86 look like not mediated by Celtic in any case: 10/19.
Additionally there are words in Celtic that look Vascoid-related but not via PIE:
- 1 and 4 (the I/we thing but different from PIE *wey)
- 7 and 9 (the this/here thing, very Vascoid)
- 10 there
- 32 PBryt. *ziki - Basque txiki (<*ziki)
- 37 Bryt gwas, gwaz - Basque gizon
- 38 Bryt den, dyn - Bas. dena
- 39. ume - bugei (Breton)
- 55. hasi - had, hasenn, had (Bryt)
- 63. ? okel - kig, cig, kua (Bryt. *kika)
- 74. begi - lagad, lagas, llygad (Bryt.)
- 75. sudur - *srogna (Gael.)
- 84. hego - askell/asgell (Bryt.)
- 85. sabel - *bolgo (specially Gael.)
- 94. ? koska egin - krogiñ (PC *kna-yo-)
So there are like 14 extra words in this limited sample that are related between Vascoid and Celtic (either subfamily but specially Brythonic) but not with PIE.
So it's very balanced in favor of some intense contact Vascoid-Celtic but not necessarily in the Celtic>Basque direction, actually many words seem to have taken the opposite one (substrate probably).
There are also a large number of words that only seem to relate at the Basque-PIE level and never at the Celtic one.
As appendix, some English/proto-Germanic words which look Vascoid but not via Celtic nor PIE:
ReplyDelete- 'blood' (<PG *blodam), compare with Basque 'odol'
- ear (confusingly claimed <PG *auzo but this is only true for Gothic, all North and West Germanic are in the "ear" line), compare with Basque 'belarri'
- belly (<PG *baelg) compare with Basque 'sabel' (this one also relates to some Celtic words: *bolgo but not to PIE *uderos).
If I understand correctly PIE is constructed from multiple IE languages but Proto-Basque is constructed from a single language. Considering the sound changes of all branches and making extrapolation PIE could be imagined as 4000-5000 years old. However, with only one branch, I would say constructed proto-Basque could not more than 1500-2000 years old. With this argument I would say comparison is not possible.
ReplyDeleteYes. I seldom use "proto-Basque" for that reason, except where I need to indicate a reconstructed/proposed sound change such as k->h.
ReplyDeleteOctavià above uses Proto-North-Caucasian (PNC) instead as if it was "proto-Basque" but Basque itself is not even considered in the proto-language reconstruction and the existence of a single North Caucasian family is highly controversial, notwithstanding the also controversial or at least unclear relation with Basque. So, while I do think that NE Caucasian probably has some remote relation with Basque, I cannot follow his model for lack of Basque-NWC-NEC comparison in the reconstructed proto-language. It's like making a PIE out of Greek and Latin alone, ignoring Sanskrit, Germanic and Tocharian, you know.
"However, with only one branch, I would say constructed proto-Basque could not more than 1500-2000 years old. With this argument I would say comparison is not possible".
We cannot provide a date for Basque because we lack of a second language to compare and establish a bifurcation point. Languages do not appear suddenly out of nowhere but evolve more or less gradually or abruptly from previous versions, so, if Basque-2.0 is only 2000 years, there was a Basque-1.9 3000 years ago, a Basque-1.8 4000 years ago and so on until the origin of language.
While it's true that the comparison is not strictly parallel, as we are not doing glottochronology but just identification of sound-and-meaning affinity, it is totally valid. Alternatively you can compare with each of the IE living languages but that's a lot of effort and should surely provide not better results except for those languages in contact with Basque (Western IE essentially: Germanic, Celtic and Italic).
"I'm sorry to disapoint you, but you're the 4th or 5th people I've known to compare Basque and PIE"...
ReplyDeleteI was not aware. I have not found their work online...
I could give you some references if you wish...
"except bide, which is a loanword from *pent-. And gorri is also a loanword but from *kreuH- 'blood, gore'".
Via what? Orcish?! Neither word exists in Latin as such nor I think they do in Celtic.
You apparently forgot other poorly attested IE languages such as Italoid (aka Sorotaptic).
I seldom use "proto-Basque" for that reason, except where I need to indicate a reconstructed/proposed sound change such as k->h.
But you can't simply ignore the research made by Mitxelena and others.
Octavià above uses Proto-North-Caucasian (PNC) instead as if it was "proto-Basque"
Not so. What I do is to compare (Proto-)Basque with Starostin's PNC.
but Basque itself is not even considered in the proto-language reconstruction and the existence of a single North Caucasian family is highly controversial,
Surely many people thinks so because of the time-depth and issues involved the comparison.
notwithstanding the also controversial or at least unclear relation with Basque. So, while I do think that NE Caucasian probably has some remote relation with Basque, I cannot follow his model for lack of Basque-NWC-NEC comparison in the reconstructed proto-language.
Vasco-Caucasian is much older than PIE. But there're a number of reasons which make Starostin's PNC an older entity than commonly thought and thus closer to the actual (unreconstructed) Proto-Vasco-Caucasian. Don't forget also Burushaski is also included in this macro-family.
IMHO, the first farmers of the Near East spoke Vasco-Caucasian languages. According to the genetic research made by Cavalli-Sforza and others, these Neolithic farmers emigrated to Europe bringing with them new species, techniques and also their own languages, from which Basque descends.
Also PIE has many Vasco-Caucasian cultural loanwords relative from the Neolithic, which PIE speakers opicked up from their neighbouring farmers.
Sumerian also looks like Vasco-Caucasian, and I've also detected a VC substrate in Semitic.
"I could give you some references if you wish..."
ReplyDeletePlease do.
"You apparently forgot other poorly attested IE languages such as Italoid (aka Sorotaptic)".
Very poorly attested as far as I can see, again no easy to find online references - looks worse than Pictish. I first thought you might mean Italic languages such as Sabine or Umbrian but seems you might be thinking in something like Lusitanian. In any case, it's lack of evidence rather than evidence, a most speculative matter unless it can be demonstrated (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence).
"But you can't simply ignore the research made by Mitxelena and others".
I can because I am an ignorant amateur (you will excuse me for that, I hope). But mostly because all I've read is not too solid - after all there's too little to reconstruct a proto-Basque other than spoken Basque (several dialects but all too similar), toponimy and a handful of Roman era anthroponyms and theonyms.
For example I find the claim that ancient Basque lacked the sound M totally incredible. Iberian (excepting NE Iberian) may have lacked it but I see no reason to extend this logic to Basque: how did you say "mendi"? "bendi"? "ama" was "aba"?, "eme" was "ebe"? "eman" (to give) was "eban" (to slice, cut). And then why words like ibai have not become imai, ibili has not become imili, etc?
On the other hand the lack of P, F, etc. is way too obvious and the K>H shift has been argued to me in rather convincing form, though, as I have said on occasion, it may have been a K<>H irregular flow rather than unidirectional shift.
Whatever the case, we can discard authority if we think they were wrong. Kepler would have never discovered anything if he had remained stuck to Platonian geometry. Sometimes is best to throw all you think you know to the trash bin and start all over.
"Not so. What I do is to compare (Proto-)Basque with Starostin's PNC".
In previous conversations with you I understood that you argued once and again that Basque and all Vascoid languages (Iberian, etc.) were just derived forms of PNC which arrived to Western Europe in the Neolithic, emphasizing that there was no need to reconstruct a proto-Vasco-Caucasian because PNC was old and diverse enough.
However I may have got you wrong, my apologies if so.
"Surely many people thinks so because of the time-depth and issues involved the comparison".
AFAIK the problem of North Caucasian is specially that of NW Caucasian phonetic, which is simply too strange to allow linguists to work properly, right? Additionally, a the language family has been pushed to near extinction, the reconstruction seems complex.
In any case, my few excursions into NWC I found nothing that looked like NEC. However I did find NEC-Sumerian and NEC-Basque connections, even if weak. I'd say that something with such a strange phonetics as NWC is not likely to be a relative of Basque, whose phonetics are quite "clean" (five vowels and so on). But this is not a conclusive argument admittedly.
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ReplyDelete"Don't forget also Burushaski is also included in this macro-family".
Hypothetical super-family. For me the big question is: can you demonstrate that Burushaski or Chinese or whatever is related to Basque? So far I have seen nothing of that. Only with NEC.
Because you know "burusaski" in Basque means "head-basket" but in Burushaski it means nothing like that, so on first sight they are not related.
Then a quick useful tool is comparing the first numerals, for which this site is a great tool, and we have:
Basque: bat bi hiru lau bost
Hunza hik altó iskí wálti shindí
Yasin hek altó iskí wálte cendí
No relation at all, at least I can't see it. I can relate hek with Armenian mek or Balochi/Iranic yak, Sanskrit eka, etc. Or even some Dravidian words like okati.
Alto? Sure with "alter ego", sounds IE again but not Basque (bi, beste for other). Iskí? Not closer to hiru than treyes certainly, etc.
I have not explored yet further but so far the numbers' test is horribly negative.
We can try with Chinese or NWC, I have failed to find any connection yet however.
"IMHO, the first farmers of the Near East spoke Vasco-Caucasian languages".
IMNSHO there were at least three groups: Anatolian, Zagros and Levantine. The Zagros one would be derived from East European Gravettian, via the Caucasus (Zarzian culture), so these may have indeed spoke NEC and also be at the origin of Hurro-Urartean and Sumerian.
As for the Anatolian and Levantine groups things are not so clear, specially as we have the PPNB flows and then also the Black-Grey pottery invasions, etc. There may have been a number of languages and at least one of them (PPNA probably) was Afroasiatic, eventually leading to Semitic (CAPC).
As for the rest I'd explore the possibility of Tyrsenian (Pelasgian) and Hattic/NWC being related. I'd also try to find out where does Kartvelian belong to in all this mess. But I do not think that the Anatolian group is closely related to NEC/Eastern Gravettian, though at some point all West Eurasian languages are related.
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ReplyDelete"According to the genetic research made by Cavalli-Sforza and others, these Neolithic farmers emigrated to Europe bringing with them new species, techniques and also their own languages, from which Basque descends".
That's a misunderstanding (sometimes bordering religious fanaticism) I and others are trying to correct and or relativize to its own proper size. The apportion of "Neolithic" lineages among modern Basques is trivial (5% or so) and even in more impacted areas like Valencia, it's not more than 20-30%.
Modern research once and again confirms this low importance of Neolithic flows, which is confirmed AFAIK by archaeology in the Mediterranean case, with most Cardium Pottery sites being continuous with Epipaleolithic in culture and technology. However languages may have caused a greater impact than genes and material culture. I am open to that possibility.
Yet I find most strange that of all three West Asian Neolithic groups, the only one where a connection is clear is the most distant one: the Zagros group with its Sumer and NE Caucasus connection. This is not probably a Neolithic flow westwards but a Paleolithic flow westwards and eastwards from Central Europe surely.
"Also PIE has many Vasco-Caucasian cultural loanwords relative from the Neolithic, which PIE speakers opicked up from their neighbouring farmers".
This I think may be plausible. But even if it's sprachbund and not phylogenetic connection, it's something it cannot be ignored.
However, as Andrew underlined, the words involved do not look neolithic stuff but older or at least random stuff.
"Sumerian also looks like Vasco-Caucasian, and I've also detected a VC substrate in Semitic".
That's interesting. Semitic after all coalesced in contact with (likely) NW and NE Caucasian languages like Sumerian, Hurrian and Hattic. I can imagine a sprachbund between these three areas in Neolithic (not necessarily substrate: it can be just contact influence). It is important to understand that there was not one single "ur-Neolithic people" but at least three, one of which (Zagros) is particularly connected to East Europe, another (Palestine) probably influenced by Egypt (Afroasiatic) and finally one in Anatolia, with various diffuse connections. There could have been even more.
Btw, Octavià, check Dravidian because the two alleged borrowings from IE into Basque you argued for, are also clearly congnate in Dravidian (Telugu):
ReplyDelete170 - road - (eu) bide - (PIE) *pent- (tel) bATa
172 - red - (eu) gorri - (PIE) *h₁rewdʰós - (tel) erra
And in this last one notice the similitude with Basque erre (to burn) and Tamil eri (to burn). And this is, it seems only, the tip of the iceberg. I'll get back to Dravidian because it is a very interesting third language, which seems to have iportant connections in vocabulary with both PIE and Basque (and sometimes with both at the same time).
Btw, does any of you philologers have a decent Swadesh list for proto-NW- and proto-NE-Caucasian (as separate families I prefer). It's very complicated to work with so many different languages and incomplete word lists.
And the last "update" before my batteries go dry is that:
ReplyDelete(Method): I compared Basque (eu), PIE, Archi (a NEC language from Daghestan) and Telugu (a major Dravidian language). While Basque and Telugu lists had all words, PIE and Archi did not, so in the end I could only compare across all four families with 39 words for which all them had representatives in the Swadesh lists.
The results suggest a quite stronger connection between PIE and Basque than the others, NEC is connected with all other three at middle levels and Dravidian is the more weakly connected.
(Results): Total of 39 words located in all four lists.
Non-additive relations:
9 - EU-IE
6 - NEC-DR
4 - all four
4 - EU-IE-NEC
4 - IE-NEC
3 - EU-DR
3 - IE-DR
2 - EU-NEC-DR
2 - EU-NEC
1 - EU-IE-DR
1 - IE-NEC-DR
Additive bilateral relations (except "all four")
14 - EU-IE
9 - IE-NEC
8 - NEC-DR
8 - EU-NEC
6 - EU-DR
5 - IE-DR
So, if a phylogeny would be constructed based on such limited comparison, the result would be that:
1. Dravidian would be the first one to break apart (T=2)
2. NEC would be the second one (though maybe kept some stronger sprachbund after the separation with all others, specially with proto-Dravidian) (T=1.5)
3. The last division appears to be PIE-Basque at T=1.
Of course a lot of confirmation work would be needed. But that's what the draft exercise tells me.
Correction to previous post: 39 are the words that showed at least one apparent match, some words did not display any match at all and I forgot to mention them: I count 7 of these now (total of comparable words across all four lists: 46).
ReplyDelete"I could give you some references if you wish..."
ReplyDeletePlease do.
Try these ones: http://www.etchamendy.com/
http://www.scribd.com/doc/34070533/DIA-02-Comparing-Basque-and-PIE-v2
"You apparently forgot other poorly attested IE languages such as Italoid (aka Sorotaptic)".
Very poorly attested as far as I can see, again no easy to find online references - looks worse than Pictish. I first thought you might mean Italic languages such as Sabine or Umbrian but seems you might be thinking in something like Lusitanian.
Yes, Lusitanian is likely a Italoid dialect.
You're right about online references, but unfortunately you've got to recurr to printed books and articles. As in other Paleo-Hispanic languages (e.g. Iberian), there's no much literature outside Spanish specialists, the main one being Francisco Villar from Salamanca University.
Also the Catalan filologist Joan Coromines also made some research on Italoid (which he called "Sorotaptic") even to the point of publishing a lead foil inscription found in Amélie-les-Bains, Roussillon (Banys d'Arles in Catalan).
For example I find the claim that ancient Basque lacked the sound M totally incredible. Iberian (excepting NE Iberian) may have lacked it but I see no reason to extend this logic to Basque:
From my own research, it looks like Proto-Basque had merged nasals into n. By contrast, Iberian didn't differentiate (at least in writing) between m and b.
how did you say "mendi"? "bendi"?
Yes, that's right. The following n caused initial *b- to be nasalized.
"ama" was "aba"?, "eme" was "ebe"?
Definitely not. Academic vascologists would respectively reconstruct *anba and *enbe, but I'd prefer *anna and *enne.
"eman" (to give) was "eban" (to slice, cut).
No. The verb 'to give' was probably *e-oan- ~ *e-uan-, coming from an earlier *e-goan- ~ *e-guan- by assimilation g > b, as the last form is found in Iberian.
And then why words like ibai have not become imai, ibili has not become imili, etc?
Because there's no nasal there.
In previous conversations with you I understood that you argued once and again that Basque and all Vascoid languages (Iberian, etc.) were just derived forms of PNC which arrived to Western Europe in the Neolithic, emphasizing that there was no need to reconstruct a proto-Vasco-Caucasian because PNC was old and diverse enough.
No, what I said is the PNC recontructed by Starostin is actually closer to the unreconstructed Proto-Vasco-Caucasian that commonly thought, so it's a good aproximation.
AFAIK the problem of North Caucasian is specially that of NW Caucasian phonetic, which is simply too strange to allow linguists to work properly, right? Additionally, a the language family has been pushed to near extinction, the reconstruction seems complex.
Vjacheslav Chirikba made his doctoral thesis about NW Caucasian. Unfortunately this is another offline resource (I've got to buy the book).
Because you know "burusaski" in Basque means "head-basket" but in Burushaski it means nothing like that, so on first sight they are not related.
Surely I must take this as a joke.
Please do me a favour and forget about casual language comparison and Chinese.
"not a single city is known to have existed in all the islands until the Romans."
ReplyDeleteDepends on how you measure it. There were fishing and huntiojng villages in the British Isles are pre-Neolithic. For example Thatcham in Berkshire was a mesolithic hunting camp and more or less continously inhabited since then.
Abingdon in the English county of Oxfordshire was a 33 hectare settlement around 6000 years ago.
Marazion in Cornwall was settled and may have had tin mines for 4000 years.
Camulodunum aka Colchester aka Colonia Claudia Victricensis was a substantial Celtic settlement that may have been the capital of a British Celtic Kingdom that far predated the Romans and was appropriated by them until it was razed in in Boudica's rebellion in AD 60.
Thus, there were some fairly decent sized habitations by the time you get to the late Celtic/pre-Roman era, and whether or not they were truly cities comes down to a matter of definition as much as anything.
ReplyDelete170 - road - (eu) bide - (PIE) *pent- (tel) bATa
The Kannada equivalent is baTTe. Borrowed form Prakrits (Jain or Buddhist legacy...thus Indo-Aryan).
My thoery the sedentary civlization of South Dravidian linguistic family in the South was the result of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian speakers but controlled by Dravidian chieftains (with the exception of Maharashtra).
Why do you compare Proto IE words with independent languages?
@Octavià: thanks for the links. The second one specially is very interesting, even if I can only accept easily less than half of Fournet's cognates (just had a quick read anyhow). Many of the "good ones" are the same ones I located, what is in itself encouraging. Interestingly I had not perceived the cross-relation between eye and to see:
ReplyDelete"Basque *begi ‘eye’ ~ PIE *s-pek- ‘to see’"
"Basque *i/e-kusi ‘to see’ ~ PIE *Hokw ‘eye’"
Which may well be correct.
Etchamendy's theory may well point to some interesting elements but in any case, it's clear that Basque is not IE, even if it may be related in several ways.
I must say I was very surprised to get quite higher Basque-IE correspondences than Basque-NEC ones in the exercise above, I actually expected the Basque-Caucasian connection to be stronger or at least similar, and the NEC-IE connection also to be stronger or at least similar. But seems not.
...
The issue of Italoid is certainly intriguing. Out of Iberia Lusitanian is generally considered "Illyrian" or proto-Celtic (i.e. prior to the P>Q shift of "Goidelic"). I understand that recently Venetic was "demonstrated" to be closer to Italic than to Illyrian proper and I also realized recently that Mycenaean Greek looks almost more like Latin than like Greek. So this matter of "Italoid" is indeed an intriguing line of research but with many blanks to be filled.
However in the Basque case, we see no historical proto-Celtic or "Italoid" in the area of contact, unless we'd consider Arverni to be that (they are claimed to be among the oldest Celtic peoples of the area, so they probably arrived with Urnfields or Hallstatt, not La Tène). But by the south, the product of these migrations was Celtiberians, who are totally Q-Celtic. So in principle Basques were surrounded by genuine Celts and not "Italoids". The Ligurians seem to be restricted to their historical area by the West or more likely parts of it (as other peoples are called Celtici, Gallaeci, etc. clearly indicating their Gaelic language and identity). So to me they look more like either:
(a) proto-Celts (i.e. Celts but with their language in a very early stage prior to the P>Q shift, so they would have arrived possibly in the Urnfields period)
(b) Celticized Italic language peoples (not much difference, right?)
I'd dare suggest that the most genuine (conservative) Western IE was Italic and that's why we see a lot of other scattered languages that approach it without being clearly it, because of incomplete divergence. Alternatively, proto-Italic may have been the language of Unetice culture, which was central to Bronze Age Western Indoeuropeans of Central Europe, influencing all the other groups, notably Celts. There are other possibilities I guess but in any case it does not look like it can be a pretext to force-feed PIE "loanwords" into Basque.
"Academic vascologists would respectively reconstruct *anba and *enbe, but I'd prefer *anna and *enne".
ReplyDeleteAh, alright. Like the famous "senbe" (seme: son), which is probably the origin of all this speculation. Is there any other "evidence" at all? Because senbe may actually be a case of indoeuropeization at the Celtic border (notice the similitude sen(be)-son). On the other hand seme seems related to Latin semen (seed) and to seed and sow itself (PIE *suh₂-kéh₂-) and of course to son (PIE *suHnús). However as there is a proposed etymology for these words in PIE (<*sewH- to give birth) and not in Basque, this is surely a case of IE loanword into Basque.
I'm of the opinion that eman (to give) and eme (female) are related (and probably also ar (male) and hartu (to take), assuming irregular loss of h in ar, what is reasonable, considering har is worm, of obvious sexual connotations). So I'm not sure I like all those ideas on the origin of "m-words" in Basque.
It's "a theory" but is it sufficiently substantiated more like a mere conjecture based on a couple of hints? I understand it's the latter.
"Because there's no nasal there".
Ok, that's logical. I had the wrong idea that it was b>m and not nb>m. But there's only one example of "nb" digraph in all Basque "literature" AFAIK so...
Wait! Then why do we have Anboto? The chief peak of Biscay and Araba (not the highest but the most "magical" one). And enbata (sea storm)? Notice that, unlike in Spanish, Basque language feels no need to make nb > mb and in fact tends to pronounce Spanish mb as /nb/ ("ambos" sounds /anbos/).
So even less persuaded now.
"Surely I must take this as a joke".
It is a joke but a serious one. After that I made a mini-research with numbers and there's no obvious connection. I'll check the Swadesh list when possible but I do not expect any particular likelihood other than generic "proto-Western".
The problem is that the "Vasco-Caucasian" proposal has been created as a catchall box for those languages which did not fall in the Nostratic proposal, but once you discard Nostratic (a most unlikely idea) you can proceed to study the connection between languages dispassionately, without prejudices. In this sense, I'd expect Burushaski to be related to Dravidian more than to any other language (but haven't checked yet: it's just a geographically-based hunch).
"Please do me a favour and forget about casual language comparison and Chinese".
No way! If you cannot establish direct connections between Chinese and Basque, Bengtson and the others are wrong (this is my application of The Emperor's Clothes story, my all-times Grimms' favorite: there are no clothes and I am the kid laughing at the Naked Emperor). The Chinese-Basque link or lack of it is the only thing that can show that these two languages are related or not. If other languages are also related (or not) that's an independent thing.
I also do not think Tibeto-Burman compares well with Basque, so it's not just the peculiar monosyllabism of Chinese: it is that those languages derive from an older distinct root. As I say there's no archaeological support for any Basque-Caucasian-Sino-Tibetan link of any sort. So you better have the most solid and bullet-proof of all linguistic theories ever because there is absolutely nothing else that could support it.
@Andrew:
ReplyDelete"Depends on how you measure it".
Generally historians apply three elements:
1. The existence of a wall (that's what defined a town in the Middle Ages)
2. Size
3. Social stratification (the main argument against considering Jericho the oldest town or city, as it was not hierarchized - but had a wall and was large enough)
"Abingdon in the English county of Oxfordshire was a 33 hectare settlement around 6000 years ago".
Looks pretty big. Wasn't it walled? You read much about the megaliths but little about the towns, also in Iberia. Yet it's the towns and cities which actually create the human geography, economy, politics, etc.
@manju:
ReplyDelete"The Kannada equivalent is baTTe. Borrowed form Prakrits (Jain or Buddhist legacy...thus Indo-Aryan)".
Are you sure?
What about red?
"Why do you compare Proto IE words with independent languages?"
I'd use proto-languages but I can't find them in Swadesh list form. So I'm being forced to work with what I can find, sadly enough. So I took a random representative from each family, maybe not the best one? Definitively next time I compare with NEC I'll use Chechen because it's much better documented.
Are you sure?
ReplyDelete100%!
What about red?
No idea. Well, the PD construction appears to be 'er-'. Not found in either Kannada or Malayalam.
I've quoted Fournet and Etxemendi's merely for didactical purposeses, as they're crackpot theories.
ReplyDeleteI must say I was very surprised to get quite higher Basque-IE correspondences than Basque-NEC ones in the exercise above, I actually expected the Basque-Caucasian connection to be stronger or at least similar, and the NEC-IE connection also to be stronger or at least similar. But seems not.
The fact is although Basque has many IE loanwords, its core lexicon isn't remtedly similar to IE.
Ah, alright. Like the famous "senbe" (seme: son), which is probably the origin of all this speculation. Is there any other "evidence" at all? Because senbe may actually be a case of indoeuropeization at the Celtic border (notice the similitude sen(be)-son).
AFAIK, Basque sein, sehi < Proto-Basque *śeni is related to PNC *ts’ænʔV 'new'.
I'm of the opinion that eman (to give) and eme (female) are related (and probably also ar (male) and hartu (to take), assuming irregular loss of h in ar, what is reasonable, considering har is worm, of obvious sexual connotations).
Excuse me, but these "etymologies" are nothing but amateurish work.
Basque -ar 'male' is from Proto-Basque harr, -arr (without asterisk as it's attested in Aquitanian inscriptions), which corresponds to Iberian taŕ, with loss of initial t- due to Martinet's Law.
And har 'worm' derives from Proto-Basque *han-arr, whose nasal consonant is still reflected in the forms hãr (Z), ãr (R).
I fail to see how can you argue that these are loanwords when you cannot propose another vehicle but a hypothetical "Italoid" for which almost nothing is known and which in any case should be similar to Italic and/or pre-Q Celtic (which are clearly not the vehicles in most cases).
ReplyDeleteEssentially you seem to be claiming (implicitly) that Basque was existing in vicinity of PIE some 6000 years ago, then losing contact for some 3000 years or so. We know that was not the case almost for sure.
"Excuse me, but these "etymologies" are nothing but amateurish work".
I'd say it's not worse that some "profesional" work I have to read now and then. Linguistics is just not or barely scientific, sorry about that but it's the truth.
"Basque -ar 'male' is from Proto-Basque harr, -arr (without asterisk as it's attested in Aquitanian inscriptions), which corresponds to Iberian taŕ, with loss of initial t- due to Martinet's Law".
Maybe it is that way. But I would not be surprised if you are wrong.
The problem with regular sound shift laws is that they are oblivious to dialectal diversity and change through space and time: they assume a perfected standard A evolving into a perfected standard B by means of perfectly regular sound changes. However we know from real life that actual change is much more chaotic and irregular. It's like applying Newtonian mechanics to climate: it doesn't work. You need chaos science to make any sense of it.
"And har 'worm' derives from Proto-Basque *han-arr, whose nasal consonant is still reflected in the forms hãr (Z), ãr (R)".
Erronkera (R) is extinct and if something have in common Xiberuera (Z) and Erronkera (R) is that they both belong to the Pyrenean super-dialect of Basque, one of three major branches, possible residual of greater linguistic diversity in the past and, for some, each being a different language on their own right.
"I've quoted Fournet and Etxemendi's merely for didactical purposeses, as they're crackpot theories".
Well, as Fournet and I reached independently to some similar conclusions, it seems obvious that he cannot be that wrong - nor can be I. Of course we could be two crackpots to commit the same heretic error but we have committed it independently.
As for Etchamendy (not Etxemendi, each one writes his/her surname as he wants to), I have not yet gone through his evidence, so I cannot give an opinion. But I like Fournet's approach because it's at least to some extent the same one I tried (though he's obviously better prepared).
...
"AFAIK, Basque sein, sehi < Proto-Basque *śeni is related to PNC *ts’ænʔV 'new'"...
ReplyDeleteI see. I doubt whether to argue this matter but sein only exists in Bizkaiera (Western macro-dialect, which may have included Cantabrian in the distant past).
But what I'm noticing is that the prefix sen- seems to mean "relative", as in "senar" (husband) or "senide" (relative). So, whatever the exact etymology we may be before a "male relative" meaning:
The sound affinity of sein/seme with son/semen is so extreme that I'm all for a IE connection in this case though not sure how.
Sen however also means lucidity, common sense, character. And may also be at the origin of senar and senide, as well as related to Catalan seny and Latin senatus/-or/-il, and generic IE "senior" (*senh₁ó-: "old") in turn potential cognate of zahar (Basque for "old")as mentioned in the main article.
It's difficult to make sense in this case because a lot of words with more or less related or unrelated meaning in both IE and Basque oscillate around the same very narrow sound range. There's something here and is something criss-crossing Basque and IE but what exactly, I'm unsure.
Abingdon's wall was built ca. 100 BCE; pre-Roman by a century or two.
ReplyDeleteBut, walls in any case, certainly aren't absolutely necessary to the definition of a city. The Indus River Valley civilization's cities never had them (except for a couple small frontier trading post/garrisons in SW India), yet they had planned street systems, a common water and sewer system, and large populations. And even major New World cities of the Aztecs and Incas lacked walls as well, and the only places in the colonial New World to have walls were small trading post/garrison towns like those of the Harappans.
I fail to see how can you argue that these are loanwords when you cannot propose another vehicle but a hypothetical "Italoid" for which almost nothing is known and which in any case should be similar to Italic and/or pre-Q Celtic (which are clearly not the vehicles in most cases).
ReplyDeleteI've already summarized the work of two reputed linguists about this language, so please don't keep saying such things :-)
Essentially you seem to be claiming (implicitly) that Basque was existing in vicinity of PIE some 6000 years ago, then losing contact for some 3000 years or so. We know that was not the case almost for sure.
I've said nothing of the kind. Proto-Basque was in contact with Celtic in the Iron Age,and surely also with Italoid not much before.
Linguistics is just not or barely scientific, sorry about that but it's the truth.
I strongly disagree. Sure, historical linguistics isn't an exact science like mathematics, but it's still a science. But the real problem is many supposed-to-be "professionals" make amateurish work.
Maybe it is that way. But I would not be surprised if you are wrong.
Then prove it :-)
The problem with regular sound shift laws is that they are oblivious to dialectal diversity and change through space and time: they assume a perfected standard A evolving into a perfected standard B by means of perfectly regular sound changes.
The concept of "regular" sound changes comes from 19th century's Neogrammarians. I'd prefer instead predictable, a statistical notion.
"And har 'worm' derives from Proto-Basque *han-arr, whose nasal consonant is still reflected in the forms hãr (Z), ãr (R)".
I forgot to say these two dialects keep nasality in the form of nasal vowels.
But what I'm noticing is that the prefix sen- seems to mean "relative", as in "senar" (husband) or "senide" (relative).
No "prefix" but first compound element.
The sound affinity of sein/seme with son/semen is so extreme that I'm all for a IE connection in this case though not sure how.
To the best of my knowledge, these resemblances are chance ones.
Sen however also means lucidity, common sense, character. And may also be at the origin of senar and senide, as well as related to Catalan seny and Latin senatus/-or/-il, and generic IE "senior" (*senh₁ó-: "old") in turn potential cognate of zahar (Basque for "old")as mentioned in the main article.
The IE root *sen- 'old' is behind these words, but they're completely unrelated to the Basque ones.
"I've said nothing of the kind. Proto-Basque was in contact with Celtic in the Iron Age,and surely also with Italoid not much before".
ReplyDeleteIMO Vascoid languages were in contact with Western IE (proto-Celto-Italic and to lesser extent proto-Germanic) since c. 2400 BCE at the Rhine/North Seas ethnic border. And possibly even within the Vascoid territory punctually as the Bell Beaker phenomenon (originally IE probably) scattered around.
However it's difficult to see how they could influence Vascoid languages to any great extent - because there was no elite dominance (as with Latin) nor high cultural exchanges like could happen today via the media and the internet. At most there was lesser border interactions that should have never altered the core language the way it seems to have happened.
We cannot confuse in any case proto-Western-IE with proto-IE. I have already listed a number of PIE-Basque apparent cognates which are absent in Western IE (Celtic, Italic).
Italoid is just a pretext. Because it would in any case be part of the same Celto-Italic branch and hence we should see the same words in Celtic and/or Italic or mostly so. We do not.
So there is a Basque-IE contact before Western IE expansion, even before Rhine borderland and Bell Beaker lesser interaction, even before IE reached Central Europe at all.
There is Basque-IE contact before or at the Samara valley stage, some 8000 years ago. And that requires an explanation.
"Then prove it".
ReplyDeleteFirs you prove "Martinet's law". You cannot prove that either. That's why I cast doubt.
"The concept of "regular" sound changes comes from 19th century's Neogrammarians".
That's exactly part of the problem: it's a 19th century neoclassical concept.
"I'd prefer instead predictable, a statistical notion".
I can agree with this preference. But statistics are not "laws" nor "rules", just tendencies.
"I forgot to say these two dialects keep nasality in the form of nasal vowels".
Do you think this may be related to nasality in Catalan, East Catalan specially?
"To the best of my knowledge, these resemblances are chance ones".
I do not believe in coincidences when they accumulate the way these do. Sorry: too much.
"The IE root *sen- 'old' is behind these words, but they're completely unrelated to the Basque ones".
How can you be so sure?
Probably because you already claimed the opposite: "Basque sein, sehi < Proto-Basque *śeni is related to PNC *ts’ænʔV 'new'".
But is that true? I can take that as possible PNEC, though a *tsijV forms looks even more likely on light of what I can find online:
In Lezgian languages "new" is:
/t͡sʼiji/, /t͡sʼajif/, /t͡sʼiji/
In Avar-Andic "new" is: cija-b, ciw, ci-da, cijo-m, ciu, ciju, ci-w, cinu-b, cihu-b
Not particularly close nor informative on its own right. Not even related to Basque "new" (berri), nor there is any other word in Basque where 'sen-' or 'sem-' means "new".
Instead we do have this particle meaning 'relative', surely 'male relative', ("senar", "senide" and archaic "senbe", modern "seme"), and lucididty ("sen" as distinct word and in some derivatives).
And we have similarly sounding IE words:
1. *suHnús (son, from *sewH-, to give birth, potentially related to NEC words for "new"), specially "ciw" and similar Avar-Andic words.
2. Lat. 'semen' (seed), surely from the same root as (1)
3. *senh₁ó- (old, elder), which oddly enough might also come from *sewH-, meaning "grandfather", "patriarch", or maybe just "born" or "first born", rather than just "old".
My previously suggested correlation with Basque 'zahar' (old, possibly from 'zakar': bad, and related to 'txar': bad) may hence be wrong (too shallow). Because the equivalent of elder in Basque is agure (< agur-tu: to greet, to respect).
Whatever the case, sen in Basque seems more related to IE than anything else I can perceive.
IMO Vascoid languages were in contact with Western IE (proto-Celto-Italic and to lesser extent proto-Germanic) since c. 2400 BCE at the Rhine/North Seas ethnic border. And possibly even within the Vascoid territory punctually as the Bell Beaker phenomenon (originally IE probably) scattered around.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there was anything like Celto-Italic, and Italoid was somewhere between Baltic and Italic. Some people have suggested Bell Beaker might be associated with a pre-Celtic IE language, perhaps Krahe's "AltEuropäische" or even Italoid itself.
We cannot confuse in any case proto-Western-IE with proto-IE. I have already listed a number of PIE-Basque apparent cognates which are absent in Western IE (Celtic, Italic).
Sorry, but to me most of your "cognates" aren't real ones. Most of them don't even sound similar.
I don't want to discourage you, but comparative linguistics doesn't work that way.
Firs you prove "Martinet's law". You cannot prove that either. That's why I cast doubt.
I've already done this is on my blog. Have you any specific objection to that?
"I forgot to say these two dialects keep nasality in the form of nasal vowels".
Do you think this may be related to nasality in Catalan, East Catalan specially?
I don't get your point. Catalan has no nasal vowels whatsoever.
Probably because you already claimed the opposite: "Basque sein, sehi < Proto-Basque *śeni is related to PNC *ts’ænʔV 'new'".
That's right, because the original meaning of Proto-Basque śeni (the asterisk isn't needed because it's actually attested in Aquitanian inscriptions) and Iberian śani was 'son' or 'child'.
Instead we do have this particle meaning 'relative', surely 'male relative', ("senar", "senide" and archaic "senbe", modern "seme"),
That's right. This is a root *śenn- 'family': senar 'husband' is from *śenn-aŕ 'male of the family'; senide 'relative' is from *śenn-ide 'kin of the family' and so on.
and lucididty ("sen" as distinct word and in some derivatives).
Not so. This is a homonymous word of Romance origin (e.g. Catalan seny).
1. *suHnús (son, from *sewH-, to give birth, potentially related to NEC words for "new"), specially "ciw" and similar Avar-Andic words.
Possibly PIE borrowed it from some Vasco-Caucasian language spoken by Neolithic farmers.
2. Lat. 'semen' (seed), surely from the same root as (1)
Not sure.
3. *senh₁ó- (old, elder), which oddly enough might also come from *sewH-, meaning "grandfather", "patriarch", or maybe just "born" or "first born", rather than just "old".
Definitely not, and it's important you realize why. 'Born' and 'grown up' > 'mature, old' are in fact opposite concepts.
As an example, Basque adin 'age; judgement' is a loanword from Iberian adin, probably 'mature, old', from PNC *=VdʑV 'to grow'.
Because the equivalent of elder in Basque is agure (< agur-tu: to greet, to respect).
Basque agure 'old man' and guraso 'parents' are probably IE loanwords from *g´erH- 'old man'. And agur is probably from the same root *kurr- than gur-tu, kur-tu 'to kneel, to bow, to revere', from PNC *=ig(w)Vr 'to bend, to fold'.
Graphs quickly googled that include Italo-Celtic or Italo-Celto-Germanic (where Balto-Slavic is the other Western IE branch):
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v426/n6965/images/nature02029-f1.2.jpg
http://dienekes.110mb.com/articles/ieorigins/colin_renfrew.jpg
http://rootsofeurope.ku.dk/billeder/blokseminarer_gaesteforelaesninger/2009-07-14_heggarty_alternativ_stamtraesmodel.bmp/
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/summer96/BRANCH.JPG
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/books/tree.gif
Generally Italic and Celtic are considered the main survivors of the West-Central European group emanated from Corded Ware (this is shared with Germanic and Balto-Slavic) and later apparent in Tummuli and Urnfields culture. However Hallstatt seems already only Celtic or Celto-Illyrian, to the exclusion of Italic peoples, already in Italy by that time.
"Italoid was somewhere between Baltic and Italic"
Interesting idea (Latvian-Latin). Still it would mean that conjectural borrowings of Italoid into Basque would be present in either of these two other subfamilies or both. Are they?
"Some people have suggested Bell Beaker might be associated with a pre-Celtic IE language, perhaps Krahe's "AltEuropäische" or even Italoid itself".
Possibly at their origins, it'd be proto-Celto-Italic-Illyrian or just proto-Western, if Germanic also comes from that bunch. But Bell Beaker is a trading guild and/or religious sect and not a real culture. In Portugal they became "Tartessian" or whatever they were in Portugal back then, etc. There's no relevant cultural transfer associated to Bell Beaker, the same that Hebrew (or even Greek) did not spread with Christian burial rituals.
"Sorry, but to me most of your "cognates" aren't real ones. Most of them don't even sound similar".
Not even those in the main list? I reckon that some are questionable but how can anyone challenge for instance:
(65) hezur - *h₃ost-, *kost- [bone]
(76) aho - *h₁oh₁s- [mouth]
(77) hortz - *h₃dónts [tooth]
(86) heste - *eh₁ter- [gut]
(103) jaki(-n) - *ǵneh₃-[to know]
(149) izar - *h₂stḗr [star]
(168) hauts - *h₃és-no-, *h₃és-i- [ash]
(170) bide - *pent- [way, road]
(178) egu, egun - *h₂eǵh- [day]
It seems evident that even some regular rules can be inferred here like h3 reflecting Basque H, while h2 and h1 do not.
You can also see ts <> tz but st <> z
"I don't want to discourage you, but comparative linguistics doesn't work that way".
I do not pretend much, just offering my considerations. We are after all tracking something very thin (extremely old) that can only be inferred by statistical sound comparison (always for same meaning words).
"I've already done this is on my blog. Have you any specific objection to that?"
Link?
"I don't get your point. Catalan has no nasal vowels whatsoever".
Catalan as spoken in Barcelona and all the coast is extremely nasal, almost like Texan English and the nasalization happens at the vowels indeed. Catalan is the most nasal of all Iberian languages by far.
Just so I'm sure to be right. Wikpedia says: "A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth". And that's exactly what your typical Catalan does all the time forcing a lot of vowels into modified forms for that reason alone.
English speakers, specially in the USA also do that. It's at least extremely rare in Basque but I take your word for Xiberuera and Erronkera, as these are strongly influenced by Occitan (of which Catalan is a dialect).
What I was wondering anyhow is if this reflected not just Occitan influence but a sound cline along the Pyrenees maybe.
"That's right, because the original meaning of Proto-Basque śeni (the asterisk isn't needed because it's actually attested in Aquitanian inscriptions) and Iberian śani was 'son' or 'child'".
ReplyDeleteHow do we know? Do we have a translation? (We do not) Cannot it mean husband, relative or some other attested sen- word? Why not?
I know that the answer can only be because XX says so. But that's not any valid answer.
"This is a homonymous word of Romance origin (e.g. Catalan seny)".
Romance or Latin? (senator, senil, senior) Or maybe an older/distinct IE origin/connection as attested in the various PIE words mentioned already. I doubt that Catalan had such strong influence in Basque. The opposite is possible instead considering the toponymy of NW Catalonia (specially) and the fact that Basque is attested at Huesca, near Lleida, as late as the 13th century.
But I'm not even saying this is a Basque influence in Catalan. Most likely both words come from a common root, possibly IE but ill-explained at this stage. A candidate can be Latin but there are other possibilities.
"1. *suHnús (son, from *sewH-, to give birth, potentially related to NEC words for "new"), specially "ciw" and similar Avar-Andic words.
Possibly PIE borrowed it from some Vasco-Caucasian language spoken by Neolithic farmers".
Maybe but then how it arrived into such important Basque kinship (and other) terms?
What I am exploring is more interesting: the three language families have possibly a shared root, albeit a remote one, long before Neolithic.
"2. Lat. 'semen' (seed), surely from the same root as (1)
Not sure".
Me neither (that's why I said "possibly"). A possibility is that the root is the same at proto-European (i.e. the conjectural shared root of IE, NEC and Basque) and then sen as lucidity made its way into Basque from Western IE (senior or similar) and semen evolved instead from Vascoid seme (son > seed makes all the sense).
...
"'Born' and 'grown up' > 'mature, old' are in fact opposite concepts".
ReplyDeleteNot really: everyone is born, young or old. And an ancestor is always "first born" as is the elder of any kind (unless honorific). What you say "elder son" in English is said "primogénito" in Spanish. Both have a conceptual element of birth (son, -génito) however they indicate the oldest of all sons, not the youngest one.
It's not so simple. Black and white are opposite maybe but eng. black and sp. blanco are apparently from the same root.
In any case the conservatism of these words is amazing, so almost everything is possible.
"Basque adin 'age; judgement' is a loanword from Iberian adin, probably 'mature, old', from PNC *=VdʑV 'to grow'".
I believe we have discussed this before and I think adin comes from adi (to listen, pay attention). Related term is aditu (which literally means "listened" but has the sense of "learned", "wise"). It is possible that the Iberian term is related but the conjectural PNC *=VdʑV (to grow) actually looks much more like "hazi" (to grow), logically.
"Basque agure 'old man' and guraso 'parents' are probably IE loanwords from *g´erH- 'old man'".
Gurasoak (does not exist in singular form) has the kinship suffix -aso (arbaso, amaso, aitaso, even itsaso probably considered a relative once upon a time). Gurasoak's preffix is probably "gura" (desire, wish), though it may be shortening of gure arbasoak, where "arba-" has been lost (our ancestors > "ourestors").
Agure comes from agur(tu) and not the other way around. It needs no IE explanation at all and can be argued instead to be related with agindu (to command) and agintari (manager, boss). Also in ag- is ageri: to seem or look like.
I think you argue for IE borrowings all the time because otherwise your "precioussss" PNC-Basque conceptualization can suffer. What I'd suggest is to integrate IE into it, because it seems to me it is a much needed thing to do.
"gur-tu, kur-tu"
Hmmmm...
Much more likely they come from gura (desire, wish).
You cannot just throw away all balls to the IE outfield because that's really cheating. Essentially you are saying: Basque does not exsist, even before Latin and Romance influence it was like 80% Indoeuropean already. And that is simply not true.
Catalan as spoken in Barcelona and all the coast is extremely nasal, almost like Texan English and the nasalization happens at the vowels indeed. Catalan is the most nasal of all Iberian languages by far.
ReplyDeleteI live in Barcelona and also speak Catalan, and I can't assure my language has no nasal vowels like French or Portuguese, much less US English. Where did you get such rubbish?
"Italoid was somewhere between Baltic and Italic"
ReplyDeleteInteresting idea (Latvian-Latin). Still it would mean that conjectural borrowings of Italoid into Basque would be present in either of these two other subfamilies or both. Are they?
Of course not, because that's meaningless. The things is (according to Coromines' and Villar's research) Italoid shares iglosses with both Baltic and Italic.
I don't want to sound harsh, but sometimes you sound too amateur, so to speak. :-)
A possibility is that the root is the same at proto-European (i.e. the conjectural shared root of IE, NEC and Basque) and then sen as lucidity made its way into Basque from Western IE (senior or similar) and semen evolved instead from Vascoid seme (son > seed makes all the sense).
Sorry, it doesn't make any sense.
I believe we have discussed this before and I think adin comes from adi (to listen, pay attention). Related term is aditu (which literally means "listened" but has the sense of "learned", "wise").
Basque is full of homonymous or quasi-homonymous words, a nightmare for any linguist (even professional ones).
It is possible that the Iberian term is related but the conjectural PNC *=VdʑV (to grow) actually looks much more like "hazi" (to grow), logically.One thing doesn't preclude the other.
Gurasoak (does not exist in singular form) has the kinship suffix -aso (arbaso, amaso, aitaso, even itsaso probably considered a relative once upon a time).
This "suffix" (rather a compound element) is acually -so. Of course, itsaso 'sea' has a homonymous compound element.
Gurasoak's preffix is probably "gura" (desire, wish), though it may be shortening of gure arbasoak, where "arba-" has been lost (our ancestors > "ourestors").
Definitely not. Basque gura is related to non-native kutun (B, G) 'beloved', possibly from IE *gheldh- 'to desire'.
I think you argue for IE borrowings all the time because otherwise your "precioussss" PNC-Basque conceptualization can suffer. What I'd suggest is to integrate IE into it, because it seems to me it is a much needed thing to do.
I've been researching the origin of Basque from some years, so I think I've probably got a better idea than yourself, who I remind you, recognized you weren't a linguist.
I think you argue for IE borrowings all the time because otherwise your "precioussss" PNC-Basque conceptualization can suffer. What I'd suggest is to integrate IE into it, because it seems to me it is a much needed thing to do.
All the attempts to relate the core lexicon of Basque with IE have failed. If I've quoted a few is only for didactical purposes: this is the way things shouldn't be done. Unfortunately, you've put yourself on the crackpot side.
"gur-tu, kur-tu"
Hmmmm... Much more likely they come from gura (desire, wish).
I'm affraid they've got a different kind of rhotics :-)
You hear the people speaking Catalan or Spanish with Catalan accent too, mostly in the media, and they nasalize all the time. Basically a Catalan accent is made up of nasalizations and contracted diphthongs.
ReplyDeleteIn French the only nasal vowel is "u" (/ü/), right? French is to me much less nasal than Catalan but they open the mouth too little anyhow.
...
"Of course not, because that's meaningless".
It's very much meaningful: if neither alleged closest relative of the ghostly Italoid has the controversial words (not even a fraction of them), then Italoid probably did not have them either.
So "of course not" means I am right in this issue.
You seem to think you can get away hypothesizing an influence through a language that cannot be tested in any way. That's actually as good as the "Orcish" influence I winked about earlier: it's cheating and/or wild speculation (about the same thing - the only difference being in consciousness or intent).
"I don't want to sound harsh, but sometimes you sound too amateur, so to speak".
You don't sound harsh, you sound snobbish.
Of course I'm amateur in linguistics. And I take that as a potential virtue, because that makes me free from the burden of pseudo-knowledge others have.
"Sorry, it doesn't make any sense".
It makes as much sense as any other speculation on the matter. The only sure thing is that there is a number of IE and Basque words that are related by sound and meaning in a most interesting and intriguing criss-cross fashion.
"Basque is full of homonymous or quasi-homonymous words, a nightmare for any linguist (even professional ones)".
Depends. Homonymous words might be more related than you care to admit, at least in many cases. It can also be a paradise for a linguist with an open mind.
"One thing doesn't preclude the other".
It should: because of sound change regularities and meaning consistency!
If *=VdʑV <> hazi ("to grow" in "PNC" and Basque), then *=VdʑV cannot produce adi nor adin nor aditu. Because it's clear that
(1) = <> h
(2) dʑ <> z
So:
(1) = <> ∅
(2) dʑ <> d
... is wrong.
And anyhow, it's obvious from inside Basque that adi, aditu and adin are related.
Probably sen- and seme are not understandable with a purely Basque internal logic, what may or not mean they are borrowings of some sort, but the adi-adin-aditu class is extremely transparent and therefore genuinely Basque, the same that gora comes from goi-ra, etc.
"This "suffix" (rather a compound element) is acually -so".
In this you are probably right. Not that it changes a thing (actually makes the gura- etymology more clear).
"Of course, itsaso 'sea' has a homonymous compound element".
I'm not sure. Itsaso may be related to iz- (presumably meaning water or sea), to Germanic zee/sea and little more. To be homonym it'd have to be a variant Greek thalassos but the derivation is almost forced. So I'd say that the suffix -so is probably meaning that the sea is an ancestor or otherwise spiritual being tha requires similar respectful addressing.
"Basque gura is related to non-native kutun (B, G) 'beloved', possibly from IE *gheldh- 'to desire'".
ReplyDeleteNonsense. Gura is not related to kuttun (never just kutun: it's one of those words that always has the palatalized diminutive, like txiki - small > Sp. chico/a). Kuttun, is slang in any case and looks rather modern. It is probably as untrackable as moinoino, pottolo, etc., all quasi-onomatopeyic "children words", words that mothers and grandmothers make up as they go... a related example is ttunttuna, that still retains the Spanish origin "tonta", "tontita" (= "silly").
It's even possible that kuttun(a) may derive from ttunttuna. I would not be surprised at all.
Gura instead looks in the quite genuine sound group of gar, gari, gernu, giro, gor, gorri, gora, gu, gure, gura...
None of these words looks like deriving from any other language, nor they can be confused even if mispronouncing dialectally: they are all allophones, except maybe gure/gura, which might be exchanged. However its's unlikely that they are related (our - wish).
"I've been researching the origin of Basque from some years, so I think I've probably got a better idea than yourself, who I remind you, recognized you weren't a linguist".
Don't continue on this line if you don't want your pretty academic title to be used as toilet paper. It's just too easy to demolish your discipline: it's not rocket science nor anything of the like, really.
And I know too many people with a degree who know nearly nothing about what they are supposed to know. I'm not saying that's you but not everything can be learned from books and long dead authorities.
I'd say it's a lot better to get yourself immersed in the living reality of the language if possible, and also to ignore other languages firs and foremost in order to understand the language from inside, not trying to fit everything with an specific outside as you do. Ironically you end up saying it's all IE and not PNC, what is like WTF!
"All the attempts to relate the core lexicon of Basque with IE have failed".
Maybe. That sounds more interesting.
What would you consider "the core lexicon" of a language. I'm not persuaded it's Swadesh lists as such (some sectors look like stuck in there with a lever) but something very close, right?
"I'm affraid they've got a different kind of rhotics"
I meant agure, agur, agurtu...
Still I'd dare say that rhotics can change from flap to thrill. You say agure but also agurra, yet they are from the same obvious root (agur).
If you want to make a distinction (I do not), the agur(tu) and gur(tu) do relate but agure relates to gura or gure, never gur(tu).
I'd say that r/rr are not always dichotomic and when they do not serve to mark a difference, they can be exchanged (at least sometimes). Otherwise agure/agurra cannot be explained. The law must be broken because reality demands it.
You hear the people speaking Catalan or Spanish with Catalan accent too, mostly in the media, and they nasalize all the time. Basically a Catalan accent is made up of nasalizations and contracted diphthongs.
ReplyDeleteSorry, but Catalan has no nasal vowels whatsoever. But perhaps you're confusing nasality with another phonation like velarity, as Catalan has a velar /l/ much like English "dark l".
In French the only nasal vowel is "u" (/ü/), right?
No, that's wrong. French has a lot of nasal vowels, as you can see in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology#Vowels
Of course I'm amateur in linguistics. And I take that as a potential virtue, because that makes me free from the burden of pseudo-knowledge others have.
Sorry, but I think the one who has "pseudo-knowledge" is you. For example, trying to convince a Catalan-speaker that his language has nasal vowels is pretty ridiculous.
"I've been researching the origin of Basque from some years, so I think I've probably got a better idea than yourself, who I remind you, recognized you weren't a linguist".
ReplyDeleteDon't continue on this line if you don't want your pretty academic title to be used as toilet paper. It's just too easy to demolish your discipline: it's not rocket science nor anything of the like, really.
Firstly, I'm not an academic linguist, and secondly, historical linguistics isn't a game anybody is able to play.
And I know too many people with a degree who know nearly nothing about what they are supposed to know. I'm not saying that's you but not everything can be learned from books and long dead authorities.
This is precisely why I've got my own blog: to give people information what academic linguistics won't tell them.
It's very much meaningful: if neither alleged closest relative of the ghostly Italoid has the controversial words (not even a fraction of them), then Italoid probably did not have them either.
Sorry, but I misunderstood you. Now I see you meant "cognate formsof these words". Well, if these languages inherited the same word from PIE, you might expect to have cognates in the other families.
Interestingly enough, Latin itself has loanwords from Italoid, as it preceded Italic in the Italian Peninsula. According to Villar, Latin words with /a/ instead of the expected /o/, e.g. mare 'sea' might be borrowings from Italoid.
Another likely Italoid I've discovered is vagus vs. native vehō, vehiculum, from PIE *weg´h- 'to carry'.
"One thing doesn't preclude the other".
ReplyDeleteIt should: because of sound change regularities and meaning consistency!
But Basque adin 'age' was surely borrowed from Iberian!!
but the adi-adin-aditu class is extremely transparent and therefore genuinely Basque, the same that gora comes from goi-ra, etc.
Sorry, but they look as two homonymous words: one meaning 'age' and another one 'intelligence'.
I'm not sure. Itsaso may be related to iz- (presumably meaning water or sea)
Not **iz- but (g)iza- in gizaurde, izurde 'dolphin' (lit. 'sea-pig').
to Germanic zee/sea and little more.
Possibly distant relatives from a root whose origin meaning was 'salt'.
So I'd say that the suffix -so is probably meaning that the sea is an ancestor or otherwise spiritual being tha requires similar respectful addressing.
Bullshit. This is like equating Proto-Germanic *saiwa-z 'sea' with *saiwalo 'soul'. Similar sounding but completely different meaning.
"Basque gura is related to non-native kutun (B, G) 'beloved', possibly from IE *gheldh- 'to desire'".
Nonsense. Gura is not related to kuttun (never just kutun: it's one of those words that always has the palatalized diminutive, like txiki - small > Sp. chico/a).Kuttun, is slang in any case and looks rather modern.
Expressive features doesn't prevent this word from having an etymology.
You must be also aware that Basque has many loanwords from one or more extinct languages whose phonotactics is different to the one of native words. Some of these variants seem to have survived up to the High Middle Ages, probably spoken by nomadic shepherds and/or other minority groups stigmatized by the dominant society (e.g. the so-called "agotes").
Nasality in Catalan is vocalic, I'm sure. O becomes almost U or rather NG but not by articulating at the lips or throat but by pronouncing it at the back palate and allowing much of the air to get through the nose. And the same happens with all vowels except probably I
ReplyDeleteYou pronounce Pujol as PngJAngL, where ng is the vowel nasalization (my best approximation using Latin letters).
And it's the same with every word I know of. You just have to listen to any speech of Maragall...
"For example, trying to convince a Catalan-speaker that his language has nasal vowels is pretty ridiculous".
I'm surprised that you did not notice: it's extremely nasal. But guess Texans do not notice either...
"Sorry, but I misunderstood you. Now I see you meant "cognate forms of these words". Well, if these languages inherited the same word from PIE, you might expect to have cognates in the other families".
ReplyDeleteRight. Thanks for understanding this part. However I do not understand how what follows has any relation.
I do think that you give credit to "Italoid" for words which may well have non-IE origin (particularly mare). And also to explain subtle vocalic changes a/e which may well respond to mere dialectal variation. Kind of something artificial we had to introduce here to keep using neoclassical linguistics instead of accepting the reality of chaos dynamics also (and maybe with particular intensity) in linguistics.
"But Basque adin 'age' was surely borrowed from Iberian!!"
That it is also attested in Iberian does not mean it is a borrowing or a strict borrowing (the word may have been flowing forth and back through some Basque and Iberian dialects, for example). We do not understand well if Iberian was one or several languages, we do not understand well how it relates to Basque or rather the various Basque dialects that must have existed back then, as there was no Batua (standard Basque) either.
I do not need Iberian to explain adin or aditu in Basque, I only need the root adi (attention) and related verbs adi egon and aditu. More transparent adi derivates are: adierazi (to express), adimen (intelligence: lit. "attention capability"), aditu (n., wise, expert), adiskide (friend, where -kide means peer, fellow, partner, so "attentive partner").
Stranger terms are adina when it means "as much as" and aditz (verb, -(h)itz is word). These two may be unrelated.
"Not **iz- but (g)iza- in gizaurde, izurde 'dolphin' (lit. 'sea-pig')".
That cannot be: giza means "human" (adj.) -> gizaki (human being), gizon (man).
Giza also looks like a "proto-Basque" grammatical modification by which "iza(n)" (being) becomes human "giza", probably related to "gu" (we). The g- meaning "we" is common in verbs (gara, gaude, genbilen...), so no surprise here.
So giza is probably gu+iza(n) in a very archaic way of grammar now totally lost (except in verbs): being like us.
If I mentioned iz- as water or sea, it is because I have read it elsewhere, specially in relation with toponyms. Sincerely I am not totally convinced but when you cannot think of anything better, you have to yield.
"This is like equating Proto-Germanic *saiwa-z 'sea' with *saiwalo 'soul'. Similar sounding but completely different meaning".
ReplyDeleteI do not see why water and soul are "different". Everyone who understands the very basics of astrology or alchemy knows that soul and water are almost the same thing in such imaginary universes that are what existed before Science. Just because you cannot understand how water, moon, soul, death, darkness and hair relate, doesn't mean that they are not related. It just means that you have prejudices on how words relate to each other, mental barriers of your own.
"Expressive features doesn't prevent this word from having an etymology".
Ttunttun probably.
"You must be also aware that Basque has many loanwords from one or more extinct languages whose phonotactics is different to the one of native words. Some of these variants seem to have survived up to the High Middle Ages, probably spoken by nomadic shepherds and/or other minority groups stigmatized by the dominant society (e.g. the so-called "agotes")".
Agotes, Cagots, Gafos, Chrétiens, etc. were NOT nomadic. They were maybe Occitan exiles from the Albigensian Crusade and were sedentary. They are not known to have ever spoken any language different than their hosts' (Romances, Basque, Breton). The only peculiarity is that they were extremely segregated, probably a Catholic imposition of some sort as a revenge for their "heressy" (though this is controversial, because really, nobody knows for sure who were originally these Cagots).
If Basque has rare languages' influence that's surely not attributable to the Cagots. It'd be more likely if it had influences from whichever pastoralist community brought the stone ring burial practices to the Pyrenees in the Iron Age or from whatever was spoken in the Chalcolithic civilization of Vila Nova de Sao Pedro in Portugal (probably not Tartessian, which I rather associate with the intrusive "horizons" of the SW) or... but in any case it's more likely a pre-IE, non-IE matter.
Nasality in Catalan is vocalic, I'm sure. O becomes almost U or rather NG but not by articulating at the lips or throat but by pronouncing it at the back palate and allowing much of the air to get through the nose. And the same happens with all vowels except probably I
ReplyDeleteSorry, but I disagree. I'm sure what you call "nasality" in Catalan is actually another phonation feature. Real nasal languages are Portuguese and French, specially the latter.
I do think that you give credit to "Italoid" for words which may well have non-IE origin (particularly mare). And also to explain subtle vocalic changes a/e which may well respond to mere dialectal variation.
Sorry, but I think you didn't understand my point.
That it is also attested in Iberian does not mean it is a borrowing or a strict borrowing (the word may have been flowing forth and back through some Basque and Iberian dialects, for example).
In that case, adin 'age' would be it would be hazi 'to grow' the one borrowed from another Vasco-Caucasian language.
I also insist that adi 'attention' and adin 'jugdement' have nothing to do with adin 'age'. They're homonymous words.
"Not **iz- but (g)iza- in gizaurde, izurde 'dolphin' (lit. 'sea-pig')".
That cannot be: giza means "human" (adj.) -> gizaki (human being), gizon (man).
Once again it's a case of homonymy. Basque gizon 'man' is surely a loanword from Celtic *gdonjo- 'man', a derivate of *gdon- 'earth'.
There's no problem with being an amateur, but you've got still to learn a lot before making useful hypothesis. :-)
"it would be hazi 'to grow' the one borrowed from another Vasco-Caucasian language".
ReplyDeleteHazi sounds much more like the *PNC *word you mentioned, that's clear. It would not be a borrowing but a cognate, right?
"I also insist that adi 'attention' and adin 'jugdement' have nothing to do with adin 'age'. They're homonymous words".
Adimen - judgement. They are not homonymous first of all because they have a very logical connection: age = learning/experience/wisdom. They are almost the same thing.
"That cannot be: giza means "human" (adj.) -> gizaki (human being), gizon (man).
Once again it's a case of homonymy. Basque gizon 'man' is surely a loanword from Celtic *gdonjo- 'man', a derivate of *gdon- 'earth'".
Please, you can only twist things so much. How come can you appeal to a conjectural giza- to explain iz- and then reject the only Basque words that begin that way.
Your obsession for explaining Basque in terms of PNC (and very specially IE "borrowings") only gets you confused.
Time for reality check: first of all try to explain Basque as Basque, from Basque. Not always possible but often it is. And often it is correctly explained that way - though surely there will be a handful of exceptions ( which would need careful demonstrations as correspond to all exceptional claims).
When you have finished explaining Basque from Basque, you still have a lot to explore in Iberian, IE languages, PIE and Caucasian languages, etc... and probably also in languages already lost, including ancient stages of Basque or Vascoid only retained in fossil forms.
But you cannot put the cart before the oxen. First you need a theory of Basque from Basque, and not a theory of Basque from Orcish, PNC or whatever else - unless you can solidly demonstrate it first, what you (or anybody else) have not done.
"There's no problem with being an amateur, but you've got still to learn a lot before making useful hypothesis".
You must mean distorting reality in the most convoluted ways to fits one's preconceptions. No, thank you. I prefer to sin of amateurish boldness than of erudite self-satisfying decadence.
Hazi sounds much more like the *PNC *word you mentioned, that's clear. It would not be a borrowing but a cognate, right?
ReplyDeleteMy point is both adin and hazi are outputs of the same root bur in different languages.
Adimen - judgement. They are not homonymous first of all because they have a very logical connection: age = learning/experience/wisdom. They are almost the same thing.
Possible, but not sure. In any case, this words deserves research.
"That cannot be: giza means "human" (adj.) -> gizaki (human being), gizon (man).
Once again it's a case of homonymy. Basque gizon 'man' is surely a loanword from Celtic *gdonjo- 'man', a derivate of *gdon- 'earth'".
Please, you can only twist things so much. How come can you appeal to a conjectural giza- to explain iz- and then reject the only Basque words that begin that way.
It isn't conjectural,as the form gizaurde is attested in the Lapurdian dialect. This giza- 'sea' is clearly homonymous to giza- 'man' in compounds, as 'human pig' doesn't mean any sense.
Time for reality check: first of all try to explain Basque as Basque, from Basque. Not always possible but often it is. And often it is correctly explained that way - though surely there will be a handful of exceptions ( which would need careful demonstrations as correspond to all exceptional claims).
I understand your point, but I'm sorry to disagree.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteYour position reminds me of that of academic Vascologists, who regard Basque as an isolate without any proved relationship with any other language of the world, not even Iberian.
ReplyDeleteGiven this false premise, they try to explain everything in Basque from Basque itself, even to the point of labelling some weird words as "expressive" or "phonsymbolic". In other cases, an impossible Latin or Romance etymology is adduced, e.g. mukurru 'heap' or gonburu 'filled to the brim' from Latin cumulus.
"My point is both adin and hazi are outputs of the same root bur in different languages".
ReplyDeleteAnd my point is that adin must come from adi, as do so many other words. Which are its origins in Iberian, if it's related in any way or just a sound coincidence are another story.
"In any case, this words deserves research".
Of course.
"It isn't conjectural,as the form gizaurde is attested in the Lapurdian dialect".
Maybe but iz- as water is also alleged in several toponyms. And then you have izotz (ice), where (h)otz is cold and iz- is...? Water logically.
You also have iz(a)- as to be (izaki: being, izaera: character, and maybe also izar: star, though it'd require a revision of what the common particle -ar- means).
Even if iz- is just a contraction of giza-, this does not allow you to reject giza, gizarte, gizaki and gizon as equally derived from the root giza (human).
"as 'human pig' doesn't mean any sense".
On the contrary it makes all sense because while the boar (rather than pig) correlation of dolphins is kinda odd, the relation with humans is only natural as dolphins are similarly intelligent as we are by all accounts. There's no animal that compares as well with humans but dolphins and this intelligence and humanity would not have been unnoticed neither for Magdalenian seal hunters nor for Cardium Pottery open sea sailors, the two most likely cultures in which proto-Basque would have coalesced.
So "human (or social) boar" instead of "sea boar" makes all sense, indeed. However both etymologies may exist as parallel-convergent (one from iz- sea, water and the other from giza- human). And I'd dare say it is the case: in some parts calling the creature "boar-person" and in others calling them the similarly sounding "water-boar". There's no contradiction as it is just dialectal variants, like behatz (normally toe) in Gipuzkera to mean hatz (finger) - absurdres of real speech once you get out of the academical constraints.
"Your position reminds me of that of academic Vascologists, who regard Basque as an isolate without any proved relationship with any other language of the world, not even Iberian".
ReplyDeleteI do not fully agree with that isolationist proposition but I think it is a good starting point.
At the moment Basque has not been demonstrated to be clearly related to any other language anywhere, not even Iberian.
I know that Iberian is a good candidate but it's also clear that nobody has been able to translate Iberian using Basque as "dictionary" and there are major problems with Iberian grammar specially, which appears to be all but Basque-like.
I know from my "mass lexical comparison exercises" that NEC has some degree of affinity with Basque, possibly more than other language families. And I know that there is some grammar and vocabulary support for this. However it is still a weak connection, much weaker than Indoeuropean languages among themselves, so it can be a very old and ill-understood connection, not necesarily just Neolithic...
A Neolithic age for Basque would be about the same time as the IE scatter: c. 3500 BCE, as there is no Neolithic in the Basque Country before that date (and only marginally older in the Garonne basin). So we should be able to notice a much stronger grammar affinity with Iberian, much like you can compare Albanian, Hittite and English for instance (or actually closer because of the unavoidable sprachbund effects that reinforce the affinity once and again).
We should also be able to track the "Vascoid" toponymy through the Balcans, etc. but we should clearly see a dychotomy in this aspect between the Cardium Pottery area (Ibero-Vascoid presumably) and the Danubian area (some other language subfamily or even a totally unrelated family).
However we do not see that and, following Venneman, the Vascoid toponym area is quite homogeneous in Central and SW Europe, and also in Italy - but rare in the Balcans or further east. This distribution matches better pre-Neolithic patterns or, if Neolithic, it can only relate with Megalithism, which would have a Portuguese core.
So for me either:
(1) Vascoid is pre-Neolithic and then Iberian is also pre-Neolithic or alternative a creole admixture between Vascoid and some language from abroad.
(2) Vascoid is the Neolithic language of the Megalithic super-culture and hence Iberian (proper of an are low in Megalithism) is a related but distinct Neolithic language.
I'd imagine you'd favor (2) but I am not sure at all. (1) also has some important pros, specially considering the extremely low Neolithic genetics in Basques (less than 5% in the Y-DNA, mostly J2).
Isolated is not, nothing is. But what exactly it is connected to is a matter that should be discerned carefully and certainly not at the expense of internal Basque evolutionary logic (unless it can be very solidly demonstrated, what is most difficult).
"It isn't conjectural,as the form gizaurde is attested in the Lapurdian dialect".
ReplyDeleteMaybe but iz- as water is also alleged in several toponyms. And then you have izotz (ice), where (h)otz is cold and iz- is...? Water logically.
I don't think there's such a root **iz. I agree with Trask on that respect.
Even if iz- is just a contraction of giza-, this does not allow you to reject giza, gizarte, gizaki and gizon as equally derived from the root giza (human).
AFAIK, giza- is the compound form of gizon. But it has nothing to do with *(g)iza- 'sea' in the compound gizurde, nor with the verb izan 'to be'.
A Neolithic age for Basque would be about the same time as the IE scatter: c. 3500 BCE, as there is no Neolithic in the Basque Country before that date (and only marginally older in the Garonne basin).
But Cardial Pottery in the Iberian Peninsula is two millenia earlier.
We should also be able to track the "Vascoid" toponymy through the Balcans, etc. but we should clearly see a dychotomy in this aspect between the Cardium Pottery area (Ibero-Vascoid presumably) and the Danubian area (some other language subfamily or even a totally unrelated family).
I don't think the gap between Iberian and Basque is that old. I'd oput that somewhere between 1,000 and 500 BC, that is, in the Late Bronze Age or even the Early Iron Age.
Also Vasco-Caucasian substrate is mainly detectable in the form of loanwords to IE languages, not toponymy.
However we do not see that and, following Venneman, the Vascoid toponym area is quite homogeneous in Central and SW Europe, and also in Italy - but rare in the Balcans or further east.
Vennemann's "Vasconic" is nothing but rubbish. He usually reverses the direction of IE loanwords in Basque and then presents them as "Vasconic". I've dealt this with more detail in my own blog.
Just a brief note: "sea pig" (海豚 hǎitún) means "dolphin" in Chinese.
ReplyDeleteAs for giza-/i- we have stated and clarified enough our viewpoints but we are not going to agree. If it looks like a duck and quacks as a duck then...?
ReplyDeleteMaju: it is a duck.
Octavià: it is an elephant and frog.
More: "But Cardial Pottery in the Iberian Peninsula is two millenia earlier".
Circa 1.2 millennia before 3500 BCE (in the historical Iberian and Tartessian area, and also in SE France).
But not in the Basque area around the Bay of Biscay and the Western-Central Pyrenees, where Basque language exists and/or has existed in historical times (supported by toponymy and such).
Do you mean that Basque coalesced out of the historical Vasconia? Where? Why?
"I don't think the gap between Iberian and Basque is that old. I'd oput that somewhere between 1,000 and 500 BC, that is, in the Late Bronze Age or even the Early Iron Age".
If so we should be able to read Iberian almost as we do with modern or historical Basque of almost that age. We cannot.
If so historical ancient Basque and Iberian would be exactly the same language or almost. Anyhow that would put you claiming a techno-cultural connection that does not exist, as that was the period of greatest separation between Iberia and Vasconia because of the Celtic wedge (Urnfield culture). At that time Vasconia is fully in the Atlantic Bronze (until c. 700) and then, in the Iron Age, Vasconia is anyhow quite on its own.
Your date frames make no sense, not even from a linguistic (glottochronologic) viewpoint. But not in any case in relation to prehistory either.
"Also Vasco-Caucasian substrate is mainly detectable in the form of loanwords to IE languages, not toponymy".
Vasco-Caucasian I do not know but Vasconic is clearly omipresent in Western Europe up Germany and Italy.
"Vennemann's "Vasconic" is nothing but rubbish".
Your standpoint is idiotic and fundamentalist. It is very obvious even if he may be wrong in a couple of cases. Vasconic is real: you can't help but recognizing it all around in toponyms.
"He usually reverses the direction of IE loanwords in Basque"...
That's the real rubbish. You have been using that stratagem (in reverse form) all the time in this discussion.
It's you who's cheating the real facts and who is not understanding what is really going on at all. You could join perfectly with Sanchís to revert out of the blue the reality of Prehistory. The more I know, the less I like your approach, sincerely.
"Just a brief note: "sea pig" (海豚 hǎitún) means "dolphin" in Chinese".
ReplyDeleteVery curious detail, thanks.
But not in the Basque area around the Bay of Biscay and the Western-Central Pyrenees, where Basque language exists and/or has existed in historical times (supported by toponymy and such).
ReplyDeleteYours is a fallacious argument. What you call "Historical times" doesn't go back than the Iron Age.
"I don't think the gap between Iberian and Basque is that old. I'd oput that somewhere between 1,000 and 500 BC, that is, in the Late Bronze Age or even the Early Iron Age".
If so we should be able to read Iberian almost as we do with modern or historical Basque of almost that age. We cannot.
Firstly, there're no actual Proto-Basque texts contemporary of the Iberian ones, only Latin inscriptions with Vasconic names.
Secondly, Basque has a strong non-Iberian adstrate. That is, a large part of the Basque lexicon comes from other languages. Add to this the lenition of fortis plosives (Martinet's Law), which occurred sometime around 500 BC.
"Vennemann's "Vasconic" is nothing but rubbish".
Your standpoint is idiotic and fundamentalist. It is very obvious even if he may be wrong in a couple of cases. Vasconic is real: you can't help but recognizing it all around in toponyms.
Not really. Vennemann is a crackpot and you stay on his side :-) And please don't compare me with Jesús.
"What you call "Historical times" doesn't go back [beyond] the Iron Age".
ReplyDeleteYes, of course. So are you saying that allows you to make up history before that based on nothing but your whims? At least you must have a decent understanding of the relevant archaeology.
And I'd say that the local archaeology is supportive of continuity since at least the Neolithic or, probably, the Upper Paleolithic.
There's no change in the Bronze or Iron Ages other than the roaming (proto-)Celts at the margins.
"Firstly, there're no actual Proto-Basque texts contemporary of the Iberian ones, only Latin inscriptions with Vasconic names".
What about Iruña-Veleia? Not that it makes any difference because debating the origin of a language on written texts is like debating the origin of Indoeuropean on Hittite and Greek texts: pointless.
"Secondly, Basque has a strong non-Iberian adstrate. That is, a large part of the Basque lexicon comes from other languages".
Besides Latin/Romance? I do not think so. You'd have to demonstrate that first of all.
I am rather of the opinion that many words identified as loans, even from Latin (pago, bi) are in fact loans of, once much more extended, Vascoid to those languages. This also applies to Celtic, etc.
I am not sure about the exact genesis of Iberian but a possibility is that it's a creole of whatever the Cardium Pottery peoples spoke originally and Vascoid substrate. If you read English today, it may look largely "Romance" only on vocabulary, yet it's a Germanic language. Similarly Iberian may look largely "Basque" but have in fact a different origin for its grammar (linguistic backbone).
"Not really. Vennemann is a crackpot and you stay on his side :-)"
Proudly so.
"And please don't compare me with Jesús".
You two can easily converge: he claims IE eternal persistence in SW Europe, you claim recent arrival of Iberian and Basque, so you two agree pretty much.
I do not.
Yes, of course. So are you saying that allows you to make up history before that based on nothing but your whims? At least you must have a decent understanding of the relevant archaeology.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, archaeology alone doesn't tell us much about which languages spoke ancient people.
What about Iruña-Veleia?
AFAIK, these texts are fakes.
Besides Latin/Romance? I do not think so. You'd have to demonstrate that first of all.
I'd recommend you read my blog.
I'm rather of the opinion that many words identified as loans, even from Latin (pago, bi) are in fact loans of, once much more extended, Vascoid to those languages. This also applies to Celtic, etc.
I think you opinion is groundless.
Proudly so.
So you're proud of being a crackpot? Good.
You two can easily converge: he claims IE eternal persistence in SW Europe, you claim recent arrival of Iberian and Basque, so you two agree pretty much.
I don't thing Cardial Pottery is "recent".
"Unfortunately, archaeology alone doesn't tell us much about which languages spoke ancient people".
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately but neither does linguistics. And you should not expect language change on absence of major cultural changes in any case.
"AFAIK, these texts are fakes".
AFAIK you are wrong and I have written a lot already about that in this blog and Leherensuge.
A mafioso commission of almost only linguists cannot make any scientifically grounded resolution on what is primarily an archaeological matter. Only archaeologists and physicists can say something founded on this matter.
Your disregard for archaeology really does not say much good about what you can eventually produce, sadly.
"I'd recommend you read my blog".
I follow your blog but if you want me to point to a particular article, you may want to add a direct link.
"I think you opinion is groundless".
So do I think of your opinion in many cases, sadly enough.
"So you're proud of being a crackpot? Good".
I'm proud of standing for what looks like the truth and not being quick to dismiss such strong and self-evident data as "crackpot". Sincerely I think PNC (and by extension Vasco-Caucasian without further qualifications) is a crackpot theory, as is Nostratic and Sino-Dene-Caucasian. However I imagine all them have a grain of truth to them, which must be saved from the unavoidable demise of the main corpus.
"I don't thing Cardial Pottery is "recent"".
You just said that Basque would have evolved in the Iron Age, c. 500 BCE. That is "recent" indeed!!!
Cardium Pottery is c. 4700 BCE in the Occitan-Andalusian-Portuguese arch (though it never reached the Basque area in any recognizable way, not even as Epi-Cardial - only in the area of Tolulouse).
A mafioso commission of almost only linguists cannot make any scientifically grounded resolution on what is primarily an archaeological matter. Only archaeologists and physicists can say something founded on this matter.
ReplyDeleteYour disregard for archaeology really does not say much good about what you can eventually produce, sadly.
When the discovery was firstly made public, I was surprised, but afterwards it became evident an archaeological fraud had been commiting. I've also been in contact with one personal who suffered personal harassment from one individual involved in the fraud, probably the same anonymous author of the pampleft against Lakarra (of whom I'm not exactly a fan). So the matter is rather serious to make jokes about it.
I'm proud of standing for what looks like the truth and not being quick to dismiss such strong and self-evident data as "crackpot".
I'm sorry to say your competence in linguistics (and not just historical) is rather low, even to the point of dreaming Catalan had nasal vowels, to name an example.
You just said that Basque would have evolved in the Iron Age, c. 500 BCE. That is "recent" indeed!!!
What I said is that the common ancestor of Basque and Iberian must have been split sometime between 1,000 and 500 BC, not in the Neolithic as you suggested.
The matter is of course serious: the reputation of archaeologists, critical historical findings and the destiny of a major archaeological site has been held hostage by a mafia of philologists and a couple of auxiliary troops.
ReplyDeleteThere is no "fraud" whatsoever other than the persecution on no grounds by some of your linguistic fellows and the evidence is being withheld by the authorities, who fear that an objective analysis would show how
You now claim that someone (who?) was threatened by someone else (who?) in the usual case of rumor mill promoted by the Lakarra mafia. Is that second "who" Rubén Cerdán? Because that person is certainly problematic and at least guilty of embezzlement and scientific fraud as far as I can tell.
"... even to the point of dreaming Catalan had nasal vowels, to name an example".
Whatever, for me Catalan sounds very nasal.
"What I said is that the common ancestor of Basque and Iberian must have been split sometime between 1,000 and 500 BC, not in the Neolithic as you suggested".
Same thing, as Iberian is very different from Basque, yet Basque is very similar with itself, even in the words registered in toponymy and antiquity. It's a conservative rather stable language (what is logical because it's not expanding), yet Iberian is clearly not the same thing.
Hence it's impossible it could have diverged from Basque only 500 years ago, much less as Iberian is most likely to have coalesced in SE Iberia between Cardium Pottery and El Argar, while Basque is likely to have been spoken in Aquitaine at least as early as 2800 BCE (Artenac culture) or more probably much earlier.
Whatever the case, your stand in the Veleia academic corruption case clearly shows that you cannot distinguish archaeological evidence when you see it. If this would have been a fraud as you, TVE and the Lakarrists claim, then all the analytics would have been performed already and we would have clear evidence to judge. The fact that the authorities are withholding the evidence, even after repeated judicial requirement, is proof that they are genuine.
You now claim that someone (who?) was threatened by someone else (who?) in the usual case of rumor mill promoted by the Lakarra mafia. Is that second "who" Rubén Cerdán? Because that person is certainly problematic and at least guilty of embezzlement and scientific fraud as far as I can tell.
ReplyDeleteYou must understand I can't reveal the identity of that person. But I can say he's the victim of personal harassment and libel promoted by a supporter of the Iruña-Veleia fraud.
The real mafia disguised itself as a victim of a supposed mafia centered around Lakarra (of whom, I repeat, I'm no supporter). So to apeak, they put the bite and you eated it! It's a pity you've (unawaringly) contributed to spread this intoxication.
Whatever, for me Catalan sounds very nasal.
This is nothing compared to French or Portuguese, which possess real nasal vowels.
Same thing, as Iberian is very different from Basque,
Not so different, as otherwise the Basco-Iberist hypothesis would have died many decades ago, which have still some defenders (obviously crackpot themselves).
yet Basque is very similar with itself, even in the words registered in toponymy and antiquity.
A little correction: Basque is very similar to Proto-Basque, not itself.
Without further data or evidence supporting it I think this you claim is libelous. It's not different from the kind of trash that Zionists and Spanish Nationalists like to throw around.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand we have enough evidence of harassment and libel by the "experts' commission" (academic mafia) and their politico puppets (López de Lacalle) against the archaeological team. But worst is that the evidence is being withheld from Justice.
This matter should have been settled in 2007/08 but not by a linguists' camarilla and their nonsensical opinions but by a neutral chemical laboratory.
Overall archaeologists support the findings as real, and so do a lot of independent linguists and other experts. On the commission's side there's only a bunch of inconclusive papers, most of them mere linguistic speculations without any foundation. But they have the media and some key Spanish-language internet forums.
You can only take the commission's side if:
1. You are extremely naive
2. You are rather evil and hope to climb positions in the academic hierarchy by licking Lakarra's boots
3. Any combination/variant of the above two
You must go through all the papers I have linked to on the Veleia affair. It's by now unmistakable that the graffiti are true and that there is ZERO evidence against them being genuine.
"Not so different, as otherwise the Basco-Iberist hypothesis would have died many decades ago"...
It does not because Iberian "sounds" like Basque and includes many obvious Basque words/cognates in its vocabulary. However the fact that we cannot read Iberian using a Basque dictionary and grammar also says that they are much more distinct than just 500 BCE. They must have been diverging since at least 5000 BCE, regardless of sprachbund issues.
"... obviously crackpot themselves".
Everybody is a crackpot except you and Starostin, right?
Ahem!
"A little correction: Basque is very similar to Proto-Basque, not itself".
I do not consider Basque in Antiquity to be "proto-Basque" as it's extremely identical to modern Basque. Proto-Basque would be something in an older stage if anything.
It does not because Iberian "sounds" like Basque and includes many obvious Basque words/cognates in its vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteThis shows they aren't so far apart as you think.
However the fact that we cannot read Iberian using a Basque dictionary and grammar also says that they are much more distinct than just 500 BCE.
So what? Romance languages descend from Latin and yet we can hardly understand Latin using a Spanish dictionary and grammar.
Everybody is a crackpot except you and Starostin, right?
No, but you should be more humble and recognize you've got still many things to learn.
I do not consider Basque in Antiquity to be "proto-Basque" as it's extremely identical to modern Basque. Proto-Basque would be something in an older stage if anything.
By definition, Proto-Basque is the common ancestor all historical Basque dialects. What you call "Proto-Basque" would be actually "Proto-Vasconic".
But you cannot read Iberian with Basque, when you'd be able to Read Ovid with Spanish (and Romances have evolved a lot faster than Basque, because of creolization and cosmopolitanism).
ReplyDelete"Romance languages descend from Latin and yet we can hardly understand Latin using a Spanish dictionary and grammar".
I think you can. The verbs are almost identical and so is most of the vocabulary. The main change is the loss of declensions into pronouns.
And again, Romances have evolved a lot faster than Basque for sure.
"No, but you should be more humble and recognize you've got still many things to learn".
That's something you can apply as well.
"By definition, Proto-Basque is the common ancestor all historical Basque dialects. What you call "Proto-Basque" would be actually "Proto-Vasconic"".
Ok.
Still there was probably never such single "proto-Basque" but a dialect continuum. The distances involved and the ethnic homogeneity, on occasion expressed politically as well, prevented further differentiation, as did the lack of expansion (which speeds up linguistic change A LOT).
This is something you have to understand: the rate of change in languages is not uniform but varies a lot depending on circumstances. In general more isolated and non-expanding languages remain relatively static, examples can be Lithuanian within IE or Icelandic within North Germanic. Basque belongs to this category and not to that of languages in rapid expansion, assimilation of new adult speakers and therefore fast paced evolution (and grammatical simplification).
"No, but you should be more humble and recognize you've got still many things to learn".
ReplyDeleteThat's something you can apply as well.
I always do, my friend. Truth isn't an asset of anyone.
Still there was probably never such single "proto-Basque" but a dialect continuum.
I think Proto-Basque was itself part of a dialect continuum which also included Iberian. Although most of the words found in Aquitanian inscriptions correspond to Proto-Basque a few of them are from Iberian.
For example, Iberian tautinn corresponds to Proto-Basque hautenn, that is, 'the ones of the tribe', from
Celtic *touta- 'people'. This lexeme still survives in modern Basque hauta 'choice, selected' and points to a Celtic-speaking elite among Vasconic speakers.
The distances involved and the ethnic homogeneity, on occasion expressed politically as well, prevented further differentiation, as did the lack of expansion (which speeds up linguistic change A LOT).
This is something you have to understand: the rate of change in languages is not uniform but varies a lot depending on circumstances. In general more isolated and non-expanding languages remain relatively static, examples can be Lithuanian within IE or Icelandic within North Germanic. Basque belongs to this category and not to that of languages in rapid expansion, assimilation of new adult speakers and therefore fast paced evolution (and grammatical simplification).
Still you can't project the comparative low change rate of Basque in the last 2,000 years back to the Neolithic. It's conceivable that Basque slowed its change rate when it became geograhically isolated, surrounded in all sides by Romance languages.
Overall archaeologists support the findings as real, and so do a lot of independent linguists and other experts.
ReplyDeleteEhem, could you provide some references (of course, other than the pamphlet you quoted before)?
But you cannot read Iberian with Basque, when you'd be able to Read Ovid with Spanish
ReplyDeleteSorry, but I must be an extremely dumb person, because I can't. :-)
Does that mean that Spanish and Latin are 7,000 years far apart? Surely not.
"I think Proto-Basque was itself part of a dialect continuum which also included Iberian".
ReplyDeleteBased on what I know of Prehistory, Basque and Iberian areas were not in any form of intense contact at any time, but specially not so between c. 1200 and 550 BCE, when NE Iberia was under IE ("Celtic") control.
The Basque-Aquitanian area has no particular connectivity to the Iberian area (between Granada and Catalonia) but rather to other groups in Portugal, Occitania, etc. The Iberian area is also rather apart from the Megalithic cultural area (excepting the purely Pyrenean strip and some scattered dolmens elsewhere). So it's more likely that Prehistoric Basque would be more closely related to the languages of Estremadura or Occitania (Ligur?), if to any of those groups at all.
I would say that the interaction was most intense with Occitania of all other regions, because it can be tracked to Paleolithic times, it was reinforced in the Epicardial period to some extent (Toulouse Epicardial, Roucadour) and then this "SE French" Epicardial may also have been at the origin of Artenac bowmen culture somehow and then it has intense connections with Estremadura and the Basque area in the Bell Beaker phase.
So if I had to pinpoint a candidate to be the closest language to Basque, I'd say Ligurian. Second would come whatever was spoken in Portuguese Estremadura in the Chalcolithic, because there was the main civilization of Atlantic (and Megalithic) Europe in those times. Iberian would only come third and only because it should be related to either of these two lost languages (or both). However Iberian is better documented.
"For example, Iberian tautinn corresponds to Proto-Basque hautenn, that is, 'the ones of the tribe', from
Celtic *touta- 'people'. This lexeme still survives in modern Basque hauta 'choice, selected' and points to a Celtic-speaking elite among Vasconic speakers".
Extremely speculative nonsense: all that is nothing but wishful thinking. Hauta(-tu), to choose, can have a number of possible etymologies and choosing a Celtic conjectural proto-word is just as valid as any other random act of comparison.
For example it may perfectly come from "hau" (this). Besides, per the classics, the proto-Basque for hauta- would be *kauta-, never *tauta-, much less *touta-.
Trying to find Celtic or Latin origins for everything Basque is pathologic (and often wrong).
"Still you can't project the comparative low change rate of Basque in the last 2,000 years back to the Neolithic. It's conceivable that Basque slowed its change rate when it became geograhically isolated, surrounded in all sides by Romance languages".
By Celtic languages first of all. That happened with Urnfields, when the Iberian-Basque geographic connections were broken for some 700 years.
What I say is that when a language expands, it changes a lot faster than when it does not. Basque probably only expanded once: with Artenac culture c. 2500 BCE. And trade routes were rather limited (never any center of civilization).
"Ehem, could you provide some references (of course, other than the pamphlet you quoted before)?"
ReplyDeleteIt's obvious you have not read much in the links I provided because all is in there. Anyhow, for the archaeological reports: Silgo, Harris, geological: van Driesche, linguistic: Iglesias, Fdez. de Pinedo, Frank (1, 2). There's more stuff...
"For example, Iberian tautinn corresponds to Proto-Basque hautenn, that is, 'the ones of the tribe', from
ReplyDeleteCeltic *touta- 'people'. This lexeme still survives in modern Basque hauta 'choice, selected' and points to a Celtic-speaking elite among Vasconic speakers".
Interesting. 'Tuath' in modern Irish, basically my surname: Tuathail. The concept od a Celtic elite amoung the Vascon speakers makes sense. Weren't the people often refered to as 'Celto-Iberians'?
"It's conceivable that Basque slowed its change rate when it became geograhically isolated, surrounded in all sides by Romance languages".
That makes sense too. It has seemed to me that Basque is probably a product of an early Neolithic expansion of some sort.
"Based on what I know of Prehistory, Basque and Iberian areas were not in any form of intense contact at any time"
But Ireland was hardly under any mainland European control when it adopted the Celtic language. And it makes sense that some language related to Basque was spoken in Ireland before Celtic arrived.
"So if I had to pinpoint a candidate to be the closest language to Basque, I'd say Ligurian".
Makes sense, but it too could be Neolithic in its arrival in the north Italy/south France region.
Terry: tuatha is Gaelic for "peoples", sing. tuath, but that does not mean it is related in any way to Basque hautatu (to choose, elect).
ReplyDeleteThis is first of all a case of most unlikely relation because the compared words do not even mean the same thing at all. This kind of amateurish comparisons appear a lot in lists of fake "cognates", like you usual Basque-Berber comparison lists. We must first therefore make sure we are comparing apples with apples (tuath with herri, people, would be in this case) and, if not, be sure we have excellent reasons to skip this fundamental rule.
We do not in this case, so it's a clear case of amateurish forced comparison.
"But Ireland was hardly under any mainland European control when it adopted the Celtic language".
As far as I know it was invaded from Great Britain, not the continent. From Wikipedia:
"Insular Celtic likely reached Britain and Ireland in the Iron Age, the general consensus being that it spread from the continental Hallstatt culture. The Celtic tribes of Ireland include the Brigantes, a name which also belonged to the largest tribe of northern and midland Britain. Another tribe by the 2nd century AD was the Manapii, possibly the same people as the Menapii, a Belgic tribe of northern Gaul".
Notice that Hallstatt would be the oldest possible layer of Celtic influence in the Atlantic Islands:
"Celtic arrival in Britain is usually taken to correspond to Hallstatt influence and the appearance of chariot burials in what is now England from about the 6th century BC" (ref). Further layers would have arrived mostly within La Tène cultural frame. I understand that there's nothing "Celtic" in Ireland (nor most of Britain) before c. 300 BCE.
"Makes sense, but it too could be Neolithic in its arrival in the north Italy/south France region".
Indeed. This is something I cannot decide upon: is Basque/Vascoid Neolithic of Paleolithic by local origin? However it must be said that Occitan Cardium Pottery almost has no "true colonization" sites (a couple of coastal site near Nice, that's all). All the rest is assimilated natives (and all the rest is a lot of sites!)
Maybe linguists could help, because if Basque is Neolithic it must show very clear signs of a strong substrate (the "Magdalenian language"), as there is no genetic replacement of any significance with Neolithic.
Yet I see impressive internal consistence in Basque language and little sign of such substrate. Rather adstrate in form of calendar words like uda and negua (summer and winter) and such, which may come from Portugal or other Megalithic area centers - or just be too old to discern etymologically.
Terry: tuatha is Gaelic for "peoples", sing. tuath, but that does not mean it is related in any way to Basque hautatu (to choose, elect).
ReplyDeleteThis is first of all a case of most unlikely relation because the compared words do not even mean the same thing at all.
Do you know the concept of semantic shift?
Remember that German Deustch, English Dutch, Spanish tudesco, Italian tedesco come from PGmc *teudiska-z 'of the people'.
If tautinn/hautenn applied to an elite of Celtic origin among Vasconic people, it would make sense for the word *tauta > hauta to mean 'elite'.
I'd also recommend you use the word "amateurish" to describe your own approach to historical linguistics. :-)
Hauta does not mean neither elite nor people, it is the verb hauta(-tu): to choose, to elect. People is said herri, elite does not have any name as such other than Romance-borrowed "elite", etc.
ReplyDelete"If tautinn/hautenn applied to an elite of Celtic origin among Vasconic people"...
Elite that did not exist...
"I'd also recommend you use the word "amateurish" to describe your own approach to historical linguistics".
In this particular case it is you who is clearly being amateurish, without qualifications of any sort: you are not just ignoring the laws of regular sound change (against what you have demanded previously) but you are comparing words that mean very different things all based on a conjecture of yours about a hypothetical unlikely "Celtic elite" you invented out of the blue.
All that is laughable and certainly deserves the "amateurish" tag. My amateurism is a zillion times more serious and methodical: first of all I compare only words that are identical in meaning and second I have a quite decent idea of the prehistory in which the languages I'm trying to reconstruct evolved.
So while I may sin of some amateurism (I'd call that "freshness") I do not reach to the levels of one-sided unbelievable manipulation you have just done with the verb hautatu and Celtic/Germanic word tuath/*teudiska.
Btw, I do not believe tudesco is any true Spanish word: the closest thing to Deutsch in Spanish is teutón (Teuton). Tudesco looks an Italian loanword, not anything genuinely Castilian.
On tuatha/teuton/Teutates, before I forget, I must mention that we do have a clear case of derivation of the Celtic god Teutates into Basque language and mythology, where he becomes Eate, a son of Goddess Mari, identical to Odei ("Cloud"), god of storms, or Mikelatz (St. Michael's breath), the evil twin in the Atxular series.
ReplyDeleteNotice how Teutates > Eate [(t)E(ut)ATE(s)] does not resemble at all the proposed tuatha > hauta(-tu), which would in any case demand an intermediate *kauta stage in order to explain the initial H.
Hauta does not mean neither elite nor people, it is the verb hauta(-tu): to choose, to elect.
ReplyDeleteFrom Elhuyar dictionary:
hauta. 1. Elección, opción 2. Adecuado, -a; excelente.
It's the second meaning, 'excellent', which it's related to 'elite'.
In this particular case it is you who is clearly being amateurish, without qualifications of any sort: you are not just ignoring the laws of regular sound change (against what you have demanded previously) but you are comparing words that mean very different things all based on a conjecture of yours about a hypothetical unlikely "Celtic elite" you invented out of the blue.
Taking up a difficult subject such as historical linguistics with no adequate training (either academic or not) is like commiting intellectual suicide.
People is said herri, elite does not have any name as such other than Romance-borrowed "elite", etc.
You're also obviously unaware of the concept of semantic drift/shift. Words don't always keep its original meaning but often change it, always of course not in arbritary ways.
BTW, I forgot to mention that the fact Chinese word for 'dolphin' is actually a compound 'sea-pig' supports my standpoint about the Basque word for 'dolphin'.
Btw, I do not believe tudesco is any true Spanish word: the closest thing to Deutsch in Spanish is teutón (Teuton). Tudesco looks an Italian loanword, not anything genuinely Castilian.
Surely you don't know there's a street named "Tudescos" in Madrid. You know, not all words can be found in dictionaries!
On tuatha/teuton/Teutates, before I forget, I must mention that we do have a clear case of derivation of the Celtic god Teutates into Basque language and mythology, where he becomes Eate, a son of Goddess Mari, identical to Odei ("Cloud"), god of storms, or Mikelatz (St. Michael's breath), the evil twin in the Atxular series.
ReplyDeleteNotice how Teutates > Eate [(t)E(ut)ATE(s)] does not resemble at all the proposed tuatha > hauta(-tu), which would in any case demand an intermediate *kauta stage in order to explain the initial H.
Not so. The shift from t > h is also a consequence of Martinet's Law and it also occurs in other words of Celtic origin like hede 'strap, leash' < < *tente ~ Celtic *tantā 'cable, cord'.
"BTW, I forgot to mention that the fact Chinese word for 'dolphin' is actually a compound 'sea-pig' supports my standpoint about the Basque word for 'dolphin'"
ReplyDeleteAnd mine. For me iz- would be sea or rather water however, not giza- (human).
"Surely you don't know there's a street named "Tudescos" in Madrid".
How does that contradict my suggestion that "tudesco" is an Italian loan with very limited if any penetration at all?
"It's the second meaning, 'excellent', which it's related to 'elite'".
The second meaning is the same as Greek "eu-". It has never been used in any way to describe any aristocracy, aristocracy I have good reasons to believe never really was developed (as this was the trigger of the Basque bagauda: feudalization). Resistance to feudalization was surely one of the reasons why Celts were not welcomed in any case.
Notice please that keltos must derive from keldo (an insult), a clear symptom of hostility towards Celts by Vasco-Ibero-Ligurians and probably Greeks to some extent.
If you call them "miserable", you don't call them "excellent". Yes or yes?
For me iz- would be sea or rather water however, not giza- (human).
ReplyDeleteSorry, but existence of such root **iz 'water' os very doubtful. The word 'dolphin' is from *(g)iza- 'sea', the same root found in itsaso < *itsa-śo.
The second meaning is the same as Greek "eu-".
Which isn't remotedly related.
It has never been used in any way to describe any aristocracy, aristocracy I have good reasons to believe never really was developed (as this was the trigger of the Basque bagauda: feudalization).
This is your suppostion. You haven't refuted my argument in any way.
Notice please that keltos must derive from keldo (an insult), a clear symptom of hostility towards Celts by Vasco-Ibero-Ligurians and probably Greeks to some extent.
Don't make me laugh! There're many books which would explain the etymology of Celtic, beggining with Caesar's De Bello Gallico: 'they are called Celts in their own language and Gauls in ours'.
"Surely you don't know there's a street named "Tudescos" in Madrid".
ReplyDeleteHow does that contradict my suggestion that "tudesco" is an Italian loan with very limited if any penetration at all?
Sorry, but the Italian word is tedesco, with e. On the other hand, tudesco appears to be old in Spanish: http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/SrvltGUIBusUsual?TIPO_BUS=3&LEMA=tudesco
You have already said that "The word 'dolphin' is from *(g)iza- 'sea'"... yet you cannot demonstrate it, much less keeping any phonetical consistence.
ReplyDeleteHowever we have izotz, which cannot be "sea" nor "human" nor really "giza" nor "itsa"(-so). Iz- in izotz must be water, as happens in anthro-/toponimy (Izeta, Izaga (place of water(s)),Izaro (ring of water), etc.)
Also izerdi ("half "iz""): sweat.
Alternatively it may be "surf" or some other water-related concept like "wave" (but most likely just water). It may be the same as Itzi- in Itziar, Deba, a sacred hill by the sea. And hence may be the same as Itsa- (Itsaso: water relative). But these are more questionable as there's no clear phonetic change sequence.
"Which isn't remotedly related".
I do not care, it expresses the same concept in a way no Spanish or English word can.
"This is your suppostion. You haven't refuted my argument in any way".
I do not have to refute what has been happily claimed but not proven in any way. The burden of providing evidence falls on whoever makes the claim, in this case: you.
"Don't make me laugh! There're many books which would explain the etymology of Celtic, beggining with Caesar's De Bello Gallico: 'they are called Celts in their own language and Gauls in ours'".
So you think that Celts called themselves Celts? Interesting. I'd say that Caesar takes that from the Greeks, as he's not the best geographer nor ethnographer but mostly a propagandist of himself.
Celts through the world call themselves Gael (Gaulish) or local names, never Celtic, except where this word was surely introduced as exonym from Iberian, Ligurian or Basque. All "Celts" are found in epi-Basque geography: Celtiberians, Celtici in Portugal and Caesar's "Celts" bordering Ligurians and Aquitani. These are I say exonyms derived from Basque "keldo" (dirty) [related: "keldar" (useless, petty), "kelmen" (coward, weak)]. The word Celt (keltos) is first attested among Greeks, who, for some good reason, put great care on not establishing outposts in Celtic lands but only in Ligurian and Iberian ones, even being surely central in the (re-)Iberization of Catalonia c. 550 BCE.
You have already said that "The word 'dolphin' is from *(g)iza- 'sea'"... yet you cannot demonstrate it, much less keeping any phonetical consistence.
ReplyDeleteThe word 'dolphin' is gizaurde (L), izurde (B, G), izurda (B), a commpound from *(g)iza 'sea' un urde 'pig, right? The first member of the compound is also found in itsaso < *itsa-śo, with assimilation of sibilants. This gives us a root *(g)isa ~ *itsa 'sea'.
However we have izotz, which cannot be "sea" nor "human" nor really "giza" nor "itsa"(-so). Iz- in izotz must be water, as happens in anthro-/toponimy (Izeta, Izaga (place of water(s)),Izaro (ring of water), etc.)
Also izerdi ("half "iz""): sweat.
There's no real evidence of such a root **iz 'water' in Basque. What you've got is a bunch of similar sounding but etymologically related words.
Besides reading Trask, I'd recommend "The Oxford Guide To Etymology" http://books.google.es/books?id=h-jxZ0Iby-IC&printsec=frontcover&dq="the+oxford+guide+to+etymology"&source=bl&ots=pFg5dNXMxx&sig=CGZpwpNYZHKW7il3EFDrSoPUJ4c
I do not have to refute what has been happily claimed but not proven in any way. The burden of providing evidence falls on whoever makes the claim, in this case: you.
Sorry, but I've given you the evidence. It's you who haven't refuted it!
So you think that Celts called themselves Celts? Interesting. I'd say that Caesar takes that from the Greeks, as he's not the best geographer nor ethnographer but mostly a propagandist of himself.
To best of my knowledge, the Greek word is Keltoi 'Celts'. This root *kelt- is undoubtedly related to Gall- of Gauls (Latin Gallii).
Celts through the world call themselves Gael (Gaulish)
This is Irish, not Gaulish. This is the second time you confuse both.
All "Celts" are found in epi-Basque geography: Celtiberians, Celtici in Portugal and Caesar's "Celts" bordering Ligurians and Aquitani. These are I say exonyms derived from Basque "keldo" (dirty) [related: "keldar" (useless, petty), "kelmen" (coward, weak)].
While these words might have a root *kel 'weak' in common, your etymology is highly unlikely, if not pretty ridiculous, as Celts weren't precisely "cowards" but temible warriors.
This etymology must be IE. The most likely one is *kel-to- 'warrior, fighter', a derivate of PIE *kelH2- 'to strike'. In an Iberian funeral inscription we find the expression keltaŕ erker, which I translate as 'warrior man' (Iberian erker is the equivalent of Latin vir).
"a commpound from *(g)iza 'sea' un urde 'pig, right?"
ReplyDeleteI'm saying not. I'm saying that the Lapurtera variant is their own and not etymologically related to the rest probably just a mariner wordplay.
We know what giza means anyhow and it's nothing like sea or water: it's human.
"There's no real evidence of such a root **iz 'water' in Basque. What you've got is a bunch of similar sounding but etymologically related words".
Related indeed. It's as good evidence as I can get (or yours for the matter).
"Sorry, but I've given you the evidence".
No evidence! WTF, are you fooling me? Where's your evidence?!
"This root *kelt- is undoubtedly related to Gall- of Gauls (Latin Gallii)"...
That's the other possibility but having "keldo" I think it's a more reasonable etymology. It may have been a playword on Gael but they are not the same word and only the Basque term can explain the t sound of Keltos, maybe suggesting a preference for this variant sound (/t/ above /d/) among coastal Vasconic speakers (Ligurians or Iberians) who were, no doubt, the primary source of Greeks.
Alternatively -LD- was cacophonic in Phocaean Greek. It's possible because I do not recall many -ld- words in Greek, while in Basque they are common, specially those in "alde". But correct me if I'm wrong.
"This is Irish, not Gaulish. This is the second time you confuse both".
Gaulish is barely attested: Gaelic is well documented instead. Remember that Latin word is Gallus/-i, which is similar to Gael and found in Gael-like forms specially in Galatia, Gallaecia, Gallia, etc. They called themselves Gael and Romans, who are their close relatives and neighbors, retained their true name, while more distant Greeks did not and instead borrowed an exonym from Ibero-Ligurians, an insulting one (as exonyms often are).
"... as Celts weren't precisely "cowards" but temible warriors"...
Hmmm... it's also claimed they were blond like faeries but the truth is that they dyed their hair.
The word keldo is surely a playword on G(a)el that stuck but it's a clearly Vascoid playword. It's self-evident. Calling your enemies "dirty", "unclean", is the least you can do, right?
"This etymology must be IE. The most likely one is *kel-to- 'warrior, fighter', a derivate of PIE *kelH2- 'to strike'. In an Iberian funeral inscription we find the expression keltaŕ erker, which I translate as 'warrior man' (Iberian erker is the equivalent of Latin vir)".
Keltar erker? Celtic man?
I'm not sure about "erker", which may well mean "foreigner" as "erdeldun", but I'll take your word for it meaning "man". But "keltar" is a dictionary case: Celt.
And why would Iberian have an IE-derivate anyhow?
"a commpound from *(g)iza 'sea' un urde 'pig, right?"
ReplyDeleteI'm saying not. I'm saying that the Lapurtera variant is their own and not etymologically related to the rest probably just a mariner wordplay.
This is just your opinion, not mine. To me, the relationship of this word with itsaso 'sea' is plainly clear.
Sorry, but I've given you the evidence".
No evidence! WTF, are you fooling me? Where's your evidence?!
I've stated my case with plenty of details, so I beg you please read carefully my earlier posts. I don't like to repeat myself :-(
Gaulish is barely attested: Gaelic is well documented instead.
This doesn't justify your confusing them. If you'd like to learn more about Gaulish, I'd recommend you read Xavier Delamarre's Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise http://www.amazon.fr/Dictionnaire-langue-gauloise-linguistique-vieux-celtique/dp/2877722376, although they're also some online resources.
But "keltar" is a dictionary case: Celt.
If I were you, I won't use any dictionary to translate Iberian. The deaseased was certainly an Iberian, because he has an Iberian name, not a Celtic one.
And why would Iberian have an IE-derivate anyhow?
Because it borrowed from Celtic. Like Celts, Iberians were a warfare aristocracy and were in contact with them, so it's no wonder they borrowed Celtic words.
"a commpound from *(g)iza 'sea' un urde 'pig, right?"
ReplyDeleteI'm saying not. I'm saying that the Lapurtera variant is their own and not etymologically related to the rest probably just a mariner wordplay.
Sorry, but this is simply ridiculous.
Sorry, but I've given you the evidence".
No evidence! WTF, are you fooling me? Where's your evidence?!
I've stated my case carefully, so I beg you read my earlier posts. I don't like to repeat myself :-(
Gaulish is barely attested: Gaelic is well documented instead.
This is no reason to confuse them. If you're interested in Gaulish, there're some online resources available, although I'd strongly recommend you Xavier Delamarre's book Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise.
Keltar erker? Celtic man?
I'm not sure about "erker", which may well mean "foreigner" as "erdeldun", but I'll take your word for it meaning "man". But "keltar" is a dictionary case: Celt.
If I were, I won't try to translate Iberian with any dictionary. As the name of the deseased was an Iberian one, we can be sure this man was also Iberian.
And why would Iberian have an IE-derivate anyhow?
Like Celts, Iberians were a warfarr aristocracy, so it's wonder they borrowed Celtic words.
"This is just your opinion, not mine".
ReplyDeleteOf course!
"I've stated my case with plenty of details, so I beg you please read carefully my earlier posts. I don't like to repeat myself".
You may need to. Because while I have read all your posts with due attention I have yet to see any "evidence". You speculate a lot and provide little to no evidence. I'm ok with that but do not pretend to be "scientific" and to have "evidence" when there's nothing of that over here.
I say you have no evidence at all and that you have not provided it. I challenge you to prove me wrong.
"Because it borrowed from Celtic".
Why would it borrow anything from Celtic? And why would it be a word that is not attested in living Celtic.
Reality check is most convenient here too. Because I believe you just make up things according to your best (but possibly wrong) judgment and then try to defend that. It's ok but it's just an opinion, there's not a single piece of "evidence" anywhere, just speculation.
I'm sorry, but I can't waste more of my time with you. My advice is to you get a good training in historical linguistics before engaging yourself in amateurish pastimes.
ReplyDeleteHi Maju
ReplyDeleteI noticed you have mentioned and discussed one of my drafts on Basque as compared to PIE.
I read with much interest your discussion with the Lord of All Trolls, aka Octavia.
I noticed you bravely rejected his nonsensical theories.
Don't be impressed by his "you are an amateur" blathering. He's completely incompetent and never wrote anything publishable in a scientific Journal.
Best
A.
I'm not really impressed, I may be a bit amateur for linguistics as such but I'm not amateur in life. I know well he is using that kind of disqualifying discourse because he lacks other arguments.
ReplyDeleteI presume you are one of the two Arnauds Octavià mentioned as "crackpots". Possibly A. Fournet (my intuition).
As said before I have just had a preliminary look at both studies but I think there is something. I was refractory to this idea of a Basque-IE relatedness earlier because of all those confusing superfamily hypothesis that have become so popular (but are so feeble) and because I thought it'd be something that would have been already studied in depth.
But as I found myself exploring some unlikely IE-Basque connections, not just words that could be attributed to Western European sprachbund or Vascoid substrate but words that NEED from a PIE-Basque connection somehow, I realize that some other approach is needed.
One reasonable hypothesis to test is that all West Eurasian languages (minus Afroasiatic and Uralic, plus probably some South Asian languages) are related by origin some 50 or 40 Ka ago (maybe less?). That's what I was trying to test a bit when this debate ensued.
I'll continue at some point, I guess. But be warned that linguistics is just a side interest for me, even if it's indeed arising a lot of discussion, often for good (sometimes circular however).
Cheers.
Hi
ReplyDeleteYes that's correct. Your intuition is right.
Working on macro-comparative issues, I've tried to analyze Basque and see how it could be handled on a large perpective.
These words that can be compared with PIE are somewhat a puzzle. If we assume that they are not just chance-coincidences, then (1) Basque is more closely related to PIE than would appear or (2) an intrusion of archaic PIE happened in an early stage of Basque.
Now we have so many Basque words which resist any comparison...
Hard to tell.
Best
A.
One of the two of (2b) an intrusion of archaic Basque happened into PIE (similarly puzzling as 2a anyhow).
ReplyDeleteIMO what we see is remnants of either Gravettian sprachbund or Aurignacian phylogeny, or a mix of both because p-Basque and PIE should not have been in contact ever again after that.
Eratum "of" should be "or".
ReplyDelete>>"... as Celts weren't precisely "cowards" but temible warriors"...
ReplyDelete>"Hmmm... it's also claimed they were blond like faeries but the truth is that they dyed their hair. "
Come on... Celts ruled a big chunk of Europe, sacked Rome and Delphi, were invited to Settle in Anatolia because the local ruler wantied their help in war IIRC, were mercenaries for Cathage (and Egypt at some point) and you're actually considering they were not a warlike people?
The description of the Gauls in battle by the Romans doesn't paint a wimpy peace-loving group either.
I'm not saying that, but everything is relative. I doubt in any case that there is any "keltar" warrior word, neither in IE nor in Vasconic.
ReplyDeleteThey could be the best warriors (what is very much arguable) and still being called "dirty" or even "petty" (not "cowards") by their neighbors and foes.
Also, not sure if it's relevant, but IE and Vasconic cosmologies are very different: IE religion is one of winners: if you win you are chanted, you become a demigod, the gods feel proud of you. Not that they care on how do you win. On the other hand, Basque culture and religion disdains the hero and enhances the community.
Basques do not exist because Elkano or Zumalakarregi or Sancho the Great. The opposite may be true instead. If you are making money at the expense of the people, you are not a "self-made-man" but a criminal and a traitor.
Others sing Roland, we know we were the ones to kill him and to demolish the arrogance of the Emperor... for a good reason. We do not sing those stories however.
So it's not like Celtic "warlikeness" would impress Basque or other Vasconic peoples easily. They would still be just a bunch of noisy vagrants... with a bleached mustache.
Being imperialist-expansive is not the same as being brave anyhow. I'd rather think of that as cowardice if anything because noble, genuine people do not oppress others.
I'm not really impressed, I may be a bit amateur for linguistics as such but I'm not amateur in life. I know well he is using that kind of disqualifying discourse because he lacks other arguments.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that although intuition might be of great help in historical linguistics, it can't substitute REAL knowledge.
You've been asking me for "evidence" while at the same time you keep ignoring it. This is the only reason why I gave up this discussion.
I read with much interest your discussion with the Lord of All Trolls, aka Octavia.
Don't be impressed by his "you are an amateur" blathering. He's completely incompetent and never wrote anything publishable in a scientific Journal.
Yes, Arnaud publishes in such journal. For example, he recently wrote an article for the Journal of Indo-European Studies (JIES).
However, he forgot to mention he got self-expelled from Yahoo groups after insulting the moderators for having him censored after repeated personal attacks against other members. BTW, I've also been the target of unimaginable insults and deprecations (see how he calls me, for example).
I assume he has a severe psychiatric disorder and doesn't tolerate criticism against his **crackpot** theories.
He got self-expelled from TWO Yahoo groups.
ReplyDelete"You've been asking me for "evidence" while at the same time you keep ignoring it".
ReplyDeleteIn all this discussion you have presented no or very little evidence. You just expect the rest of the universe to take your speculations or Mitxelena's opinions transformed into dangerous dogma as "The Truth (TM)".
Sorry but I cannot do that at risk of giving away my scientific soul...
(Gratis! There are better deals in Hell, they've told me).
"... it can't substitute REAL knowledge".
You still have to demonstrate real knowledge to me. I see you talking a lot of PNC but never about Lezgian or Adigey. Do you know anything at all about those languages? Have you ever been in Daghestan? Can you even babble a word or two in Ingush? That's knowledge and not just repeating what other people wrote in the past, selectively so...
"However, he forgot to mention he got self-expelled from Yahoo groups after insulting the moderators for having him censored after repeated personal attacks against other members. BTW, I've also been the target of unimaginable insults and deprecations (see how he calls me, for example)".
I'd rather stay away of such "academic" discussions.
However I'd say that you both have called each other names. Essentially it's clear that you two do not respect each other as linguists.
And what I see in the realm of Linguistics is that people have a lot of different opinions. Here in this thread alone three different academically credited linguists have spoken and each has his own different theory and feels the others are totally wrong.
So why should I respect your opinion better than that of Arnaud or Jesús? Or better than my own amateurish (but essentially valid) mass lexical comparison exercises? If you want respect, you have to earn it and disqualification or academic arrogance is not a way of persuading.
As anyone coming from the Nonviolent and Assambleary Movement can tell you: it is persuading and not just "winning" what matters. And in order to persuade you have to be open to be persuaded yourself, what matters are arguments, reason, not pretenses.
Why would it borrow anything from Celtic? And why would it be a word that is not attested in living Celtic.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand why you keep arguing against IE (and more specifically Celtic) loanwords in early Vasconic.
I also don't understand why do you dismiss the role of warfare artistocracies in the Bronze and Iron ages' societies. My point is Celts were precisely one of these aristocracies, although certianly not the only one, as Iberians also were it.
By "living Celtic" I assume you refer to modern Celtic languages.
Unfortunately, the most important ancient Celtic language is Gaulish, while hasn't left descendents living but plenty of loanwords and topomastics, as well as inscriptions and glosses. If you're interested, I encourage you to read Delamarre's book.
There're also Celtiberian, comparatively less known but also with PRINTED bibliography (most linguistic work isn't available online) and Tartessian, now considered as Celtic since Koch's book.
About the reconstruction of Proto-Celtic, the best reference is Matasović's etymological dictionary, whose printed version is very expensive but it's available for free as a scanned PDF file if you do a little research.
In all this discussion you have presented no or very little evidence.
ReplyDeleteFar from truth.
You just expect the rest of the universe to take your speculations or Mitxelena's opinions transformed into dangerous dogma as "The Truth (TM)".
What Mitxelena did was to reconstruct the phonological system of the common ancestor of the historical Basque dialects. His work is remarkable for his time and highly coherent, not only from a purely internal point of view, but also by the actual evidence of Aquitanian inscriptions.
You still have to demonstrate real knowledge to me.
I was generally referring to scholarship. Being an amateur doesn't dispense you from other people's work on the field. Mitxelena's would be a good example.
However I'd say that you both have called each other names. Essentially it's clear that you two do not respect each other as linguists.
He has insulted me in very nasty ways (this is like pissing or defecating on), showing he has a serious mental disorder.
My own assessment is that although most of his theories are unacceptable as a whole, some ideas contained in them are interesting. He precisely hates me so much because I've used some of his own ideas to build my own theories.
So why should I respect your opinion better than that of Arnaud or Jesús? Or better than my own amateurish (but essentially valid) mass lexical comparison exercises?
Sorry, but mass comparison has little value by itself. This is why most linguists are critical of Greenberg's work.
If you want respect, you have to earn it and disqualification or academic arrogance is not a way of persuading.
Unfortunately, it's hard to persuade someone who doesn't want to be presuaded. :-)
My sentence: "Why would it borrow anything from Celtic? And why would it be a word that is not attested in living Celtic".
ReplyDeleteOctavià's reply: "I don't understand why you keep arguing against IE (and more specifically Celtic) loanwords in early Vasconic".
My reply now: If the word is not attested in Celtic then it's a clear case of a non-Celtic non-borrowing (almost "non-word"?)
There are three possible cases:
1. Affinity Basque-PIE and Basque-Celtic. These could (but not "must") be IE words borrowed into Basque via Celtic.
2. Affinity Basque-PIE but undocumented in Celtic. Definitively these words were not borrowed into Basque via Celtic. They signify deep PIE-Basque connections of some sort.
3. Affinity Basque-Celtic but not PIE. These are surely Vascoid loans into Celtic. Though the opposite case is not totally impossible, it's much less likely because there is a breach of PIE-Celtic continuity, for which Vascoid substrate is a good explanation.
"I also don't understand why do you dismiss the role of warfare artistocracies in the Bronze and Iron ages' societies".
These "aristocracies" are not demonstrated and IMO are most unlikely for all I know of Prehistory. The Iron Age (Urnfield culture does not reach the Upper Ebro before this period) is a phase of violent conflicts at the Ebro banks and there is some penetration of Urnfield burials in Araba (but only there and heavily modified by Aquitanian influence). There was never any "Celtic" aristocracy among Basques and anyhow the later history shows the Basque peoples to be highly refractory to feudalism of any sort, revolting against Rome, the Goths and the Franks for that reason essentially. What has kept Basque language alive is hatred against feudalism in fact, feudalism that spoke Indoeuropean languages: first Celtic, then Latin, Germanic and Romance.
"By "living Celtic" I assume you refer to modern Celtic languages".
Of course.
"Unfortunately, the most important ancient Celtic language is Gaulish, while hasn't left descendents living but plenty of loanwords and topomastics, as well as inscriptions and glosses".
I understand that Gaulish and Belgic were the parents of the Celtic languages spoken in Britain and Ireland. There's no particular reason to think they were different and in many cases a continental tribe is known to have played a central role in the islands (for example the Belgae, the Atrebates or the Parisii in today's England, surely defining Brythonic to a large extent).
Considering that most of the Celtic inflow into the Islands dates only of 300 BCE and later, we are in a case in which the insular dialects should be representative of the continental ones, specially those of ancient Armorica and Belgica.
"Far from truth".
ReplyDeleteI'm still waiting for you to point to the evidence which you claim to have presented and that I see nowhere.
"What Mitxelena did was to reconstruct the phonological system of the common ancestor of the historical Basque dialects. His work is remarkable for his time and highly coherent, not only from a purely internal point of view, but also by the actual evidence of Aquitanian inscriptions".
I'm not going to discuss Mitxelena's work here. I admit I am not qualified for that. However for what I have been told, Mitxelena was much more humble about the reach of his work than so many "Mitxelenists". In any case, it is a theory, not evidence.
It's like proto-words: as Arnaud says well in his paper, proto-words cannot be considered as "data" but they must be accepted for what they are: conjectural conclusions. We can use them with some caution but they are not evidence on their own right.
Similarly Mitxelena's conclusions are conclusions, not data.
"I was generally referring to scholarship. Being an amateur doesn't dispense you from other people's work on the field".
In fact that's what defines me as amateur. If I knew all the materials I would not consider myself as "amateur", regardless of degree or not.
But I do not know all that stuff, what on occasion may an advantage, as I lack certain prejudices. Though of course it is also a disadvantage.
"He has insulted me in very nasty ways (this is like pissing or defecating on)"...
Well, I have not seen that in this debate. I hope you two keep some forms.
"My own assessment is that although most of his theories are unacceptable as a whole, some ideas contained in them are interesting. He precisely hates me so much because I've used some of his own ideas to build my own theories".
I would say that is a valid approach: to take someone's ideas and subvert them - as long as it is done for good.
"Sorry, but mass comparison has little value by itself".
That's all I can do. I know the limits of the mass lexical comparison but I also know that it has helped in some cases to discover real linguistic families and relations.
I think MLC can serve to establish the draft on which you professionals of philology can work with the comparative method and such.
"Unfortunately, it's hard to persuade someone who doesn't want to be persuaded"...
Of course, but that only says negative about the refractory person. You may not persuade the one you are directly addressing but, if you are well armed with reason, you will persuade the public.
But you will never persuade (no matter how much reason you may have) if you are not pedagogic. If you don't bother arguing, so sure you feel in your "ivory tower".
My reply now: If the word is not attested in Celtic then it's a clear case of a non-Celtic non-borrowing (almost "non-word"?)
ReplyDeleteFrom Middle Irish cellach, Matasović reconstructs Proto-Celtic *kelta-ko- 'fight, war', from PIE *kelH2- 'to strike'. He also thinks the ehtnonym Celts is probably derivated from the same root (*kel-to-).
These "aristocracies" are not demonstrated and IMO are most unlikely for all I know of Prehistory. The Iron Age (Urnfield culture does not reach the Upper Ebro before this period) is a phase of violent conflicts at the Ebro banks and there is some penetration of Urnfield burials in Araba (but only there and heavily modified by Aquitanian influence).
But the Vasconic homeland was located North of the Pyrenees, in Aquitaine!!!!
You also forget Iberians were themselves a warfare aristocracy, of course influences by Celts. And the Iberian word tautinn is attested in the Aquitanian inscriptions along with Proto-Basque hautenn.
Similarly Mitxelena's conclusions are conclusions, not data.
But they're based on actual data,
so you can't simply ignore them.
In fact that's what defines me as amateur. If I knew all the materials I would not consider myself as "amateur", regardless of degree or not.
This is precisely why you still have to read a lot. You can't simply step in without knowing what other people have written about the subject.
"From Middle Irish cellach, Matasović reconstructs Proto-Celtic *kelta-ko- 'fight, war', from PIE *kelH2- 'to strike'. He also thinks the ehtnonym Celts is probably derivated from the same root (*kel-to-)".
ReplyDeleteOk, it is a counter-hypothesis or alternative theory.
However, while 'cellah' means "strife, contention" (according to Wikitionary), which is not a word you can directly apply to people, you need to derive it, like in 'bellicose' or 'bellatores' (from comparable Lat. 'bellum'). We do not see in "keltos" anything like that.
Also I wonder how solid are those proto-Celtic and PIE reconstructions, i.e. if they are born of the need to explain "keltos" alone or they are actually justified by a extended comparison of other Celtic and IE words (I mean: you cannot create a proto-word out of a single word, you need at least two from different contexts - and the more the merrier).
"But the Vasconic homeland was located North of the Pyrenees, in Aquitaine!!!!"
That's a lot to say. I see no reason for not extending all the "Vasconic homeland" to all the lands between Asturias and Provence, or even larger. We do not know for sure but it's pretty clear that Basques ("euskaldunak", people who spoke Basque or proto-Basque whatever the ethnonyms or tribal names used) extended from the the land of the Cantabri to that of the Ilergetes and by the north at least to the Garonne. In previous times the lands of Vasconic language were surely larger, no doubt, and Iberian has to be seen in this context: as an offshoot of Vasconic probably, even if we do not know at what stage they diverged exactly.
Aquitaine is probably a reference, specially since the Celts destroyed Biasteri (La Hoya) but that doesn't mean that Basques "came" from anywhere else: peoples do not move so much, specially farmers do not.
The null hypothesis is persistence, continuity and that is precisely what the verb "eutsi", the likely root of euskara means. So euskara would mean the "the continuity language" (and "way of life", because -era/-ara means "language" only because it means "mode").
If you want to change this likely reality the least you need is a good argumentation of some sort. For instance if you claim that Basques arrived from Aquitaine (which is just a few kilometers away, so it's like not moving at all) you need an archaeological justification of some sort. You cannot write prehistory out of the blue, you need to have an idea of what could have happened, what cultural flows, if any, we can identify, etc.
Basques most probably never came from anywhere but if there was a single episode that changes things here that was, as in other parts of Atlantic Europe, the arrival of Dolmenic Megalithism (from Portugal ultimately). After that you see continuity and it's a quite well researched matter.
Anyhow, I think you did not understand my complaint: what I meant is that while Urnfield presence indicates a brief Celtic influence in Araba, this influence is "Basquified" because of "Aquitanian" counter-influence. Aquitaine is indeed the reference of Basque continuity in this particular case, because there were no changes in Aquitaine either.
"You also forget Iberians were themselves a warfare aristocracy"...
ReplyDeleteI do not think so: I see Iberians as a civilization, continuing El Argar and to some extent also Tartessos, that (counter-)expanded in NE direction (in Catalonia) at the expense of the Celts.
It is the only case of Iberian expansion and the perseverance of some IE customs such as cremation burial suggests that the people simply rebelled and overthrew the foreign lords, with likely help from Phocaean Greeks, Iberians from the south and Basques from the mountains. Celtiberian legends as narrated by Romans attest to a long period of conflict between Celts and Iberians and to Celtiberians being the result of a peace agreement between both sides, surely some time after the Celts were expelled from Catalonia and north of the Ebro line.
Iberians were not immersed like Celts or other IEs in perpetual conquest. We do not know of any country they ever conquered, even if we think that somehow they did that with Catalonia.
I do not mean by this that they were peace-love-and-flowers hippies, but they are clearly out of the IE or Semitic lifestyle of quasi-eternal conquest. They fought and they were maybe fighting before IE arrival if we are to judge by fortifications and such but they do not look expansionist, rather (semi-)civilized traders if anything.
"And the Iberian word tautinn is attested in the Aquitanian inscriptions along with Proto-Basque hautenn".
Ok, I take notice of that. But I think you reach to too rapid conclusions with too little evidence. For example, "tautinn" could well be "daudinn" (as the Iberian syllabary is not too phonetically precise). But most important is that you do not know what hautenn means in Aquitanian. Personally I'd read it as "hau den-" or something like that.
I think that the risk you and others take is too big and can only bring you to improbable conclusions that will be challenged once and again. I'm sure it's not just me, right?
"But they're based on actual data,
so you can't simply ignore them".
I do not mean to ignore them. But, changing field, we can well say that String Theory (or others) is based on factual data. That alone does not mean it is proven nor that the theory is factual and can be used as if it were data.
"This is precisely why you still have to read a lot".
Maybe but I'm getting old and linguistics is not my first field of interest...
But I do accept that criticism, indeed.
"You can't simply step in without knowing what other people have written about the subject".
Well, it's my blog and I write on whatever I feel like. WTF! :D
Of course I can.
It has a flaw (ignoring potentially useful knowledge) but also has some advantages (freshness in the approach). If knowledge alone would be everything, people would not die. But new minds and new approaches are needed, so the old ones have to yield, biology dixit, to the young ones.
And not all knowledge is preserved, this also goes against the law of entropy. Hopefully the best, the most useful stuff will be preserved and improved but there is no guarantee. For example we know a lot about those Socratic morons and we know too little about the true Greek philosophers: the Presocratics.
Entropy is that way. However the overall tendency is to improve, if nothing else for needs of fitness. Only the fit survive.
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ReplyDeleteAlso I wonder how solid are those proto-Celtic and PIE reconstructions, i.e. if they are born of the need to explain "keltos" alone or they are actually justified by a extended comparison of other Celtic and IE words (I mean: you cannot create a proto-word out of a single word, you need at least two from different contexts - and the more the merrier).
ReplyDelete***
It looks like a guess.
It's not even clear that the word "Keltos" really was applied to real Celts. In addition none of the Celts call themselves like that.
A.
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"But the Vasconic homeland was located North of the Pyrenees, in Aquitaine!!!!"
That's a lot to say. I see no reason for not extending all the "Vasconic homeland" to all the lands between Asturias and Provence, or even larger.
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The issue is more to find a good reason to do so. and I can't.
A.
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We do not know for sure but it's pretty clear that Basques ("euskaldunak", people who spoke Basque or proto-Basque whatever the ethnonyms or tribal names used) extended from the the land of the Cantabri to that of the Ilergetes and by the north at least to the Garonne.
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That looks indeed solid.
A.
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In previous times the lands of Vasconic language were surely larger, no doubt, and Iberian has to be seen in this context: as an offshoot of Vasconic probably, even if we do not know at what stage they diverged exactly.
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This is maybe already a conjecture.
A.
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Aquitaine is probably a reference, specially since the Celts destroyed Biasteri (La Hoya) but that doesn't mean that Basques "came" from anywhere else: peoples do not move so much, specially farmers do not.
***
They were not farmers when they arrived there long ago.
A.
***
The null hypothesis is persistence, continuity and that is precisely what the verb "eutsi", the likely root of euskara means. So euskara would mean the "the continuity language" (and "way of life", because -era/-ara means "language" only because it means "mode").
If you want to change this likely reality the least you need is a good argumentation of some sort. For instance if you claim that Basques arrived from Aquitaine (which is just a few kilometers away, so it's like not moving at all) you need an archaeological justification of some sort. You cannot write prehistory out of the blue, you need to have an idea of what could have happened, what cultural flows, if any, we can identify, etc.
Basques most probably never came from anywhere
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They must have come from some other place, the issue is more "when did they come?"
A.
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However, while 'cellah' means "strife, contention" (according to Wikitionary), which is not a word you can directly apply to people, you need to derive it, like in 'bellicose' or 'bellatores' (from comparable Lat. 'bellum'). We do not see in "keltos" anything like that.
ReplyDeleteSorry, but I disagree. Remember that Keltoi (Greek) = Galli (Latin).
"But the Vasconic homeland was located North of the Pyrenees, in Aquitaine!!!!"
That's a lot to say. I see no reason for not extending all the "Vasconic homeland" to all the lands between Asturias and Provence, or even larger.
But Aquitaine is the only region where Vasconic onomastics is surely recorded, mostly in Latin inscriptions. This can't be said of the other regions you mention.
In previous times the lands of Vasconic language were surely larger, no doubt,
Where's the evidence?
and Iberian has to be seen in this context: as an offshoot of Vasconic probably, even if we do not know at what stage they diverged exactly.
On the contrary, it was Proto-Basque which split from Iberian and not the other way around.
The null hypothesis is persistence, continuity and that is precisely what the verb "eutsi", the likely root of euskara means.
You forgot the nasal: the form enusquera was quoted by Garibay (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esteban_de_Garibay) as late as the 16th century. The first member of this compound is related to the verb *enautśi 'to make sound, to speak', whose descendants in modern Basque mean 'gossip, murmuring' or even 'bark (of a dog)'. The second member is -ara, -era 'way of'. Hence euskara, euskera means 'way of speaking', i.e. 'language'.
For example, "tautinn" could well be "daudinn" (as the Iberian syllabary is not too phonetically precise).
But not in Latin inscriptions, like the Aquitanian ones!
But most important is that you do not know what hautenn means in Aquitanian.
I'm sure this is a derivated from *tauta > hauta, a word of Celtic origin.
Iberians were not immersed like Celts or other IEs in perpetual conquest. We do not know of any country they ever conquered, even if we think that somehow they did that with Catalonia.
Nobody was "immersed in perpetual", but there're evidences of Iberians having conquered other peoples, even in Catalonia itself.
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ReplyDeleteArnaud and Octavià please, move your personal issues to other spaces (your blogs, emails or whatever).
ReplyDeleteI understand that you two have a story of confrontation before but I am not willing to put up with it here.
Thanks in advance.
...
Also, Arnaud, if you are going to quote others, please use quotations marks or HTML italic type because it's very difficult to discern what you are quoting from others and what you are saying on your own.
...
Now I'll proceed to censor your ad hominem attacks. I'll try to salvage what is still relevant to the debate.
But, please, I insist, do not make me act as moderator.
@Arnaud:
ReplyDelete"The issue is more to find a good reason to do so. and I can't".
Reason 1: null hypothesis: continuity from Paleolithic times in the Franco-Cantabrian region.
Reason 2: hypothesis of Neolithic language: Megalithism extends through all that area and is the only cultural phenomenon of any importance in all the Neolithic, Chalcolithic or even later until Roman arrival (or at least Urnfield penetration).
Of course the area could (and should) be fragmented (and linked) in a dialectal continuity but that's not the issue.
"This is maybe already a conjecture".
I base this on Venneman and my own observations, which are coincident. I do think that Vasconic was widespread in West and Central Europe (and Italy) upon a time but I'm not sure if this corresponds to a Paleolithic (Magdalenian) or Neolithic (more or less Megalithic) reality.
In any case, it allows us to get rather safe dates for Vasconic scatter: in the first case it'd be between c. 11,500 BCE and 6500 BCE (Magdalenian and Tardenoisian waves' bracket) and, in the second scenario, it'd be c. 5000-3000 BCE (Neolithic arrival to Megalithic expansion window).
In the second case Vasconic would be like IE in time depth, in the first case it'd be like Afroasiatic. I wonder if glottochronology, comparing with Iberian (the best known other Vasconic language), could allow us to determine either window with some certainty.
"They were not farmers when they arrived there long ago".
I can assure you that in the Iron Age, they were essentially farmers.
"They must have come from some other place, the issue is more "when did they come?""
Alright but if we are thinking in terms like the Paleolithic colonization of Europe by H. sapiens is about the same, right?
Let's change the situation: one can well conjecture that peoples like the Dinka, Hadza or Mbuti never really arrived from anywhere, at least not anywhere too far away, most of their ancestors may well have been in the area since before the divergence with chimpanzee and gorilla. Not everyone has to have arrived from somewhere else.
Arnaud and Octavià please, move your personal issues to other spaces (your blogs, emails or whatever).
ReplyDeleteI understand that you two have a story of confrontation before but I am not willing to put up with it here.
Thanks in advance.
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I understand this and I was expecting this kind of reaction.
A.
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Also, Arnaud, if you are going to quote others, please use quotations marks or HTML italic type because it's very difficult to discern what you are quoting from others and what you are saying on your own.
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ok
I thought it was clear but I'll try to be clearer.
A.
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Now I'll proceed to censor your ad hominem attacks. I'll try to salvage what is still relevant to the debate.
But, please, I insist, do not make me act as moderator.
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ok
I understand this point.
A.
"The issue is more to find a good reason to do so. and I can't".
ReplyDeleteReason 1: null hypothesis: continuity from Paleolithic times in the Franco-Cantabrian region.
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hm!?
A language cannot have a huge geographic extension in paleo-X conditions.
What explicit testimony do you have that Basque or Basque-related languages are documented there?
A
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Reason 2: hypothesis of Neolithic language: Megalithism extends through all that area and is the only cultural phenomenon of any importance in all the Neolithic, Chalcolithic or even later until Roman arrival (or at least Urnfield penetration).
Of course the area could (and should) be fragmented (and linked) in a dialectal continuity but that's not the issue.
***
why should we identify a cultural feature with a linguistic phenomenon? Most people are reluctant at doing that.
A.
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"This is maybe already a conjecture".
I base this on Venneman and my own observations, which are coincident. I do think that Vasconic was widespread in West and Central Europe (and Italy) upon a time but I'm not sure if this corresponds to a Paleolithic (Magdalenian) or Neolithic (more or less Megalithic) reality.
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Then this has to be discussed. To be frank, I'm highly sceptical.
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In any case, it allows us to get rather safe dates for Vasconic scatter: in the first case it'd be between c. 11,500 BCE and 6500 BCE (Magdalenian and Tardenoisian waves' bracket) and, in the second scenario, it'd be c. 5000-3000 BCE (Neolithic arrival to Megalithic expansion window).
In the second case Vasconic would be like IE in time depth, in the first case it'd be like Afroasiatic. I wonder if glottochronology, comparing with Iberian (the best known other Vasconic language), could allow us to determine either window with some certainty.
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To be discussed as well.
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"They were not farmers when they arrived there long ago".
I can assure you that in the Iron Age, they were essentially farmers.
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Yes indeed,
but this is generations after they arrived there.
A.
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"They must have come from some other place, the issue is more "when did they come?""
Alright but if we are thinking in terms like the Paleolithic colonization of Europe by H. sapiens is about the same, right?
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Yes, probably so.
A.
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Let's change the situation: one can well conjecture that peoples like the Dinka, Hadza or Mbuti never really arrived from anywhere, at least not anywhere too far away, most of their ancestors may well have been in the area since before the divergence with chimpanzee and gorilla. Not everyone has to have arrived from somewhere else.
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Yes possibly,
But we are here dealing with France and Western Europe.
A.
@Octavià:
ReplyDelete"Sorry, but I disagree. Remember that Keltoi (Greek) = Galli (Latin)".
I have no idea what you may mean with this.
"But Aquitaine is the only region where Vasconic onomastics is surely recorded, mostly in Latin inscriptions. This can't be said of the other regions you mention".
Two major objections here:
1. That's like saying IE is from Anatolia because of Hittite inscriptions (add Mycenaean ones to the pot, if you wish). It's not a valid argument because languages are primarily spoken and only secondarily written (sometimes).
2. We do have Basque inscriptions in the Ebro banks, La Rioja specially, and we also do have the texts of Iruña-Veleia, which are without doubt authentic (for all the evidence I have seen, there is no doubt: they are good). And to that, add toponimy and other indirect evidence.
"Where's the evidence?"
I have addressed this matter in my reply to Arnaud.
"On the contrary, it was Proto-Basque which split from Iberian and not the other way around".
Does it matter? If A and B split from AB, there is no hierarchy, because AB is always both proto-A and proto-B.
Still I have absolutely no reason to believe that cultural and linguistic flow from Mediterranean Iberia (historical Iberia) into the Basque area ever happened: there's simply not such cultural flow at all, except the limited migration upstream the Ebro banks of people related to Iberian Epicardial and identified anthropometrically as "gracile Mediterraneans" (in La Rioja and such, mixed with the autochtonous Pyrenean type, for what I have read).
The only possible connection between Iberians and Basques is either:
1. Neolithic: via Portugal and the Megalithic super-culture
2. Paleolithic: via the Franco-Cantabrian region, what would make "Ligurians" intermediate, much as Languedocine/Provenzal is "intermediate" between Catalan and Gascon today.
"You forgot the nasal: the form enusquera was quoted by Garibay".
Once! There's much more evidence for "eskuera" for instance. Go figure!
"The first member of this compound is related to the verb *enautśi 'to make sound, to speak', whose descendants in modern Basque mean 'gossip, murmuring' or even 'bark (of a dog)'".
That's another theory - I keep my distance but ok, it's there. I gather that you make this enautsi cognate to erran (archaic form of esan, to say), right?
"I'm sure this is a derivated from *tauta > hauta, a word of Celtic origin".
It cannot be because we know of another clear derivate from the same root and is a totally different phonetic change: the already mentioned Eate (< Teutates).
This is I understand hardcore evidence against your hypothesis, which is this way demonstrated false (as far as linguistics can do something like that).
Yet you insist. I must say this is quite unscientific.
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ReplyDelete"A language cannot have a huge geographic extension in paleo-X conditions".
ReplyDeleteWell, that certainly happened to Afroasiatic. I'm not talking of course of a single language but of a linguistic continuum (family, super-language or whatever).
In the LGM there may have been 1000 to 5000 people in Europe, mostly living in the Franco-Cantabrian region, I have no doubt that these spoke a single (super-)language and could understand each other pretty well when they met maybe seasonally to find couples and tell each others stories. The Hadza nowadays speak a single language for instance, as far as we can tell, and they are about 1000 people as well.
It's possible that there was intermittent greater linguistic complexity through the Paleolithic and later but only one group survived till historical times, so it's not that important. At least not at this point of analysis.
This group must have been derived (if Paleolithic) from Magdalenian culture, what had a Franco-Cantabrian homeland. I'd say that Dordogne in the UP was like Buckingham Palace: setting the standard of language in a very wide European region, which included most Europeans living back then.
"What explicit testimony do you have that Basque or Basque-related languages are documented there?"
Besides Iberian, it's all toponimy and substrate influence in living or historical languages. Venneman is a good place to start, though there have been/are other people arguing in the same line (and not every word Venneman claims to be Vasconic is necessarily so, of course).
"why should we identify a cultural feature with a linguistic phenomenon? Most people are reluctant at doing that".
Not me: language is a cultural manifestation. The same you learn how to work a spear, milk the sheep or build a home from your parents and other community adults, you learn language from them, as well as music, etc. Culture is what the older generations transmit to the new ones (except when innovation or import happens, of course).
But I can agree that Megalithism specifically can be seen as a super-cultural rather than purely cultural element, much as, say, Christianity was in later times. We still have examples of religious-related language expansion (Arabic of course, but also Latin/Romance consolidation) but it can well be argued that this cultural factor alone is too shallow or secondary to justify language replacement.
Still it is the strongest Neolithic wave in Atlantic Europe: from North Portugal to Southern Sweden, where often it appears together with Neolithic or just after Neolithic arrival (a few centuries later and implying Neolithic consolidation and demographic growth always). IF a Neolithic cultural flow had a major impact in Atlantic Europe, including the Basque area, this was Dolmenic Megalithism. There is no other such phenomenon which could have such an impact.
Yet this would not explain the Iberian connection because Megalithism was very weak in the Iberian area, excepting tholoi in the SE. It would require a South Portuguese intermediate link.
You can still ponder a cultural-linguistic flow from Mediterranean France and Iberia but the link is most weak as far as I can discern: Cardium Pottery Neolithic had obvious difficulties in adapting to the humid Atlantic climate (the same can be said to a large extent about LBK but there is an important (hybrid?) exception in the Belgica-Britain area).
Arnau: I had to delete another of your comments because you are using the "LoAT" insult against Octavià.
ReplyDeleteI am not going to tolerate that lack of maturity, as I said, move your petty quarrels to your spaces, not here.
Last warning!
2. We do have Basque inscriptions in the Ebro banks, La Rioja specially, and we also do have the texts of Iruña-Veleia, which are without doubt authentic (for all the evidence I have seen, there is no doubt: they are good). And to that, add toponimy and other indirect evidence.
ReplyDeleteSorry, but the authenticity of Iruña-Veleia's incriptions is ast vbest doubtful. So we've better not consider them until the matter is settled once and for all.
"The first member of this compound is related to the verb *enautśi 'to make sound, to speak', whose descendants in modern Basque mean 'gossip, murmuring' or even 'bark (of a dog)'".
That's another theory - I keep my distance but ok, it's there. I gather that you make this enautsi cognate to erran (archaic form of esan, to say), right?
Not realy. I've explained the case of esan and erran in my own blog.
"I'm sure this is a derivated from *tauta > hauta, a word of Celtic origin".
It cannot be because we know of another clear derivate from the same root and is a totally different phonetic change: the already mentioned Eate (< Teutates).
Although they could derive from the same root, *tauta and Teutates are two different words which followed different paths.
This is I understand hardcore evidence against your hypothesis, which is this way demonstrated false (as far as linguistics can do something like that).
Not really. See above.
The first member of this compound is related to the verb *enautśi 'to make sound, to speak', whose descendants in modern Basque mean 'gossip, murmuring' or even 'bark (of a dog)'.
ReplyDeleteThis is a straightforward Proto-Basque reconstruction from forms like er(h)ausi, adausi, dausi, eratsi (L), eratxi, erasi , edasi, eausi, ẽháũsi, eusi, aausi, ausi.
Let's see: your *tauta is nothing but tuath(a), an actually attested word, related, according to you, to Teutates and to some Germanic words: deutsche, dutch, teuton, tedesco, etc. Notice that there is no AU diphthong anywhere: there is UA and EU (and lonely E/U).
ReplyDeleteSo *tauta does not exist to begin with. It'd be if anything *teut- or the attested "tuath".
But *teut- is attested to derive in Basque into "e-" (in Eate), maybe via intermediate "*te-" or "tet-".
Finally, even if we accept you unacceptable proposal for "*taut-", we have a major problem explaining its transformation into "hauta", because T does never produce H in Basque as far as I know.
I think you are totally wrong about this. And your allegedly supporting "Celtic aristocracy" conjecture is even stronger evidence that you are wrong.
...
As for the etymology of euskara, I withdraw from the debate. You may have a point - unsure.
Let's see: your *tauta is nothing but tuath(a), an actually attested word,
ReplyDeleteOnce again, this is IRISH, not Gaulish. Please don't cheat with data.
related, according to you, to Teutates and to some Germanic words: deutsche, dutch, teuton, tedesco, etc. Notice that there is no AU diphthong anywhere: there is UA and EU (and lonely E/U).
There's a Gaulish inscription in Greek alphabet (quoted by Delamarre) on a couple which reads tautanoi, that is, 'the ones from the tribe', with AU diphtong.
Finally, even if we accept you unacceptable proposal for "*taut-", we have a major problem explaining its transformation into "hauta", because T does never produce H in Basque as far as I know.
This is exactly what Martinet's Law does: Iberian tautinn corresponds to Proto-Basque hautenn.
I think you are totally wrong about this. And your allegedly supporting "Celtic aristocracy" conjecture is even stronger evidence that you are wrong.
Not really, It's perfectly supported by data. The problem is you lack adequate references, e.g. Delamarre's book.
Maju:
ReplyDeleteLet's see: your *tauta is nothing but tuath(a), an actually attested word,
O:
Once again, this is IRISH, not Gaulish. Please don't cheat with data.
***
Anyway Irish makes only matters worse.
A.
***
Maju:
related, according to you, to Teutates and to some Germanic words: deutsche, dutch, teuton, tedesco, etc. Notice that there is no AU diphthong anywhere: there is UA and EU (and lonely E/U).
O:
There's a Gaulish inscription in Greek alphabet (quoted by Delamarre) on a couple which reads tautanoi, that is, 'the ones from the tribe', with AU diphtong.
***
P. 295 L'inscription gallo-grecque sur torque taoutanoi vaut sans doute pour teutanoi 'ceux de la tribu', avec une diphthongue au qui est, selon M. Lejeune, un aquitanisme (cf le NP Tautalos en Lusitanie), avec le suffixe -no- appartenance, et le pluriel-ai: 'les membres de la teuta ' ; fait comme le gotique Thiudans (*teutonos) 'roi'
("Celui de la tribu"), RIG l, 413, inscr. G-276. Il y a cependant en celtique un thème homonyme touto- 'gauche, sinistre, nord' qui pourrait expliquer un certain nombre de NP, voir à tuto-.
=> Actually that name is only conjectured to be "Celtic" and it cannot be Gaulish.
A.
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Maju:
Finally, even if we accept you unacceptable proposal for "*taut-", we have a major problem explaining its transformation into "hauta", because T does never produce H in Basque as far as I know.
O:
This is exactly what Martinet's Law does: Iberian tautinn corresponds to Proto-Basque hautenn.
***
Warning: Martinet never ever wrote that. This is O's invention.
A.
***
@Octavià:
ReplyDeleteHaven't we agreed that h in Basque is derived from proto-Basque *k/*g? How come can it now derive from both Iberian and Celtic *t?
I think that is cheating - and a lot.
"Not really, It's perfectly supported by data. The problem is you lack adequate references, e.g. Delamarre's book".
That's only a little detail that can be clarified. The problem is that you are proposing a most unlikely etymology and to support it, you propose an even most unlikely prehistorical episode.
I question both but specially I feel hugely offended by your falsification of Prehistory on mere (conjectural) linguistic grounds. There was not any Celtic aristocracy on most of Basque territory ever. There was some probably in the periphery (La Rioja specially) but I doubt you can build something as democratic as to (s)elect (hautatu) on aristocratic privileges.
I would always prefer, even if equally speculative, the derivation from hau (this) which is surely as it was done among children and adults in daily situations: "hau", "hau", etc.
Hence *hautu and somehow hautatu.
Maybe if there was a host of words of clear Celtic derivation... but I do not see anything like that.
@Arnaud:
ReplyDelete"Warning: Martinet never ever wrote that. This is O's invention".
I suspected it. Thanks for the confirmation.
I'm having to read about André Martinet, it seems, but what I'm finding is that he never wrote anything on Basque, Iberian or even Celtic, just generic linguistics and something on Provençal and French.
"Warning: Martinet never ever wrote that. This is O's invention".
ReplyDeleteMaju:
I suspected it. Thanks for the confirmation.
I'm having to read about André Martinet, it seems, but what I'm finding is that he never wrote anything on Basque, Iberian or even Celtic, just generic linguistics and something on Provençal and French.
***
There's a chapter on Basque in Economie des changements phonétiques.
It's partly readable on google books.
A.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHaven't we agreed that h in Basque is derived from proto-Basque *k/*g? How come can it now derive from both Iberian and Celtic *t?
ReplyDeleteNo, no. This sound shift occurred already in Proto-Basque (that is, at the time of Aquitanian inscriptions), and it also included *t. Thus Proto-Basque hautenn is cognate to Iberian tautinn.
Warning: Martinet never ever wrote that. This is O's invention.
Although I've named this sound shift after him, but this doesn't make it an "invention". For example, Trask named "Mitxelena Law's" the sound shift from Proto-Basque -n- to Basque 0.
The next point is why Celtic *toutā 'people, tribe' (Matasovic) would be borrowed with au in the Aquitanian region while Gaulish forms have eu (Irish has got nothing to do here). It's then likely anotherlanguage was involved, either an unknown Celtic dialect or possibly an IE but non-Celtic language like Italoid. Yes, according to Villar, Italoid merged a/o like Baltic.
It's worth noticing that Tartessian, a weird Celtic language, has a instead of the expected o in words like uar- < *ufor- 'over, on', IMHO due to an Italoid substrate.
The problem is that you are proposing a most unlikely etymology and to support it, you propose an even most unlikely prehistorical episode.
Sorry, but it's you who actually reject linguistic evidence because your own pre-conceived ideas.
I would always prefer, even if equally speculative, the derivation from hau (this) which is surely as it was done among children and adults in daily situations: "hau", "hau", etc.
Absurd.
"Although I've named this sound shift after him, but this doesn't make it an "invention". For example, Trask named "Mitxelena Law's" the sound shift from Proto-Basque -n- to Basque 0".
ReplyDeleteI imagine you and Trask think that you are honoring these late linguists but it may also be a case of abusing their names in order to push ahead your theories on their prestige.
If they did not state such "laws" it is not justified to call them after them. It'd be much better (and honest) if you called them Trask's and Alexandre's laws (or even better: "principle" instead of "law"), right?
"Tartessian, a weird Celtic language"...
I do not accept Tartessian as "Celtic". Probably not even Indoeuropean. Tartessian probably arose in the context of the SW Iberian Bronze Age's "horizons", which are probably intrusive but cannot be Celtic because Celts were then still forming at the Rhine.
As I say, I have read a paper of some guy claiming that Tartessian is Celtic but it's all so wrong that it cannot be accepted in any way.
"Absurd".
Why? Don't you think that Basque can have its own internal logic and internal derivates, as all other languages do? Why has everything to be a foreign borrowing, specially when Basque is so clearly "an isolate". It makes no sense whatsoever.
Maju:
ReplyDeleteHaven't we agreed that h in Basque is derived from proto-Basque *k/*g? How come can it now derive from both Iberian and Celtic *t?
O:
No, no. This sound shift occurred already in Proto-Basque (that is, at the time of Aquitanian inscriptions), and it also included *t. Thus Proto-Basque hautenn is cognate to Iberian tautinn.
***
These are only descriptive fallacies circularly based on your own ideas.
A.
***
A:
Warning: Martinet never ever wrote that. This is O's invention.
O:
Although I've named this sound shift after him, but this doesn't make it an "invention". For example, Trask named "Mitxelena Law's" the sound shift from Proto-Basque -n- to Basque 0.
***
They are your own interpretation of what they wrote.
A.
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A:
The next point is why Celtic *toutā 'people, tribe' (Matasovic) would be borrowed with au in the Aquitanian region while Gaulish forms have eu (Irish has got nothing to do here).
***
What examples of Gaulish eu do you have?
A.
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O:
It's then likely another language was involved, either an unknown Celtic dialect or possibly an IE but non-Celtic language like Italoid. Yes, according to Villar, Italoid merged a/o like Baltic.
***
Baltic has nothing to do here.
A.
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O:
It's worth noticing that Tartessian, a weird Celtic language, has a instead of the expected o in words like uar- < *ufor- 'over, on', IMHO due to an Italoid substrate.
***
Nonsense piled upon obscurity.
A.
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Maju:
The problem is that you are proposing a most unlikely etymology and to support it, you propose an even most unlikely prehistorical episode.
O:
Sorry, but it's you who actually reject linguistic evidence because your own pre-conceived ideas.
***
Good joke here!
Please more!
A.
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"These are only descriptive fallacies circularly based on your own ideas".
ReplyDeleteYes.
Of course we all can fall into such logical self-traps but we have to be most cautious. We have to be critical (of others' opinions/work) but also and specially self-critical. Only that way we can be scientific.
"Baltic has nothing to do here".
He thinks that "Italoid" is intermediate between Latin and Latvian (Italic and Baltic). I find this kinda odd because it goes pretty much against most Western IE internal classification schemes (which place Baltic with Slavic invariably and Italic either with Celtic or Germanic or both).
However I am tempted to think (maybe shallowly and amateurishly) that some languages within IE were more conservative than others. It is known that in Western IE, Lithuanian is indeed that case and that's because of its isolation. Similarly Icelandic is a quite conservative Germanic because of isolation as well.
If so I wonder if some of these original Western IEs called themselves "*Lats" or something like that (much as Eastern IEs called themselves "Aryans") and, if so, Latin (rather than the otherwise quite unknown Italic) could be a more direct descendant from that original Western IE.
It is I know highly conjectural but the fact that Mycenean Greek looks so much like Latin as well (as happens with Lusitanian to some extent) makes me think that Latin is closer to the core Western IE than other creole dialects. If so, it should be closer in some aspects to Baltic, as this one is the most conservative Western IE family.
But I may well be wrong. I just happen to like the idea of a Latin-Latvian connection because of the name coincidence and some linguistic weak hints. That's all.
A:
ReplyDelete"These are only descriptive fallacies circularly based on your own ideas".
Maju:
Yes.
Of course we all can fall into such logical self-traps but we have to be most cautious. We have to be critical (of others' opinions/work) but also and specially self-critical. Only that way we can be scientific.
***
yes but our dear O. is not prone to self-criticism.
A.
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A:
"Baltic has nothing to do here".
Maju:
He thinks that "Italoid" is intermediate between Latin and Latvian (Italic and Baltic). I find this kinda odd because it goes pretty much against most Western IE internal classification schemes (which place Baltic with Slavic invariably and Italic either with Celtic or Germanic or both).
***
Yes obviously Baltic is what I call a Central IE language, which neither Italic nor Celtic are.
A.
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Maju:
However I am tempted to think (maybe shallowly and amateurishly) that some languages within IE were more conservative than others. It is known that in Western IE, Lithuanian is indeed that case and that's because of its isolation. Similarly Icelandic is a quite conservative Germanic because of isolation as well.
***
Yes and no, Baltic is conservative of what appears to be Central IE innovations.
A.
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Maju:
If so I wonder if some of these original Western IEs called themselves "*Lats" or something like that (much as Eastern IEs called themselves "Aryans") and, if so, Latin (rather than the otherwise quite unknown Italic) could be a more direct descendant from that original Western IE.
It is I know highly conjectural but the fact that Mycenean Greek looks so much like Latin as well (as happens with Lusitanian to some extent) makes me think that Latin is closer to the core Western IE than other creole dialects. If so, it should be closer in some aspects to Baltic, as this one is the most conservative Western IE family.
But I may well be wrong. I just happen to like the idea of a Latin-Latvian connection because of the name coincidence and some linguistic weak hints. That's all.
***
yes, I think I won't buy this conjecture indeed.
This is not strong enough if at all.
A.
"Baltic is what I call a Central IE language"...
ReplyDeleteNot in my book. In my book IE is split into:
- Western (Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Italic and surely others like Illyrian)
- Eastern (Indo-Iranian)
And then an array of individual branches like Tocharian, Anatolian, Greek (or Greco-Traco-Armenian), Albanian, etc.
Greek is probably close to Western IE but not enough to be fully in the subfamily. Tocharian and Anatolian surely split very early and are parallel sub-families on their own right. Not sure about Albanian.
These other languages that are not Western nor Eastern have sometimes been called Central IE but it's a catchall term without any genuine personality.
"Baltic is conservative of what appears to be Central IE innovations".
That's not what I have been told or have read (once and again): Baltic and particularly Lithuanian is depicted as the most conservative of all living IE languages (the other one is Hittite but it's dead). Logically this conservatism is explained because that area of Europe was relatively isolated and "backwater" from a historical and prehistorical perspective.
But I'm open to hear your opinions on the matter. Just try to explain them well or link to relevant pages.
"yes, I think I won't buy this conjecture indeed. This is not strong enough if at all".
Fair enough. I do not expect this alone to be compelling and I cannot muster much greater evidence. But I am quite surprised by the fact that "rare" ancient IE languages (such as Lusitanian or Mycenaean Greek) tend to be closer to Latin of all languages.
It is possible that the area of Bohemia and neighboring areas (Saxony, Turingia, Hessen...) was central in the development of Western IE after Corded Ware - it certainly played a major role in Bell Beaker III and probably I too, it was central in the early Bronze Age (Unetice, Tumuli...). If Italic coalesced in this area (Celtic would originate further West in the Rhine area), it would have been crucially Central to all Western IE and an East Germany/Poland connection really allows for a more genuine (less creolized) Western IE than say Scandinavia (Germanic) or Rhineland (Celtic), areas that have much shallower IE pedigree and were in fact only indoeuropeanized almost overnight with the Corded Ware expansion.
Octavià:
ReplyDeleteNo, no. This sound shift occurred already in Proto-Basque (that is, at the time of Aquitanian inscriptions), and it also included *t. Thus Proto-Basque hautenn is cognate to Iberian tautinn.
***
Arnaud:
These are only descriptive fallacies circularly based on your own ideas.
Doublets like talsco-/halsco-, tar-/har- are very common in the Aquitanian inscriptions. This suggests Iberian kept initial t- while Proto-Basque shifted to h- as a result of a lenition process first described by Martinet.
Although this didn't happened exactly as he described (for example, chronology was wrong), it's closer enough to justify giving his name to this and similar sound shifts.
Octavià:
The next point is why Celtic *toutā 'people, tribe' (Matasovic) would be borrowed with au in the Aquitanian region while Gaulish forms have eu (Irish has got nothing to do here).
***
Arnaud:
What examples of Gaulish eu do you have?
The ones quoted by Delamarre. I agree with you, however, that forms in au are likely not Gaulish.
Octavià:
It's then likely another language was involved, either an unknown Celtic dialect or possibly an IE but non-Celtic language like Italoid. Yes, according to Villar, Italoid merged a/o like Baltic.
***
Arnaud:
Baltic has nothing to do here.
This is the evidence independently compiled by Coromines and Villar, whose work you obviously don't know. Italoid is somehwere between Baltic and Italic in the IE dialectal cloud. And IMHO, Lusitanian probably evolved from some Italoid dialect, contrary to the opinion of Indo-Europeanists like Untermann or even Koch, which make it a kind of archaic (Pre-)Celtic.
Octavià:
It's worth noticing that Tartessian, a weird Celtic language, has a instead of the expected o in words like uar- < *ufor- 'over, on', IMHO due to an Italoid substrate.
***
Arnaud:
Nonsense piled upon obscurity.
I see you haven't read Koch's book about Tartessian. An Italoid substrate/adstrate would explains perfectly the anomaly of a Celtic language having a instead of o.
If they did not state such "laws" it is not justified to call them after them.
ReplyDeleteBut the thing is they stated these sound shifts, so giving them their names is fully justified.
I do not accept Tartessian as "Celtic". Probably not even Indoeuropean. [..]
As I say, I have read a paper of some guy claiming that Tartessian is Celtic but it's all so wrong that it cannot be accepted in any way.
You have to read Koch's book before jumping to such conclusions.
Why? Don't you think that Basque can have its own internal logic and internal derivates, as all other languages do?
Of course, it has. But you can't simply extend this to every word in the language.
Why has everything to be a foreign borrowing, specially when Basque is so clearly "an isolate".
Basque has never be an "isolate", because it has surely been in contact with many different languages since prehistoric times. So why couldn't it have loanwords?
Please notice also that "many" isn't exactly the same than "everything". :-)
"You have to read Koch's book before jumping to such conclusions".
ReplyDeleteThis thing? It is after reading this "thing" that I am persuaded that Tartessian is not Celtic at all. Follow my notes on the matter written in September 2nd 2010 and not revised since then:
Criticism of Koch Tartessian as Celtic
Arganto- (silver, bright)
< *PIE herĝentom
< Basque argi (bright, clear)
Cunetes (generally accepted as Celticied, Conii)
Gargoris < old irish garg (wild, fierce) + rí (king)
[ < gar (flame) + gor (deafening)/gorri (red) + Greek suffix -is/-s]
"Turning now to the south-western inscriptions, José Antonio Correa and Jürgen Untermann, in their pioneering publications, have already recognized that these contain some elements that appear Celtic, mostlyproper names".
List of words (alleged names):
Undemonstrated (15):
aarkuui -AARTOOI/AARDOOI-
(if re. argos then < argi (eu))
aibwuuris -AIBOORIS/AIPOORIS- (not demonstrated)
albooroi -ALBUORIS/ALPUORIS-
< albura, alburus ("hisp-Celt")
< albo oro (eu) = all the zone
alkuu -ALTOO/ALDOO-
< alcus, alcuinus
< alde (zone)
alizne -ALIZN?-
< alesia, alisanu
< ala (pasture) + ...
anbaatiia -ANTEASNA/ANDEASNA-
< ambactus, amaeth (not demonstrated)
ariarize -ARIARIZ?-
< arios (not demonstrated)
< ari (eu) = fast (cf. arin-arin dance), aritz(-a/-e) (eu) = oak, the oak
teeaiona -TO?AIEIA/DO?AIEIA-
< deiwona (undemonstranted)
kiinbaai -ŔINSAIUI-
< Cempsi/Cimbii, OI cimbid = captive
(undemonstrated)
leoine -L?EIN?-
< liwonai (undemonstrated)
sarunea -SARON??A-
< serona, serana = star goddess (undemonstrated)
< sare unea (area of nets) (eu)
tarnekuun -TAARN?TO?ON/DAARN?DO?ON-
< turanikum (Hisp-Celt) < Taranos < torann = thunder
(undemonstrated)
uarboiir -OARTOOIIR/OARDOOIR-
< *u(p)ermmo-wiros (undemonstrated)
< arto = millet / ardo = wine (eu)
omuŕika -EMOBEI-KA/-TU-//-GA/-DU-
< *u(p)omorikaa (undemonstrated)
< eman+ibai / eman/eme+bei (eu) = givig river / giving/female cow (+ suffix -ka/-tu, verb)
uznee -OZN??-
< uxsmmai (in Uxama) (undemonstrated)
Plausible (4):
liirnestaakuun -LIIRN?STAATOUN/LIIRN?SDADOUN-
< ler, llyr = sea + neddamon/nessam = nearest (plausible)
melezae -M?L?ZA?-
< meliddus, milis, melys (sweet) (plausible)
tiirtoos -TEIRTUOS/DEIRDUOS-
< Celtiberian: tirtouios, tirtunos... (triple) (plausible)
< Deirdre (Celtic name)?
]uultiina -OOLTEINA/OOLDEINA-
< Celtiberian ultinos/ultia/ultu (plausible)
Note to the previous notes: the second etymology (where it's suggested) is an alternative "Vascoid" one of my own.
ReplyDeleteCapitalized alternative readings are my own readings of the same inscriptions following various transcription tables found online and in university books.
"Of course, it has. But you can't simply extend this to every word in the language".
ReplyDeleteOf course not. I am ready to concede that liburu, zeru and such come from Latin.
"Basque has never be an "isolate", because it has surely been in contact with many different languages since prehistoric times. So why couldn't it have loanwords?"
I do not say it does not have loanwords. It must have them. But what I question is IE loanwords when IEs are a recent arrival to the region. If there are so many IE connections (and there are, and often are not Celtic nor Latin), that must be because of an older contact (sprachbund or derivation) with PIE or the ancestor of PIE.
I'm more ready to accept loanwords from, say, Iberian or Tartessian or even Berber, plus lost languages like "Danubian" or others in Central and NW Europe... than loanwords from IE, specially if these are not Celtic nor Latin.
Additionally there is a school that argues that Basque has no or almost no Celtic loanwords. I do not know the details but they probably have some good reasons to claim that. And this is consistent with a long proto-history of struggle between the invading Celts (and other IEs maybe) and the native Basque, Iberian, Ligurian and other peoples. You are much less likely to exchange words at all with peoples you are continuously warring against than with peoples you are in good relations. Hence Latin was very influential in Basque but Celtic was not (probably).
Also Latin was a language of culture and civilization, like Iberian or Tartessian, Phoenician or Greek. Nothing like that can be said of Celtic.
But still it's possible that some words have been borrowed from Celtic dialects, as seems to be the case with Eate (though he's still best known by the native name Hodei: "Cloud" and totally integrated in non-IE mythology in which Eate is just the son of the dual, female/male, chthonic God of fertility and social justice). These case have to be demonstrated.
I feel much more likely that words proper of Celtic innovation or trade such as iron (it was Celts who brought the Iron Age) could be Celtic. Yet AFAIK burdin (iron) is not related to Celtic nor any other IE language. Correct me if I am wrong. Other "logical" IE borrowings might be horse or cart. The latter may be indeed (gurdi relates well with cart) but the former is surely not (zaldi is totally unrelated to horse, equus or cheval/caballo).
"Please notice also that "many" isn't exactly the same than "everything"".
It is still more than I am willing to accept. Notice that I'm more likely to challenge "classical" loanwords proposals from Latin such as pago (beech) or bi (two). The second specially I consider inacceptable and a clear case of Vasconic influence in Latin instead. The first one might be but it's still most strange that Basques lost the word for the most common tree in the Basque mountains (before pine plantation industry took over).
So I'm not likely to accept Celtic loans easily either. I'm going rather to suggest Vasconic loans to Celtic instead, at least in many cases (specially when the Celtic word is not rooted in PIE, as it's often the case - see many posts above for a list).
Sorry, but I disagree with most of what you propose. You seem to make the same mistakes than Vennemann did: reverse the direction of IE loanwords in Basque such as argi 'light' and then present them as "Vasconic".
ReplyDeleteAdditionally there is a school that argues that Basque has no or almost no Celtic loanwords. I do not know the details but they probably have some good reasons to claim that.
This is because they were unable to recognize them. In Mitxelena's times there wasn't yet a reliable Proto-Celtic dictionary.
Also your reading of Tartessian inscriptions is almost delirant. :-)
ReplyDelete"Sorry, but I disagree with most of what you propose. You seem to make the same mistakes than Vennemann did: reverse the direction of IE loanwords in Basque such as argi 'light' and then present them as "Vasconic"".
ReplyDeleteAccording to all I know "argos" is not even an IE word, hence argyros is not either.
The theory of argos/argyros coming from a PIE *h₂erǵ- needs some support because it's only attested in Celtic and Latin as clear derivates from Greek argyros, which in turn is derivate from Basque argi (light).
There is no way that Basques would borrow this word from IE when in IE it only means (in derivate form via Greek) silver. There is no "bright" or "light" word in any IE language derived from this *h₂erǵ- conjecture. Only silver and the mysterious argos, which is surely pre-IE.
Why it looks to you easier that Basques would borrow a word for something as basic as light, bright and not that Greeks would borrow "bright" for silver when they arrived to the Hesperides precisely on search of precious metals and strategic tin in the Bronze Age?
Argos is just Hellenization of argi and not any PIE. And it was borrowed by Greeks from Iberians (not Basques), precisely at the city of El Argar (curious name coincidence!) in the Bronze Age (when El Argar B adopted Mycenean burial customs).
Greeks were in Iberia in search of tin and precious metals in the Bronze Age. This is reflected imprecisely in the legends of Herakles' Works and Plato's Atlantis (different source and transmission obviously) but specially in the archaeological record of El Argar (and secondarily also in the Aegean area, there were also influences migrating eastwards: tholos burial, dolmen burial).
In this case at least Venneman is correct.
"This is because they were unable to recognize them. In Mitxelena's times there wasn't yet a reliable Proto-Celtic dictionary".
There was Gaelic and Brythonic, proto-languages cannot be compared - yes or yes? Pope Starostin would pull your ear if you did that, right?
"Also your reading of Tartessian inscriptions is almost delirant. :-)"
Strict per Almagro-Gorbea'89.
I know there are alternative schemes but at least I'm not making up mine, just following one system, the one that is available in my private library, to the letter.
In this I am following "authority".
The theory of argos/argyros coming from a PIE *h₂erǵ- needs some support because it's only attested in Celtic and Latin as clear derivates from Greek argyros, which in turn is derivate from Basque argi (light).
ReplyDeleteI suppose you forgot Hittite, isn't it? This is an IE word, not a "Vasconic" one. It looks like you caught the same virus than Vennemann :-)
I've also mentioned Koch's BOOK, not the tiny article in Paleohispanica: http://books.google.es/books?id=asiBPgAACAAJ&dq=tartessian+koch&hl=es&ei=KT1LTcToIc7Lswbrn8mXDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA
Being an amateur you should be less arrogant and willing to learn from more knowledgeable people. Please don't this as an offence but a friendly advice.
"I suppose you forgot Hittite, isn't it?"
ReplyDeleteI did. Can you document it properly?
"I've also mentioned Koch's BOOK, not the tiny article in Paleohispanica"...
Psah. After reading and criticizing the article I am not going to reward that guy with my "argyros" by buying his book.
"Being an amateur you should be less arrogant"...
I am not going to be less arrogant. I would not be myself if I would not be at leas somewhat arrogant. So, please stop trying to configure how I behave and how I am.
I've shown my middle finger (and sometimes my full fist) to many many people in these 42 years. I am arrogant and you will have to put up with it (or you can also ignore me).
However you can appeal to my self-critical side by making good constructive criticisms. But I do not think your xenophilic attitudes will ever entice me.
As you know I am interested in Caucasian and other Eastern European/West Asian possible connections of Basque and Vasconic. But I just do not swallow that anti-West-European propaganda of those who claim everything is Oriental. While there's something to that, not everything is.
And we should stand by our roots, which are much thicker, deeper and solid than you think.
While the general flow of cultural elements in Neolithic and Metal Ages has been from East to West, there have been some exceptions (notably all related with Dolmenic Megalithism) and also there is an important and very thick pre-Neolithic originality of Western Europe.
Basque language is the living time-tunnel that allows us to dive into our pre-IE and maybe even pre-Neolithic roots. But you disdain it by claiming (without much foundation for what I have seen) that it's all recent arrivals from some mythical (not archaeological) Caucasus metallurgical secret sect or something. Nonsense! Get real!
It is you who should be less arrogant and stop reasoning circularly.
O:
ReplyDeleteBeing an amateur you should be less arrogant and willing to learn from more knowledgeable people. Please don't this as an offence but a friendly advice.
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Ridiculous.
You are also an amateur, and what is more an incompetent and nonsensical one.
A.
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ReplyDelete"Baltic is what I call a Central IE language"...
Maju:
Not in my book. In my book IE is split into:
- Western (Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Italic and surely others like Illyrian)
- Eastern (Indo-Iranian)
And then an array of individual branches like Tocharian, Anatolian, Greek (or Greco-Traco-Armenian), Albanian, etc.
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I don't know which book you read, but if you read for example Fortson, people agree that there is a subgroup including indo-iranian, greeco-armenian, balto-slavic.
This is what I call central IE.
Because only Tocharian is really eastern.
A.
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Greek is probably close to Western IE but not enough to be fully in the subfamily.
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No Greek does not side with W IE.
A.
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M:
Tocharian and Anatolian surely split very early and are parallel sub-families on their own right. Not sure about Albanian.
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yes I think this is correct.
A.
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These other languages that are not Western nor Eastern have sometimes been called Central IE but it's a catchall term without any genuine personality.
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I disagree. Some of these languages definitely add up to a dialectal subbranch.
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A:
"Baltic is conservative of what appears to be Central IE innovations".
M:
That's not what I have been told or have read (once and again): Baltic and particularly Lithuanian is depicted as the most conservative of all living IE languages (the other one is Hittite but it's dead). Logically this conservatism is explained because that area of Europe was relatively isolated and "backwater" from a historical and prehistorical perspective.
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Baltic appears to be conservative mainly as a result of central IE being taken by IE-ists as main basis for IE reconstruction.
A.
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But I'm open to hear your opinions on the matter. Just try to explain them well or link to relevant pages.
"yes, I think I won't buy this conjecture indeed. This is not strong enough if at all".
M:
Fair enough. I do not expect this alone to be compelling and I cannot muster much greater evidence. But I am quite surprised by the fact that "rare" ancient IE languages (such as Lusitanian or Mycenaean Greek) tend to be closer to Latin of all languages.
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Mycenian Greek is clearly Greek and Greek is not very close to Latin.
I don't really understand that Pov.
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It is possible that the area of Bohemia and neighboring areas (Saxony, Turingia, Hessen...) was central in the development of Western IE after Corded Ware - it certainly played a major role in Bell Beaker III and probably I too, it was central in the early Bronze Age (Unetice, Tumuli...). If Italic coalesced in this area (Celtic would originate further West in the Rhine area), it would have been crucially Central to all Western IE and an East Germany/Poland connection really allows for a more genuine (less creolized) Western IE than say Scandinavia (Germanic) or Rhineland (Celtic), areas that have much shallower IE pedigree and were in fact only indoeuropeanized almost overnight with the Corded Ware expansion.
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i tend to think that there have been more than one wave of IE-ization
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O:
ReplyDelete"You have to read Koch's book before jumping to such conclusions".
M:
This thing? It is after reading this "thing" that I am persuaded that Tartessian is not Celtic
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What strikes me most in Koch's paper is that his reading of Tartessian alphabet seems to be seriously false.
In addition Tartessian seems to have glottalized phonemes like theta.
A.
M:
ReplyDeleteI am ready to concede that liburu, zeru and such come from Latin.
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Or maybe a more recent Romance language.
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M:
I'm more ready to accept loanwords from, say, Iberian or Tartessian or even Berber, plus lost languages like "Danubian" or others in Central and NW Europe... than loanwords from IE, specially if these are not Celtic nor Latin.
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The case of hartz is intriguing. Obviously very archaic.
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M:
Also Latin was a language of culture and civilization, like Iberian or Tartessian, Phoenician or Greek. Nothing like that can be said of Celtic.
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I disagree. Latin prevailed over Celtic because of military superiority but everything that is technical in Latin is derived from Gaulish: car(-rus) is a Gaulish word, etc.
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I feel much more likely that words proper of Celtic innovation or trade such as iron (it was Celts who brought the Iron Age) could be Celtic. Yet AFAIK burdin (iron) is not related to Celtic nor any other IE language. Correct me if I am wrong.
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Actually burdin can be compared with Latin ferrum.
Root *bher-
burdin actually looks Celtic.
< *bhor-dinos ?
A.
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Other "logical" IE borrowings might be horse or cart. The latter may be indeed (gurdi relates well with cart) but the former is surely not (zaldi is totally unrelated to horse, equus or cheval/caballo).
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Yes, indeed a "strange" word.
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"Please notice also that "many" isn't exactly the same than "everything"".
It is still more than I am willing to accept. Notice that I'm more likely to challenge "classical" loanwords proposals from Latin such as pago (beech) or bi (two). The second specially I consider inacceptable and a clear case of Vasconic influence in Latin instead.
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??
Latin Bi is obvious from *dwi
IE *dwi > bi
Archaic latin duellum > bellum
same law.
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The first one might be but it's still most strange that Basques lost the word for the most common tree in the Basque mountains (before pine plantation industry took over).
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This is not really a proof.
A.
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So I'm not likely to accept Celtic loans easily either. I'm going rather to suggest Vasconic loans to Celtic instead, at least in many cases (specially when the Celtic word is not rooted in PIE, as it's often the case - see many posts above for a list).
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That's logical in theory,
which words do you consider borrowed from Basque into Celtic?
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M:
ReplyDeleteAccording to all I know "argos" is not even an IE word, hence argyros is not either.
The theory of argos/argyros coming from a PIE *h₂erǵ- needs some support because it's only attested in Celtic and Latin as clear derivates from Greek argyros, which in turn is derivate from Basque argi (light).
There is no way that Basques would borrow this word from IE when in IE it only means (in derivate form via Greek) silver. There is no "bright" or "light" word in any IE language derived from this *h₂erǵ- conjecture. Only silver and the mysterious argos, which is surely pre-IE.
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This root *Herg^- is certainly a very good IE word:
Tocharian A aarki, В aarkwi “white”
Hittite ḫar-ki-iš (ḫarkis) “white”
Indo-Aryan arjunas "white"
I can't believe this is borrowed from Basque or the like. It's nearly obvious that the contrary is probable if not certain.
A.
"Because only Tocharian is really eastern".
ReplyDeleteTocharian is Tocharian. Eastern IE is Indo-Iranian and corresponds to the IEs who remained in the European (and later also Asian) steppes after the 4th millennium BCE. "macro-Scythians" for short.
"No, Greek does not side with W IE".
It's at least "centum". Also Mycenean Greek sounds a lot like Latin.
But fair enough because I think Greek diverged also in that early period of the 4th millennium, when PIE radiated in many directions: Altai (Tocharian), Caucasus-Anatolia (Anatolian), Central Europe (Western IE) and SE Europe (several groups probably).
"Baltic appears to be conservative mainly as a result of central IE being taken by IE-ists as main basis for IE reconstruction".
But then why not Slavic or Greek or Sanskrit? I do not agree with your "Central IE" concept but anyhow.
I must say I cannot agree with your "Central IE" concept because it is not consistent with archaeology nor with all I've seen so far on how IE languages may be organized phylogenetically.
There's no archaeological culture that can be attributed that "Central IE" thing. There's no steppary flow into the Balto-Slavic area since the Corded Ware genesis (and this one seems quite minor and from a secondary culture: Catacombs).
I really have a problem with this concept of "Central IE".
"Mycenian Greek is clearly Greek and Greek is not very close to Latin.
I don't really understand that Pov".
I can't tell for sure but when I looked at it years ago, I found striking stuff like ekkwos (horse) instead of anything resembling hippos. It was not the only word looking Latin, really, even if many others were surely Greek-like instead.
Equus or something like that is precisely one of the words that makes Lusitanian look Latin-like as well, so we are probably dealing here with a genuine PIE or proto-WIE word.
"i tend to think that there have been more than one wave of IE-ization".
Where? When? Be more precise than that.
As I see it, the main wave, leading to Western IE is as follows:
1. Baalberge culture, probably a bunch of mercenary opportunists in East Germany in the middle of intra-Danubian and Danubian-Nordic struggles. Expands, contracts and breaks apart.
2. A period in which the resulting cultures in East Germany and Cuyavia (Poland) suffer partial "Danubization".
3. A period of gradual resurgence of the "Polish" group: Luboń (takes most of Poland and also Belarus, etc.) and then Globular Amphorae (unifies East German WIEs, even greater extension than Luboń).
4. Corded Ware, possibly influenced by a minor invasion or flow of Catacomb culture peoples in Cuyavia. Expands brutally from Central Russia to West Germany and Scandinavia.
With a little help from other IEs (Vucedol) and Basques (Artenac) the Danubians are vanquished forever. Then comes what I call the "millennial peace", most of which is characterized by the ubiquitous (but minoritary and assimilationist) Bell Beaker phenomenon (a trading sect probably), at both sides of the linguistic-cultural Rhine border. It lasts between c. 2400 BCE and c. 1250 BCE, when Urnfield expansion breaches the Rhine line and penetrates along the west bank of the Rhône into Languedoc and Catalonia.
As you can see it is a single wave process essentially, though of course there can be moments of some overlap or uncertainty. And of course there are WIE groups that take over other WIE groups, like Romans and Germans did with Celts historically. But that's not so relevant, right?
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ReplyDelete"his reading of Tartessian alphabet seems to be seriously false".
That's what I thought too.
"Or maybe a more recent Romance language".
No. They clearly come from Latin, the persistence of -u ending and other "archaisms" totally discard Romances in these cases. This is widely acknowledged.
libro or livre won't cause liburu, they would create libVro or libVre/-a. Look for instance at gréve -> greba, and may other well known examples.
"The case of hartz is intriguing. Obviously very archaic".
To me it was this word and R. Frank's research on it what really opened my eyes, so to say. Earlier I tended to be much more reluctant to accept any PIE-Basque connection.
But there are more and I was trying to gain a preliminary understanding in this blog article.
"Latin prevailed over Celtic because of military superiority but everything that is technical in Latin is derived from Gaulish: car(-rus) is a Gaulish word, etc".
Surely not in agreement at all. Carrus is a very peculiar IE word, so I do not know, but most technical stuff, Romans learned not from Celts (that's an absurd idea!) but from Etruscans (mainly) and also Greeks and Phoenicians. At that time civilization and culture was mostly around the Mediterranean, specially the Eastern Mediterranean.
Also coincidence of words between Latin and Celtic may be part of their common southern WIE origin and of Bronze/Iron Age sprachbunds.
As for Latin prevailing over Celtic on military grounds only... yes and not. Indeed Romans were a most militarized nation but why did Germanics (a backwater nation from the Far North) defeat the Celts (which was the main reason pulling Romans into Gaul)?
According to reference Celticist scholar, W. Kruta, this happened because of the new level of quasi-civilization that Celts had achieved in the La Tène period. In this phase their economy and power structure became centralized in a number of what he calls "oppidae" but we could well call polis or towns (probably town is fine because it is directly derived from Celtic "dun"). Kruta says that then Germanics just had to take over the Celtic towns and that destroyed their social, economic and political structure in a single blow. The new Celtic strength was also their weakness, quite curiously.
Finally I'd like to say that even if Romans were essentially a bunch of decurions with low education, they also were carriers of the Mediterranean cultural greatness into most of West Europe and certainly into Celtic lands. Unlike what Monty Python say in The Life Of Brian, Romans never improved anything in Palestine or anywhere in the Mediterranean... but in Gaul and Britain they certainly brought civilization, specially after the rather destructive Celtic interlude. The problem is that Monthy Python are British and they are extrapolating what happened in Britain to Palestine without any sense.
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ReplyDelete"Actually burdin can be compared with Latin ferrum.
Root *bher-
burdin actually looks Celtic.
< *bhor-dinos ?"
IDK. These proto-roots are kinda messy. It immediately reminded me of *bhar-s-, which according to Auñamendi encyclopedia is the Celtic root of the word "Vascones". However it means "summit, point, foliage".
Burdin can still be related to ferrum but how? What's the root of ferrum? Where does it come from?
It's an interesting investigation to make.
"Latin Bi is obvious from *dwi".
I contest that. Latin bi is obviously from Basque bi via Ligurian surely in the urnfield period, when Italics arrived to North Italy.
It's too much of a coincidence to be otherwise. If it'd be an isolated occurrence, we could accept that it is a coincidence but there a lot of other Vasconic words and toponimy in Italy. It is almost for sure Vasconic.
That does not mean that PIE *dwos and Basque bi are not remotely related... but that's another story (and not a clear one, sincerely).
"This is not really a proof". [cf. pago, fagus, beech]
It is a good reason to suspect. I find more likely that IEs adopted the word from mainland Europeans, possibly of Vasconic language when they left the treeless steppes, right?
"which words do you consider borrowed from Basque into Celtic?".
I do not have a clear finished theory. However I listed above some words taken from Swadesh lists, which are coincident in Celtic and Basque and not in PIE. Quoting myself (numbers are Swadesh list's order):
Additionally there are words in Celtic that look Vascoid-related but not via PIE:
- 1 and 4 (the I/we thing but different from PIE *wey)
- 7 and 9 (the this/here thing, very Vascoid)
- 10 there
- 32 PBryt. *ziki - Basque txiki (<*ziki)
- 37 Bryt gwas, gwaz - Basque gizon
- 38 Bryt den, dyn - Bas. dena
- 39. ume - bugei (Breton)
- 55. hasi - had, hasenn, had (Bryt)
- 63. ? okel - kig, cig, kua (Bryt. *kika)
- 74. begi - lagad, lagas, llygad (Bryt.)
- 75. sudur - *srogna (Gael.)
- 84. hego - askell/asgell (Bryt.)
- 85. sabel - *bolgo (specially Gael.)
- 94. ? koska egin - krogiñ (PC *kna-yo-)
"This root *Herg^- is certainly a very good IE word:
Tocharian A aarki, В aarkwi “white”
Hittite ḫar-ki-iš (ḫarkis) “white”
Indo-Aryan arjunas "white""
I will have to concede hence that there is a PIE, rather Eastern PIE *'arki (my reconstruction) word meaning white (and not bright nor light).
This is interesting because it offers another likely PIE-Basque cognate. But lacking any WIE or even Greek (other than the mysterious argyros) cognate, a borrowing into Basque is almost impossible. We are again before a case of PIE-Basque cognate and not WIE->Basque loan.
However I rest my case for argyros being of Basque/Iberian origin. With Hittite harkiis around it's likely we are before an Anatolian or otherwise "Central IE" loan into Greek, rather than a Vasconic one.
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ReplyDelete"Actually burdin can be compared with Latin ferrum.
Root *bher-
burdin actually looks Celtic.
< *bhor-dinos ?"
M:
IDK.
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What's that IDK?
A.
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M:
These proto-roots are kinda messy. It immediately reminded me of *bhar-s-, which according to Auñamendi encyclopedia is the Celtic root of the word "Vascones". However it means "summit, point, foliage".
Burdin can still be related to ferrum but how? What's the root of ferrum? Where does it come from?
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That's another issue. You said Burdin had no IE connection. Things are not so clear as Burdin can be a Celtic-oid equivalent of LAtin Ferrum. Now I'm not stating that these words are P-IE words but just that your initial claim is not correct.
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"Latin Bi is obvious from *dwi".
M:
I contest that. Latin bi is obviously from Basque bi via Ligurian surely in the urnfield period, when Italics arrived to North Italy.
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We don't need anything but Latin to explain that PIE *dwi becomes Latin bi, so Basque is useless.
Anything from PIE *dw- becomes Latin b.
Basque would be interesting if that change was not Latin-made, it is Latin-made.
English twin shows that PIE *dwi- is old.
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M:
It's too much of a coincidence to be otherwise. If it'd be an isolated occurrence, we could accept that it is a coincidence
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It looks like a potential chance coincidence.
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but there a lot of other Vasconic words and toponimy in Italy. It is almost for sure Vasconic.
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Like which ones?
I would expect Italian toponymics to be Etruscan-oid.
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That does not mean that PIE *dwos and Basque bi are not remotely related... but that's another story (and not a clear one, sincerely).
"This is not really a proof".
ReplyDeleteM:
[cf. pago, fagus, beech]
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I don't know what you mean.
That word pago looks like an IE lw into Basque.
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M:
It is a good reason to suspect. I find more likely that IEs adopted the word from mainland Europeans, possibly of Vasconic language when they left the treeless steppes, right?
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Nothing proves that Basque or "Vasconic" was ever spoken on a large area.
Actually if Basque was spoken very anciently in Euskadi then other languages evolved out of Basque's ancestor.
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"which words do you consider borrowed from Basque into Celtic?".
I do not have a clear finished theory. However I listed above some words taken from Swadesh lists, which are coincident in Celtic and Basque and not in PIE. Quoting myself (numbers are Swadesh list's order):
Additionally there are words in Celtic that look Vascoid-related but not via PIE:
- 1 and 4 (the I/we thing but different from PIE *wey)
- 7 and 9 (the this/here thing, very Vascoid)
- 10 there
- 32 PBryt. *ziki - Basque txiki (<*ziki)
- 37 Bryt gwas, gwaz - Basque gizon
- 38 Bryt den, dyn - Bas. dena
- 39. ume - bugei (Breton)
- 55. hasi - had, hasenn, had (Bryt)
- 63. ? okel - kig, cig, kua (Bryt. *kika)
- 74. begi - lagad, lagas, llygad (Bryt.)
- 75. sudur - *srogna (Gael.)
- 84. hego - askell/asgell (Bryt.)
- 85. sabel - *bolgo (specially Gael.)
- 94. ? koska egin - krogiñ (PC *kna-yo-)
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Could you please be more precise in what these words mean?
I cannot make any comment on that.
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A:
"This root *Herg^- is certainly a very good IE word:
Tocharian A aarki, В aarkwi “white”
Hittite ḫar-ki-iš (ḫarkis) “white”
Indo-Aryan arjunas "white""
M:
I will have to concede hence that there is a PIE, rather Eastern PIE *'arki (my reconstruction) word meaning white (and not bright nor light).
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No this is a perfectly IE root attested in all branches of IE, including archaic ones like Tocharian, Hittite, Italo-Celtic, etc.
The idea that it can be a lw from Basque or Vasconic into PIE is nearly nonsense.
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This is interesting because it offers another likely PIE-Basque cognate. But lacking any WIE or even Greek (other than the mysterious argyros) cognate, a borrowing into Basque is almost impossible. We are again before a case of PIE-Basque cognate and not WIE->Basque loan.
However I rest my case for argyros being of Basque/Iberian origin.
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That's nonsense.
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With Hittite harkiis around it's likely we are before an Anatolian or otherwise "Central IE" loan into Greek, rather than a Vasconic one.
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There's absolutely no phonetic signal that this is a lw into IE languages.
Correspondences are clear.
The root H2erg^ has numerous derivatives in about all IE languages from E to W and N to S.
This cannot be a lw.
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ReplyDelete"Because only Tocharian is really eastern".
M:
Tocharian is Tocharian. Eastern IE is Indo-Iranian.
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It's absurd to describe sth as Eastern when there is sth more Eastern like Tocharian.
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"No, Greek does not side with W IE".
M:
It's at least "centum".
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Never mind.
Satem is a late innovation.
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M:
Also Mycenean Greek sounds a lot like Latin.
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Not at all. I can't understand this.
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M:
I must say I cannot agree with your "Central IE" concept because it is not consistent with archaeology nor with all I've seen so far on how IE languages may be organized phylogenetically.
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This is not my concept.
Read Fortson and other orthodox IE-ists. They agree that there is a subgroup of languages: Greek, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic.
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M:
I really have a problem with this concept of "Central IE".
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i don't.
Central IE is Yamnaya culture and the like.
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M:
I found striking stuff like ekkwos (horse) instead of anything resembling hippos.
Equus or something like that is precisely one of the words that makes Lusitanian look Latin-like as well, so we are probably dealing here with a genuine PIE or proto-WIE word.
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I disagree. there is no word for horse in PIE. that's a fiction.
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"i tend to think that there have been more than one wave of IE-ization".
M:
Where? When? Be more precise than that.
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There are plenty of signals that for example Celtic and Italic are not the first IE-sounding languages spoken in W Europe.
Words like hartz which are probably early archaic lws are a testimony of that situation.
Cf. Old-European hydronymics, etc.
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As I see it, the main wave, leading to Western IE is as follows:
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W IE is responsible for (Central) Europe becoming Neolithic so I disagree with your scenario.
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M:
ReplyDeleteSurely not in agreement at all. Carrus is a very peculiar IE word, so I do not know, but most technical stuff, Romans learned not from Celts (that's an absurd idea!)
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Most words that are not directly derived from P-IE are Celtic in Latin,
Car-rus is Celtic, Camisia is Celtic, etc.
Most words in relationship with clothing, food and craftmanship are Celtic.
you seem to have a huge and erroneous bias against Celtic.
Celts created the first European Empire from Ireland and Spain to Turkey...
They were not the kind of barbarous retards you want them to be.
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M:
but from Etruscans (mainly) and
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There's about no word in Latin that can be traced to Etruscan.
A.
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also Greeks and Phoenicians. At that time civilization and culture was mostly around the Mediterranean, specially the Eastern Mediterranean.
"What's that IDK?"
ReplyDeleteNet-slang for "I don't know", very common. Others may be IMO (in my opinion), AFAIK (as far as I know), etc.
"You said Burdin had no IE connection".
I believe I said I was not aware of such connection. I was not taking any stand on this matter, really.
"Burdin can be a Celtic-oid equivalent of Latin Ferrum".
It's easier than that: you go to Wikitionary iron, look for translations in Celtic languages and what do you get?
Breton: houarn, hern br(br)
Cornish: horn
Irish: iarann
Welsh: haearn
Scottish Gaelic: iarrnaig, iarann
So work on that, which is the factual data. Gaelic looks like English iron, which is said to be from proto-Germanic *īsarna, which in turn derivates from proto-Celtic *eisarno (makes full archaeological sense that Germanic "iron" derives from Celtic).
This is also said to be the root of Brythonic hearn and similar ones.
In turn these are said to derive from PIE *ésh₂r̥ 'blood'. But this may be just a stupid speculation, because it is much more logical that the word was imported from wherever iron tech arrived from, namely the Balcans and ultimately Anatolia (all of IE language by then, AFAIK).
Iron in Greek is however sídiros, which does not seem too closely related. For the record, Albanian is hekuri. Again not too close to the *eisarno northern name of iron.
We do not see any clear correlation either with Lat. ferrum nor Basque burdin.
But Brythonic huarn (and similar) is maybe the most closely sounding to burdin, also to Latin ferrum. This may indicate an isogloss between a Gaelic/Germanic and a Brythonic/Italic/Basque terminology. However they all seem indeed related, including Balcanic words for iron. Yet the phylogeny is not too clear.
"We don't need anything but Latin to explain that PIE *dwi becomes Latin bi, so Basque is useless".
ReplyDeleteYes we do: PIE for 2 is *dwos (or very similar always in -o-, not -i-), not *dwi. Do not cheat, please. References: 1, 2.
So you need two phonetic changes (in a two/three phonemes' word!!!): d->b and o/wo->i. No way! Much less as duos is persistent in Latin and you have it in complex words as duunviros, etc.
It is a clear borrowing from somwhere and the identity with Basque bi is so brutally striking that there's almost no other option.
"Anything from PIE *dw- becomes Latin b".
No. *dwos -> duo. It does not become anything. In fact it is extremely conservative, assuming that the PIE word is correct.
"English twin shows that PIE *dwi- is old".
Not really. Twin is obviously from two plus a suffix (such as -ing or a diminutive). The -o- vanishes but as effect of absorption into the /w/ sound only (o<->u is very natural, in fact you pronounce two as /tu:/). Similarly in Basque you have biki (twin), etc.
"I would expect Italian toponymics to be Etruscan-oid".
Etruscan is most likely an arrival from the Aegean c. 1300 BCE (proto-Vilanovan culture, closeness with Lemnian language, legend of Eneas in Italy, ancient Etruscan genetics close to Turkey, etc.)
So I would not specially think of them as Etruscan. However they could be from a variety of sources, not just Vasconic. Admittedly I am the first one surprised to find an Italian link on the Vasconic case because Magdalenian never reached Italy, except maybe the Liguria area, most of Italy is rather low in West European genetic markers (but irregularly so), etc.
But it is quite clearly there, specially in the North. This could support the Neolithic origin of Vasconic or the Megalithic one (Megalithism had an impact in Italy but more in the Center-South than the North).
A hypothesis I have is that in the Chassey-La Lagozza period, North Italians "learned Basque" (Ligurian actually from SE France). This Ligurian Vasconic link became stronger and more homogeneous as Celts and Italics pored around these peoples forcing them to entrench themselves around the Western Alps.
But I can't say. In any case the link is very very clear Arona, Arno, Alpe Graie (Harpe Garaiak), Arrezzo (compare with Basque Areso), Tiber<>Iber (<ibar<ibai) and so many others... But there are of course other linguistic sources. Italy was for sure very heterogeneous before the Roman Empire in almost all periods.
What I say is that somehow there was a strong Ligurian (as in SE French Vasconic) influence into North Italy (and maybe further south) that acted as substrate for early Italic (in North Italy) and is reflected to some extent in Latin (which becomes distinct only after Italics flowed southwards in the context of the Iron Age, c. 700 BCE, or zero "ab urbe condita").
"That word pago looks like an IE lw into Basque".
Looks like a Latin loanword indeed. But why would Basques abandon their own native word for the most common native tree. Why would there be a related word pagu meaning strong?
I'm conjecturing that this reflects a pre-IE West or Central European common word, then modified by Latin influence maybe. Not an IE word because there are no beeches anywhere in Eastern Europe (http://www.euforgen.org/fileadmin/www.euforgen.org/Documents/Maps/JPG/Fagus_sylvatica.jpg)
"Nothing proves that Basque or "Vasconic" was ever spoken on a large area".
ReplyDeleteVenneman does and I have found even greater support for this. Also it's absurd to think of Basque genesis as localized: it must be a remnant of a once much larger family. Exactly which group (Paleolithic, Neolithic) that is debatable (I do not know for sure).
"Actually if Basque was spoken very anciently in Euskadi then other languages evolved out of Basque's ancestor".
That's the idea if Basque is Paleolithic indeed. Not Basque Country specifically but the Franco-Cantabrian region, which can be considered "the Paleolithic Basque Country" and was also where most Europeans lived in that time.
If Basque is of Neolithic origin, then Basque should be derivate rather than ancestral but the ancestral language is dead by now. So Basque is still the only survivor (and together with Iberian the only historically documented one).
"Could you please be more precise in what these words mean?"
You're making me work too much, please check Swadesh list for Celtic languages and Basque.
"No this is a perfectly IE root attested in all branches of IE, including archaic ones like Tocharian, Hittite, Italo-Celtic, etc".
This is not attested in WIE (Italo-Celtic) as far as I can tell. Looks like a Basque-PIE but not Basque-WIE connection.
"The idea that it can be a lw from Basque or Vasconic into PIE is nearly nonsense".
I have not said that. I have all the time considered that PIE-Basque connections, specially those lacking in WIE, are signature of very old shared relationship of some sort. Which one I can't tell but my speculation is that they may be from the period of colonization of West Eurasia by H. sapiens (of course it might all be a Neolithic sprachbund of some sort).
"That's nonsense".
"I rest my case" means that I concede, that you are probably right, not that I insist. ;)
"There's about no word in Latin that can be traced to Etruscan".
ReplyDeleteMaybe but that is quite senseless considering that about 80% of Roman civilization is of Etruscan origin.
I know April comes from Etruscan Apru (Aphrodite) and there are others for sure. So it's not like "no word", though maybe less than we would expect considering that it were Etruscans who, essentially, built and ruled Rome.
Admittedly however Latin is older than Rome.
If centuries of elite domination of Rome by Etruscan monarchs, engineers, traders and diviners, of sprachbund as Etruscans lived just across the Tiber, left such weak influence on Roman Latin, how can I accept that a similar amount of time of Celtic hostile contact with Basques left the strong legacy claimed by some? Sorry, nope.
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ReplyDelete"We don't need anything but Latin to explain that PIE *dwi becomes Latin bi, so Basque is useless".
M:
Yes we do: PIE for 2 is *dwos (or very similar always in -o-, not -i-), not *dwi. Do not cheat, please. References: 1, 2
So you need two phonetic changes (in a two/three phonemes' word!!!): d->b and o/wo->i. No way! Much less as duos is persistent in Latin and you have it in complex words as duunviros, etc.
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I'm not cheating. Your reference mentions that FAliscan is du.
So it's not difficult to understand that PIE *du with different suffixes can become both duo and bi < dwi in Latin.
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M:
It is a clear borrowing from somwhere and the identity with Basque bi is so brutally striking that there's almost no other option.
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It's either a chance coincidence (most probably) or a lw from Latin into Basque (not probable as other numbers have little similarity).
and once again we can explain it with LAtin laws so any external hypothesis is weak.
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"Anything from PIE *dw- becomes Latin b".
No. *dwos -> duo. It does not become anything. In fact it is extremely conservative, assuming that the PIE word is correct.
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This is not correct
Irish daw shows that *dwo is false.
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A:
"English twin shows that PIE *dwi- is old".
M:
Not really. Twin is obviously from two plus a suffix (such as -ing or a diminutive). The -o- vanishes but as effect of absorption into the /w/ sound only (o<->u is very natural, in fact you pronounce two as /tu:/). Similarly in Basque you have biki (twin), etc.
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Twin is from dw-in-
because dwo-in- would be twone in English not twin.
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A:
ReplyDelete"I would expect Italian toponymics to be Etruscan-oid".
M:
Etruscan is most likely an arrival from the Aegean c. 1300 BCE (proto-Vilanovan culture, closeness with Lemnian language, legend of Eneas in Italy, ancient Etruscan genetics close to Turkey, etc.)
***
There's no reason to make Etruscan come from Anatolian, especially so late.
Etruscan is related with two other languages spoken in the Alps.
Lemnian is clearly from Italy and not a kind of remnant.
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So I would not specially think of them as Etruscan. However they could be from a variety of sources, not just Vasconic. Admittedly I am the first one surprised to find an Italian link on the Vasconic case because Magdalenian never reached Italy, except maybe the Liguria area, most of Italy is rather low in West European genetic markers (but irregularly so), etc.
But it is quite clearly there, specially in the North. This could support the Neolithic origin of Vasconic or the Megalithic one (Megalithism had an impact in Italy but more in the Center-South than the North).
A hypothesis I have is that in the Chassey-La Lagozza period, North Italians "learned Basque" (Ligurian actually from SE France).
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This is not possible as this is the place where Etruscan relatives were spoken.
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This Ligurian Vasconic link became stronger and more homogeneous as Celts and Italics pored around these peoples forcing them to entrench themselves around the Western Alps.
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Where Retic and Etrucan relatives were spoken...
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But I can't say. In any case the link is very very clear Arona, Arno, Alpe Graie (Harpe Garaiak), Arrezzo (compare with Basque Areso), Tiber<>Iber (<ibar<ibai) and so many others...
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How do you explain the t of tiber?
This does not look very strong.
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M:
But there are of course other linguistic sources. Italy was for sure very heterogeneous before the Roman Empire in almost all periods.
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Indeed !
And Spain as well.
All the more reasons to doubt that Basque could have a large extension.
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What I say is that somehow there was a strong Ligurian (as in SE French Vasconic) influence into North Italy (and maybe further south) that acted as substrate for early Italic (in North Italy) and is reflected to some extent in Latin (which becomes distinct only after Italics flowed southwards in the context of the Iron Age, c. 700 BCE, or zero "ab urbe condita").
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Doubtless impossible because of Etruscan relatives.
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"That word pago looks like an IE lw into Basque".
Looks like a Latin loanword indeed. But why would Basques abandon their own native word for the most common native tree. Why would there be a related word pagu meaning strong?
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It is strange that pago has a voiceless initial.
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M:
ReplyDeleteI know April comes from Etruscan Apru (Aphrodite) and there are others for sure.
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Apru is obviously from Greek.
A.
"I'm not cheating. Your reference mentions that FAliscan is du".
ReplyDeleteWhere there is not you cannot get anything from. There is nothing in -i- anywhere, nor starting with b-. All the rest is a self-satisfying pseudo-reasoning, instinctive anti-Basque pro-IE reaction... but without substance.
"... we can explain it with LAtin laws"...
No, we cannot.
"Irish daw shows that *dwo is false".
It does not: it's totally in the line of Celtic and West Germanic cognates.
It is anyhow remote in relation to Vasconic BI (and its Latin derivate).
"Twin is from dw-in-
because dwo-in- would be twone in English not twin".
I'm not researching the details but my suggestion was not dwo-in but two-ing (a very English or otherwise West Germanic evolution) or two + een maybe, whatever the case an Anglo and not PIE evolution.
There's a point when WIE becomes independent from PIE, when Germanic becomes independent from WIE and when English becomes independent from Germanic... It's pointless to try to look for a clearly Anglosaxon construction such as twin in PIE.
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ReplyDelete"No this is a perfectly IE root attested in all branches of IE, including archaic ones like Tocharian, Hittite, Italo-Celtic, etc".
M:
This is not attested in WIE (Italo-Celtic) as far as I can tell. Looks like a Basque-PIE but not Basque-WIE connection.
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It's clearly attested everywhere.
Including in Celtic.
I don't understand why you keep denying this basic fact.
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A.
"The idea that it can be a lw from Basque or Vasconic into PIE is nearly nonsense".
I have not said that. I have all the time considered that PIE-Basque connections, specially those lacking in WIE, are signature of very old shared relationship of some sort.
***
It cannot be a cognate as the word hartz = hittite hartak shows that argi should have initial h if it were a cognate as in Hittite harkis
Obviously it's a rather recent lw into Basque, less old than hartz.
A.
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ReplyDelete"Twin is from dw-in-
because dwo-in- would be twone in English not twin".
M:
I'm not researching the details but my suggestion was not dwo-in but two-ing (a very English or otherwise West Germanic evolution) or two + een maybe, whatever the case an Anglo and not PIE evolution.
There's a point when WIE becomes independent from PIE, when Germanic becomes independent from WIE and when English becomes independent from Germanic... It's pointless to try to look for a clearly Anglosaxon construction such as twin in PIE.
***
ok you are quite incredibly stubborn :) LOL.
Umbrian duir "two"
Hittite ta-a-i-u-ga-aš (täyugaš) “two years old”
Compare O.Ind. dvi- (e.g.
dvi-pád- = bipedal = Gree di-pous
It's obvious Latin bi comes from *dwi which exists it's a PIE-stage variant.
*dwis “twice”: O.Ind. dvíḥ (ved. also duvíḥ), Av. biš, Gk. δίς, aLat. duis, Lat. bis, M.H.G. zwir “twice”
the old form * duis * is attested in Latin.
Twin is not just English but Germanic *twin-. In addition Slavic also has *dwojnos
Etc.
A.
"Nothing proves that Basque or "Vasconic" was ever spoken on a large area".
ReplyDeleteVenneman does and I have found even greater support for this. Also it's absurd to think of Basque genesis as localized: it must be a remnant of a once much larger family. Exactly which group (Paleolithic, Neolithic) that is debatable (I do not know for sure).
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Yes
but then if the ancestor of Basque spread over Western Europe 10 ky ago or 40 ky ago then it split into so many dialectal variants that this explains that there were possibly more than 15 languages spoken in Spain and just as many languages spoken in Italy in the Antiquity.
All of them very much different.
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"Actually if Basque was spoken very anciently in Euskadi then other languages evolved out of Basque's ancestor".
That's the idea if Basque is Paleolithic indeed. Not Basque Country specifically but the Franco-Cantabrian region, which can be considered "the Paleolithic Basque Country" and was also where most Europeans lived in that time.
If Basque is of Neolithic origin, then Basque should be derivate rather than ancestral but the ancestral language is dead by now. So Basque is still the only survivor (and together with Iberian the only historically documented one).
***
This tends to make the genetic relationship of Basque and Iberian, nearly as old as that of any of them with PIE.
A.
"There's no reason to make Etruscan come from Anatolian"...
ReplyDeleteFrom the Aegean is not from "Anatolian" (IE). I do not think Etruscan is IE but it can be Pelasgic for example.
"Etruscan is related with two other languages spoken in the Alps".
One only and is one of those cases of conjectural speculation rather than anything solid, like when people claim that Ligurian or Cantabrian were "Celtic" without any evidence whatsoever.
"Lemnian is clearly from Italy and not a kind of remnant".
I disagree and specially because of two reasons:
1. There is genetic evidence linking ancient Etruscan aristocrats to the Aegean (and to much lesser extent modern Tuscans too).
2. Etruscan art shows themselves in clothing and looks very much Eteocretans. I'm not sure if they are linguistically related to Minoans but at least they are culturally.
IMO they reached Italy in the context of the Bronze Age Mediterranean flows that began with the Mycenaean contacts with Iberia (surely on the footsteps of pre-IE Cretan/Cypriot precursors) and culminated in the 13th-11th century crisis (Urnfield, Sea Peoples, Hittite, Troy, Ugarit collapse, Sardinian nuraghe and probably other stuff I'm missing right now).
The Ancients had legends that placed them as emigrants from "Lydia" (however that must be a reference to the region not Lydians who spoke a Luwian, IE, dialect in historical times).
"Where Retic and Etrucan relatives were spoken"...
I dispute this idea of Raethic having anything to do with Etruscan: there's no real evidence I know of. It's a weird speculation and nothing else.
Per Wikipedia: "Its linguistic categorization is not clearly established, and it presents a confusing mixture of what appear to be Etruscan, Indo-European, and uncertain other elements", probably Vasconic.
...
...
ReplyDelete"How do you explain the t of tiber?"
I do not have an explanation (an article, preffix, pronunciation variant as in ur/dur?). But the rest is curiously identical.
However 'iber' is the Vasconic word that more clearly flows into the Balcans: Ibar river (Kosovo) and Hebros (Maritza) river (Thrace).
"And Spain as well".
SW Europe (larger than modern Spain) shows much less external influences than Italy in all late Prehistory. Also it shows much stronger civilization centers and is essentially in connection with other areas of Atlantic Europe, at least until the arrival of IEs to Central/North Europe, when the "area of interests" slides to the West Mediterranean and Dolmenic Megalithism moves into Italy and North Africa as well.
There is a continuous Atlantic cultural area from the Megalithic expansion c. 3500 BCE to the Celtic invasions c. 700 BCE. This area goes from SW Iberia to the British islands and along all the Atlantic strip of Europe, first up to Scandinavia and then (after IE takeover in North Europe) to Belgium only.
It also has some Mediterranean extensions specially in SE France and also southern Iberia, the Pyrenean slopes... and, since. c. 2400 BCE into parts of Italy and North Africa, as mentioned. It was also important before the IE takeover in the South German area (incl. Switzerland, Austria), as well as in the NW German one (incl. Netherlands).
"It is strange that pago has a voiceless initial".
Indeed. But bago, bagu would be easily confused with conditional verbal expressions like bagara, bagaude, bagenu, bagoaz... So maybe that's the reason: anything starting with ba- in Basque is either conditional or emphatic and is a most used particle, almost in every other sentence.
"Apru is obviously from Greek".
It is related to Aphrodite, no doubt, but it is an Etruscan word in any case and it is from Etruscan that it arrived in Latin. As for Aphrodite being Greek, there are many opinions who say otherwise...
Remember that Aphrodite was the goddess protector of Troy (and probably the original Pallas), per the Iliad. And Troy (much older than anything IE in the region) may well have been non-IE even up to its very destruction by the Greek pirates.
Lemnos is just in front of Troy.
"It's clearly attested everywhere.
ReplyDeleteIncluding in Celtic. I don't understand why you keep denying this basic fact".
Because YOU have not proven it. It's YOU who is making the claim, so please YOU provide some evidence. Thanks.
"It cannot be a cognate as the word hartz = hittite hartak shows that argi should have initial h if it were a cognate as in Hittite harkis
Obviously it's a rather recent lw into Basque, less old than hartz".
I have not reached so far in my research yet and maybe never will I.
Anyhow I must here raise the issue of why all words have to follow a single sound-change path. Languages and language "clouds" are too chaotic for us to expect such a strict pathways to apply to all words, even if at some space-times, there were indeed some massive sound-shifts in regular forms.
PIE could not make loanwords into Basque. It's geographically (and archaeologically) impossible. Only WIE (or maybe Greek) can.
The opposite is also true: Basque or Vasconic could not lend words to PIE (though it could and surely did to WIE or WIE sub-branches, such as Celtic or Italic or even Germanic).
So when we have PIE-Basque connections (and we do), specially those which are not seen in WIE, we have something quite strange. But there are many of these, what implies some sort or more ancient (when? where?) phylogenetic or strong sprachbund connection between the two families.
"Umbrian duir "two""
Is Umbrian even attested at all?
"It's obvious Latin bi comes from *dwi which exists it's a PIE-stage variant".
I say no: that is wrong! It's just fencing off the obvious Basque influence.
But anyhow, I am not going to discuss this further. I just think that there is too clear Vasconic influence in Italy (and Central Europe, the likely homeland of proto-Italic) to justify at least considering a Vasconic origin for this particle.
"Yes but then if the ancestor of Basque spread over Western Europe 10 ky ago or 40 ky ago then it split into so many dialectal variants that this explains that there were possibly more than 15 languages spoken in Spain and just as many languages spoken in Italy in the Antiquity. All of them very much different".
That's correct but up to a point because, if there is no expansion, linguistic evolution slows down a lot.
Anyhow the latest pre-Neolithic cultural re-homogenization of West/Central Europe happened not with Magdalenian but with a derivative (Tardenoisian, geometric microlithism) c. 6500 BCE, less than 2000 years before the arrival of Cardium Pottery Neolithic.
"This tends to make the genetic relationship of Basque and Iberian, nearly as old as that of any of them with PIE".
Not my opinion. IE radiation is of c. 3500 BCE and Ibero-Basque relation is surely of c. 6500 to 4500 BCE, depending on whether it is Paleo- or Neolithic in origin.
The Vasconic-PIE connection should be much much older. I am inclined to think of Gravettian age, c. 28 Ka ago. (26,000 BCE very roughly): that's a much more distant connection in fact.
If the connection is instead Neolithic, then it would be as you say but then connection should be much much more obvious, as happens with Afroasiatic subfamilies.
"How do you explain the t of tiber?"
ReplyDeleteI do not have an explanation (an article, preffix, pronunciation variant as in ur/dur?). But the rest is curiously identical.
***
It's troublesome to talk about prefixes with a language like Basque.
***
However 'iber' is the Vasconic word that more clearly flows into the Balcans: Ibar river (Kosovo) and Hebros (Maritza) river (Thrace).
***
All that is very weak, I'm sorry.
It does not prove anything.
A.
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"And Spain as well".
SW Europe (larger than modern Spain) shows much less external influences than Italy in all late Prehistory. Also it shows much stronger civilization centers and is essentially in connection with other areas of Atlantic Europe, at least until the arrival of IEs to Central/North Europe, when the "area of interests" slides to the West Mediterranean and Dolmenic Megalithism moves into Italy and North Africa as well.
There is a continuous Atlantic cultural area from the Megalithic expansion c. 3500 BCE to the Celtic invasions c. 700 BCE. This area goes from SW Iberia to the British islands and along all the Atlantic strip of Europe, first up to Scandinavia and then (after IE takeover in North Europe) to Belgium only.
***
Yes but this cultural extension does not mean that there was at the same time a linguistic unity.
A.
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It also has some Mediterranean extensions specially in SE France and also southern Iberia, the Pyrenean slopes... and, since. c. 2400 BCE into parts of Italy and North Africa, as mentioned. It was also important before the IE takeover in the South German area (incl. Switzerland, Austria), as well as in the NW German one (incl. Netherlands).
A:
"Apru is obviously from Greek".
M:
It is related to Aphrodite, no doubt, but it is an Etruscan word in any case and it is from Etruscan that it arrived in Latin. As for Aphrodite being Greek, there are many opinions who say otherwise...
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Well everybody has the right to disagree but the influence of Greek mythology and culture in general upon Etruscan is obvious and strong.
A.
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Remember that Aphrodite was the goddess protector of Troy (and probably the original Pallas), per the Iliad. And Troy (much older than anything IE in the region) may well have been non-IE even up to its very destruction by the Greek pirates.
***
Then this is all the more reason not to make it Etruscan.
A.
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Lemnos is just in front of Troy.
***
yes so what.
Lemnian came from Italy.
A.
"There's no reason to make Etruscan come from Anatolian"...
ReplyDeleteFrom the Aegean is not from "Anatolian" (IE). I do not think Etruscan is IE but it can be Pelasgic for example.
***
that kind of 19th century theory is not longer very credible.
A.
***
"Etruscan is related with two other languages spoken in the Alps".
One only and is one of those cases of conjectural speculation rather than anything solid, like when people claim that Ligurian or Cantabrian were "Celtic" without any evidence whatsoever.
"Lemnian is clearly from Italy and not a kind of remnant".
I disagree and specially because of two reasons:
1. There is genetic evidence linking ancient Etruscan aristocrats to the Aegean (and to much lesser extent modern Tuscans too).
2. Etruscan art shows themselves in clothing and looks very much Eteocretans. I'm not sure if they are linguistically related to Minoans but at least they are culturally.
***
Anyway,
Lemnian displays the late sytem of patronyms with three terms of Italy and Latin, so Lemnian doubtless came from Italy after the 2nd century BCE.
A.
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IMO they reached Italy in the context of the Bronze Age Mediterranean flows that began with the Mycenaean contacts with Iberia (surely on the footsteps of pre-IE Cretan/Cypriot precursors) and culminated in the 13th-11th century crisis (Urnfield, Sea Peoples, Hittite, Troy, Ugarit collapse, Sardinian nuraghe and probably other stuff I'm missing right now).
The Ancients had legends that placed them as emigrants from "Lydia" (however that must be a reference to the region not Lydians who spoke a Luwian, IE, dialect in historical times).
***
The Ancients also said that Etruscans very autochthonous...
A.
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"Where Retic and Etrucan relatives were spoken"...
I dispute this idea of Raethic having anything to do with Etruscan: there's no real evidence I know of. It's a weird speculation and nothing else.
Per Wikipedia: "Its linguistic categorization is not clearly established, and it presents a confusing mixture of what appear to be Etruscan, Indo-European, and uncertain other elements", probably Vasconic.
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Specialists of Etruscan consider Rhaetic to be doubtless related to Etruscan.
Wikipedia may say otherwise but it changes nothing to what specialists state.
A.
A:
ReplyDelete"It's clearly attested everywhere.
Including in Celtic. I don't understand why you keep denying this basic fact".
M:
Because YOU have not proven it. It's YOU who is making the claim, so please YOU provide some evidence. Thanks.
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Gaulish Argantos for example.
I think you should make some linguistic research on your own as well. For example a good source of information is here:
starling.ru
A.
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A:
"It cannot be a cognate as the word hartz = hittite hartak shows that argi should have initial h if it were a cognate as in Hittite harkis
Obviously it's a rather recent lw into Basque, less old than hartz".
M:
I have not reached so far in my research yet and maybe never will I.
Anyhow I must here raise the issue of why all words have to follow a single sound-change path. Languages and language "clouds" are too chaotic for us to expect such a strict pathways to apply to all words, even if at some space-times, there were indeed some massive sound-shifts in regular forms.
***
yes that's true to some extent but if we do not apply strict principles then conclusions are worthless.
A.
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PIE could not make loanwords into Basque. It's geographically (and archaeologically) impossible. Only WIE (or maybe Greek) can.
***
hartz can be from an archaic form of W IE indeed, more archaic than Celtic.
A.
***
M:
The opposite is also true: Basque or Vasconic could not lend words to PIE (though it could and surely did to WIE or WIE sub-branches, such as Celtic or Italic or even Germanic).
So when we have PIE-Basque connections (and we do), specially those which are not seen in WIE, we have something quite strange. But there are many of these, what implies some sort or more ancient (when? where?) phylogenetic or strong sprachbund connection between the two families.
A:
"Umbrian duir "two""
M:
Is Umbrian even attested at all?
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yes.
A.
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A:
"It's obvious Latin bi comes from *dwi which exists it's a PIE-stage variant".
I say no: that is wrong! It's just fencing off the obvious Basque influence.
***
There's nothing obvious.
Old Latin is dui-s
so I said before, we don't need Basque to explain dui > bi
A.
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But anyhow, I am not going to discuss this further. I just think that there is too clear Vasconic influence in Italy (and Central Europe,
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I'm sorry but I see no such thing.
This is not all proven in any way.
A.
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Not my opinion. IE radiation is of c. 3500 BCE
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This is unbelievably too late.
A.
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and Ibero-Basque relation is surely of c. 6500 to 4500 BCE, depending on whether it is Paleo- or Neolithic in origin.
The Vasconic-PIE connection should be much much older. I am inclined to think of Gravettian age, c. 28 Ka ago. (26,000 BCE very roughly): that's a much more distant connection in fact.
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yes certainly
A.
"All that is very weak, I'm sorry"...
ReplyDeleteTo me finding so many rivers with so similar names is anything but "weak". But whatever rocks your boat...
"Yes but this cultural extension does not mean that there was at the same time a linguistic unity".
Maybe not or maybe yes. The matter is open but the cultural area makes linguistic area at least possible, plausible and even likely.
"... the influence of Greek mythology and culture in general upon Etruscan is obvious and strong".
Maybe but Aphrodite is surely pre-Greek: Pelasgic or West Asian pre-IE. She is clearly the same as Phoenician Astarte only that in IE mythology she is relegated to a less important role.
Anyhow it is too simplistic to say "Greek mythology" without considering what is behind, underneath Greek mythology, and what was spoken in Greece before IEs arrived c. 2000-1800 BCE.
My thesis is that Etruscans are "Pelasgic" in origin and some of the Etruscan-Greek connections are Pelasgic substrate in Greek, which is very strong.
However we do not know how homogeneous were "Pelasgians", so it's difficult to go fine into the details.
"Then this is all the more reason not to make it Etruscan".
Why? Non-IE = Etruscan possibly. Etruscan is not IE.
"Lemnian came from Italy".
No. You have nothing to support that. And we do have the genetics:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1181945/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070616191637.htm
Google search
Mwahahaha! ;)
"that kind of 19th century theory is not longer very credible"
LOL, not worth even discussing.
"Lemnian displays the late sytem of patronyms with three terms of Italy and Latin, so Lemnian doubtless came from Italy after the 2nd century BCE".
That makes no sense whatsoever because Classical Greeks would have documented that. Surely Romans incorporated that patronymic system from Etruscans, who dominated Italy for many many centuries.
"Specialists of Etruscan consider Rhaetic to be doubtless related to Etruscan".
Other specialists think otherwise.
Remember that once upon a time Etruscan was very influential in all Italy (and actually Roman hegemony is in many aspects heir to that Etruscan hegemony). There is nothing strange in Etruscan influencing Italian or languages, what is strange is not being influence by Etruscan. Why is Latin not much influenced by Etruscan? That's most
strange!
"All that is very weak, I'm sorry"...
ReplyDeleteM:
To me finding so many rivers with so similar names is anything but "weak". But whatever rocks your boat...
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So far this is only one: Ibar.
in addition i'like to know what the usual explanations for that name are.
It will take more than one chance coincidence to rock my boat indeed.
A.
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"Yes but this cultural extension does not mean that there was at the same time a linguistic unity".
M:
Maybe not or maybe yes. The matter is open but the cultural area makes linguistic area at least possible, plausible and even likely.
***
This area is too large to have only one language, and even too large for one language family
A.
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"... the influence of Greek mythology and culture in general upon Etruscan is obvious and strong".
M:
Maybe but Aphrodite is surely pre-Greek: Pelasgic or West Asian pre-IE.
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Why? the name is good Greek.
A.
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She is clearly the same as Phoenician Astarte only that in IE mythology she is relegated to a less important role.
Anyhow it is too simplistic to say "Greek mythology" without considering what is behind, underneath Greek mythology, and what was spoken in Greece before IEs arrived c. 2000-1800 BCE.
My thesis is that Etruscans are "Pelasgic" in origin and some of the Etruscan-Greek connections are Pelasgic substrate in Greek, which is very strong.
***
Then you'll have to prove that.
I cannot see a single word of Greek that looks like a word of Etruscan.
A.
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However we do not know how homogeneous were "Pelasgians", so it's difficult to go fine into the details.
"Then this is all the more reason not to make it Etruscan".
Why? Non-IE = Etruscan possibly. Etruscan is not IE.
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Yes it's very much un-IE indeed, which is a good reason not to put it in Anatolia or Aegea in the vicinity of PIE homeland.
A.
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"Lemnian came from Italy".
No. You have nothing to support that.
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Lemnian has examples of patronyms with three terms, like Italy's people after the 2nd Century BC.
A.
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M:
And we do have the genetics:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1181945/
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Linguistics is clear: Lemnian came from Italy not earlier than the 2nd century BC.
A.
Octavià:
ReplyDeleteBeing an amateur you should be less arrogant and willing to learn from more knowledgeable people. Please don't this as an offence but a friendly advice.
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Arnaud:
Ridiculous.
You are also an amateur, and what is more an incompetent and nonsensical one.
You'd better apply that to yourself!!!
Maybe but Aphrodite is surely pre-Greek: Pelasgic or West Asian pre-IE. She is clearly the same as Phoenician Astarte only that in IE mythology she is relegated to a less important role.
ReplyDeleteGreek Aphroditē has nothing to do with Pelasgian, because it's actually related to aphrós 'foam', as this goddess was believed to have originated from sea foam. This in turn comes from IE *ºnbhro-/*ºnbrhi- 'rain'.
It is strange that pago has a voiceless initial.
ReplyDeleteThis is so because alongside ancient Basque, there were also spoken a related variety which I call "Pyrenaic") at least until 1,000 BC or so. Pyrenaic was essentialy a late dialect of Iberian whose lexical remnants were absorbed by Basque and the neighbouring Romance languages.
Unlike Basque (which had already undergone Martinet's Law), in Pyrenaic it was possible to have an initial voiceless stop.
So work on that, which is the factual data. Gaelic looks like English iron, which is said to be from proto-Germanic *īsarna, which in turn derivates from proto-Celtic *eisarno (makes full archaeological sense that Germanic "iron" derives from Celtic).
ReplyDeleteThis is also said to be the root of Brythonic hearn and similar ones.
In turn these are said to derive from PIE *ésh₂r̥ 'blood'. But this may be just a stupid speculation, because it is much more logical that the word was imported from wherever iron tech arrived from, namely the Balcans and ultimately Anatolia (all of IE language by then, AFAIK).
This IE etymology is correct: Celtic *īsarno- 'iron' is derived from IE *H1e-sH2ºr- 'blood'.
This word is actually made from a prefix *H1e-, a root *sH2- and a suffix -ºr- (this can be clearly seen in the Kartvelian cognate *zisx-L-, with a reduplicated root).
Leaving out the prefix, i.e. *sarno- you've got Spanish sarna 'scabies', sarro 'tartar' and Basque sarra 'iron tartar' (with assimilation rn > rr).
"So far this is only one: Ibar".
ReplyDeleteI count four: Iberus/Ebro, Tiber, Ibar and Hebros. All related to Basque ibar (river bank) and its cognates ibai (river), ibon (creek) and probably ibili (to walk).
"This area is too large to have only one language, and even too large for one language family"...
This area is not larger than Na-Dene, Uto-Aztecan, Soiuan-Catabwan or Algic in pre-contact North America, not to mention Amerindian if you think Greensberg was correct after (what I think is the case).
What about Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan families of Africa, even before Bantu exapnsion?
What about Austronesian or even its main sub-branch Malayo-Polynesian?
There are many examples of pre-Neolithic and Neolithic families with much greater extensions. Yes or yes?
"Why? the name is good Greek".
Is it? From surf? I think that's an a posteriori story.
Aphrodite does not even belong to the Olympian generation, she is the daughter of the mutilation of Ouranos, hence a Titan by age. All the mythology around her clearly indicates a pre-IE origin of some sort.
"Then you'll have to prove that.
I cannot see a single word of Greek that looks like a word of Etruscan".
I'm not going to work this out. Pelasgic may include several language families.
Anyhow you cannot see either any word of Latin that looks Etruscan... so it cannot be Italian either, right?
"Yes it's very much un-IE indeed, which is a good reason not to put it in Anatolia or Aegea in the vicinity of PIE homeland".
The PIE homeland is much further to the NE, in the Samara Valley!
That's unless you espouse Renfrew's model, what is easy to debunk.
"Linguistics is clear".
Linguistics alone is never clear! And the only linguistic evidence you can muster is "Lemnian has examples of patronyms with three terms" and I have already told you this is surely Etruscan influence onto Romans and not the other way around.
"Greek Aphroditē has nothing to do with Pelasgian, because it's actually related to aphrós 'foam', as this goddess was believed to have originated from sea foam".
ReplyDeleteI have already read that but I do not believe it. I rather think this an explanation after the name and not the true origin of the name which must be Eteocypriot (as she was also called Kypria for a reason and is most directly associated with this island as well as other places in West Asia, like Troy).
"This is so because alongside ancient Basque, there were also spoken a related variety which I call "Pyrenaic") at least until 1,000 BC or so. Pyrenaic was essentialy a late dialect of Iberian whose lexical remnants were absorbed by Basque and the neighbouring Romance languages.
Unlike Basque (which had already undergone Martinet's Law), in Pyrenaic it was possible to have an initial voiceless stop".
This sounds interesting but I feel unable to judge.
I'd rather talk in less precise terms and speak of dialectal continuum with many variants, some of which stuck and others which did not - in a chaotic (and not rigid) way.
"This IE etymology is correct: Celtic *īsarno- 'iron' is derived from IE *H1e-sH2ºr- 'blood'".
The only logic to have that "blood" origin would be via the ochre burial rituals which were continued in Thrace (Ezero culture) for some time, as ochre may have represented blood and may have been obtained from iron minerals.
What's the Hittite word for iron? After all it was Hittites who first forged steel and they must be at the origin of this phonetic connection. Alternatively I'd look into Thraco-Phrygian (Albanian?)
A quick search on "Hittite iron word" yields that:
ReplyDeleteHittite: 'hapalki'
Hebrew: 'barzel' - showed up with the text "apparently borrowed from Hittite".
It offers a counterpoint anyhow, specially interesting because like Basque burdin it also begins with B (iron tech language may have spread via Phoenicians in this area to some extent).
Barzel > burdin is plausible (not sure if real however) and I believe I have read about this somewhere else before.
I said before that the word iron should have come via Celts but maybe not. For sure we have the "Iron Age Urnfields" (Hallstatt-related) since c. 750 BCE (at the very end of Iberian Urnfields as such) but we also have Phoenicians founding Gadir in the opposite corner of the Mediterranean c. 1100 BCE per their own chronology (though archaeology can only confirm up to 9th century BCE). Phoenicians are also an Iron Age people since their very beginnings.
Just for the record.
PS - On "apros": surf. All those words for sea and related stuff are not even genuine Greek (IE) but pre-IE "Pelasgic" by all accounts. Greek as we know is a very creolized IE with lots of pre-IE words intruding in its vocabulary, maybe more than any other IE language.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete"BTW, Arnaud's point of view is PIE-centered, that is, he devises an internal explanation for (almost) any IE word, thus leaving no rooms for external loanwords.
ReplyDeleteNotice also that IE didn't had a common word for 'iron', because iron metalurgy was unknown to PIE speakers".
Yes, I agree with you in both these statements. Yet the first known steel metallurgy is IE (not PIE): Hittite. And they are the ones inaugurating the Iron Age worldwide (AFAIK).
"Where's the evidence?" [for Aphrodite being of Cypriot or otherwise West Asian origin]
All what I have read brings us there. Aphrodite is certainly not a generic IE goddess and Greek mythology is full of pre-IE elements, most likely from the Aegean region. In general I think all non-Olympian to be non-IE and therefore pre-Greek or para-Greek (i.e. from neighboring cultures). This is a very widespread approach among historians, I'm not making up anything.
Further references: Wikipedia - Aphrodite. Sure Wikipedia can be improved often but can you improve it in this particular case?
As concession to IE mythology there's a mention to affinities with Eos (Dawn) but that's about it (and anyhow Eos was a different goddess).
PS - On "apros": surf.
ReplyDeleteActually, it's aphrós, with φ [ph].
All those words for sea and related stuff are not even genuine Greek (IE) but pre-IE "Pelasgic" by all accounts.
Once again: what's the evidence that aphrós isn't a genuine Greek word? It has a perfectly valid IE etymology.
"This IE etymology is correct: Celtic *īsarno- 'iron' is derived from IE *H1e-sH2ºr- 'blood'".
ReplyDeleteThe only logic to have that "blood" origin would be via the ochre burial rituals which were continued in Thrace (Ezero culture) for some time, as ochre may have represented blood and may have been obtained from iron minerals.
Don't forget the Spanish and Basque derivates.
Arnaud:
Actually burdin can be compared with Latin ferrum.
Root *bher-
I suppose Arnaud thinks Italic *fers-o- 'iron' and Germanic *bras- 'brass' comes from an "extension" of an IE root *bher-. The only obvious candidate is *bherHg'- 'to shine, bright', reflected as Celtic *berxto- 'bright, beautiful'. I suppose this root is connect to Sumerian barz-il '(meteoric) iron'.
burdin actually looks Celtic.
< *bhor-dinos ?
Unfortunately this word isn't attested in Celtic.
BTW, Arnaud's point of view is PIE-centered, that is, he devises an internal explanation for (almost) any IE word, thus leaving no rooms for external loanwords.
Notice also that IE didn't had a common word for 'iron', because iron metalurgy was unknown to PIE speakers.
Octavià:
ReplyDeleteBeing an amateur you should be less arrogant and willing to learn from more knowledgeable people. Please don't this as an offence but a friendly advice.
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Arnaud:
Ridiculous.
You are also an amateur, and what is more an incompetent and nonsensical one.
O:
You'd better apply that to yourself!!!
***
No
people think my papers and ideas are worth publishing in regular and reputable Journals.
I achieve that.
You do not.
Period.
A/
"It has a perfectly valid IE etymology".
ReplyDeleteWhich one? I just do not think PIEs had any words for sea or anything related like waves, surf, dolphins, whales, seagulls... They should not have words for beeches either...
So feel free to provide evidence for that etymology. Maybe they had used a lot the word "surf" at the banks of the Volga... who knows?
And please guys, try to avoid unnecessary personalized riff-raffs, ok?
ReplyDeleteKeep the debates, which are interesting, to the point: not discussing the person but the opinions, ok?
M:
ReplyDeleteA quick search on "Hittite iron word" yields that:
Hittite: 'hapalki'
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This word is in fact Hurrian: it should be read habalgi, which also exists in Hatti.
A.
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Hebrew: 'barzel' - showed up with the text "apparently borrowed from Hittite".
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Very strange claim.
Apparently the root BAR exists in Sumerian AN-BAR = Star-Iron.
Note that Akkadian also has parzilu "iron" and abaru "tin, lead".
This root bar-z- is obviously the origin of ferrum and brass.
It can mean "to burn".
A.
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M:
It offers a counterpoint anyhow, specially interesting because like Basque burdin it also begins with B (iron tech language may have spread via Phoenicians in this area to some extent).
Barzel > burdin is plausible (not sure if real however) and I believe I have read about this somewhere else before.
I said before that the word iron should have come via Celts but maybe not. For sure we have the "Iron Age Urnfields" (Hallstatt-related) since c. 750 BCE (at the very end of Iberian Urnfields as such) but we also have Phoenicians founding Gadir in the opposite corner of the Mediterranean c. 1100 BCE per their own chronology (though archaeology can only confirm up to 9th century BCE). Phoenicians are also an Iron Age people since their very beginnings.
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it can also be a direct lw thru a route (thru Iberian?) in Spain.
A.
M:
ReplyDelete"This IE etymology is correct: Celtic *īsarno- 'iron' is derived from IE *H1e-sH2ºr- 'blood'".
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That cannot work.
*i:sarno seems to be a derivative of H2eios "copper", hence H2is-arno-
A.
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Arnaud:
Actually burdin can be compared with Latin ferrum.
Root *bher-
O:
I suppose he refers to IE *bher- 'brown' as the origin of Italic *fers-o- 'iron' and Germanic *bras- 'brass'. But this looks like a Wanderwort remotedly related to Sumerian barzil 'meteoric iron'.
***
I was just trying to understand what the prototype underlying Burdin and Ferrum can be, I had not thought of Brass by the way.
A.
***
burdin actually looks Celtic.
< *bhor-dinos ?
Unfortunately this word isn't attested in Celtic.
BTW, Arnaud's point of view is PIE-centered, that is, he devises an internal explanation for (almost) any IE word, thus leaving no rooms for external loanwords.
***
Could you just stop your childish accusations?
My PoV is not especially PIE-centered. Sumerian is a very good candidate to explain these words.
A.
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O:
Notice also that IE didn't had a common word for 'iron', because iron metalurgy was unknown to PIE speakers.
***
Not so clear, see above.
A.
M:
ReplyDeleteI just do not think PIEs had any words for sea or anything related like waves, surf, dolphins, whales, seagulls... They should not have words for beeches either...
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I really do not understand that kind of PoV.
Why should they not have words for these realia?
I agree they did not have a word for elephant or camel.
"It has a perfectly valid IE etymology".
ReplyDeleteWhich one?
AS I said earlier, Greek aphrós 'foam' comes from IE *ºnbh-ro-/*ºnbhr-i- 'rain', a derivate of *nebh- 'cloud, mist'. There's nothing mysterious here. :-)
Maju:
ReplyDelete"This IE etymology is correct: Celtic *īsarno- 'iron' is derived from IE *H1e-sH2ºr- 'blood'".
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Arnaud:
That cannot work.
*i:sarno seems to be a derivative of H2eios "copper", hence H2is-arno-
***
This is highly unlikely, if not absurd.
Octavià:
I suppose he refers to IE *bher- 'brown' as the origin of Italic *fers-o- 'iron' and Germanic *bras- 'brass'. But this looks like a Wanderwort remotedly related to Sumerian barzil 'meteoric iron'.
***
Arnaud:
I was just trying to understand what the prototype underlying Burdin and Ferrum can be, I had not thought of Brass by the way.
http://newstar.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&basename=/data/ie/piet&text_number=2697&root=config
Could you just stop your childish accusations?
You own me an apology for calling me "incompetent".
My PoV is not especially PIE-centered. Sumerian is a very good candidate to explain these words.
But Sumerian could be connected to PIE *bherHg´- 'to shine, bright'.
"I've also mentioned Koch's BOOK, not the tiny article in Paleohispanica"...
ReplyDeletePsah. After reading and criticizing the article I am not going to reward that guy with my "argyros" by buying his book.
But the book gives much more information than the article, some regarding the archaeological context.
If you really want to be somebody in historical linguistics you've got no other choice than reading books like this. I've myself spent many hours in the University libraty. The amount of relevant knowledge available online is only a tiny fraction of the whole.
There's also an alternative interpretation of Tartessian as a Celtic languages in this web: http://personal.telefonica.terra.es/web/irea/principes.html.
I just do not think PIEs had any words for sea or anything related like waves, surf, dolphins, whales, seagulls... They should not have words for beeches either... Maybe they had used a lot the word "surf" at the banks of the Volga... who knows?
ReplyDeleteDo you have a Greek dictionary? The word is aphrós 'foam'. Nothing to do with 'surf', 'sea' or the like.
"Being an amateur you should be less arrogant"...
I am not going to be less arrogant. I would not be myself if I would not be at least somewhat arrogant.
If you're incapable of quoting right a simple Greek word, what do you expect to do in historical linguistics?
I've shown my middle finger (and sometimes my full fist) to many many people in these 42 years. I am arrogant and you will have to put up with it (or you can also ignore me).
Perhaps this has something to do with being Basque, hasn't it? Here in Catalonia we're less violent (we don't have an ETA, for example).
Keep the debates, which are interesting, to the point: not discussing the person but the opinions, ok?
ReplyDeleteBTW, Arnaud's competence in Etruscan is zero. In despite of this, he sticks to the outdated Italy-autochthonous theory.
I've got many things to say on this subject but this isn't the adequate forum.