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From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Etruscans [was: Re: The Coming of the Greeks]
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References: <54q9ou$85o_002@dialin.csus.edu> <petrichE16GGA.EpA@netcom.com> <575k9a$1c1@reaper.uunet.ca> <577ad3$oop@fridge-nf0.shore.net>
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 09:00:54 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.archaeology:56501 sci.lang:64880

In article <577ad3$oop@fridge-nf0.shore.net>,
Steve Whittet <whittet@shore.net> wrote:

>There was not a lot of overland traveling. Prior to the development
>of extensive networks of roads in urban areas most long distance
>travel was by river raft, barge or boat.

	Evidence?

>Prior to the domestication of animals people generally went no
>farther from home than they could walk.

	And if you continually walk in one direction, you will end up 
going very far...

>Languages prior to the developing pressures of a sedentary urban
>lifestyle appear to have had relatively small vocabularies. perhaps
>on the order of one or two thousand words.

	Evidence?

>Cattle and horses seem to come into India along with painted greyware.
>This may be coincidental. ...

	I disagree. These beasts are more easily transported by land
(where they transport themselves :-) than by water. Imagine trying to
carry a whole herd of cows or horses in some boats some times (1000 lb /
500 kg each). 

	However, this would seem to be consistent with Painted Grey Ware 
== Indo-Aryan keepers of cattle and horses.

>Are the Aryans and their hordes of horsemen a myth?

	Try putting a horse into a boat some time :-)

>>> This family has several derived features relative to Indo-European; 
>>> one of them is the vowels. Three of the original IE vowels, *e, *a,
>>> and *o, correspond well in the other IE langs, such as Latin and Greek;

>Why not Latin and Greek, which come much later, as derivatives of 
>Sanskrit? 

	Mr. Whittet, don't be a doodoohead. It _used_ to be thought that 
ancestral IE was very Sanskrit-like, but that notion was discredited in 
the 1870's or so. The idea here is that vowels corresponding to *e, *a, 
and *o correspond *very* well in most of the IE langs, but get reduced to 
a in Indo-Iranian.

>>> Germanic obscures the distinction between *a and
>>> *o -- but Indo-Iranian turns all three into a. However, there is a trace
>>> of this feature in some of the ka/cha and ga/ja alternations -- the first
>>> of the pair had a or o as the original vowel and the second one an e as
>>> the original vowel.

>There are no Germans prior to c 200 BC. Latin and Greek are a strong 
>influence on the Germanic languages, thus again, c 800 BC is your
>starting point.

	It doesn't matter what they called themselves. Latin and Greek 
were across some big mountains back then, and Germanic has some clear 
differences from L and G, notably Grimm's Law of the stop consonants; 
I'll compare English, Latin, and Greek, adding dashes to indicate more 
clearly how the word divides up:

English	Latin	Greek

that	is-tud	to
two	duo	duo
three	tre:s	treis
hund-red centum	he-katon
who	quis	tis
be	fu-	phu-
brother	frater	phrate:r
father	pater	pate:r
hound	canis	kuo:n
cow	bo:s	bous

	Mr. Whittet seems to be claiming that Germanic got its 
distinctions of vowels from Latin and Greek, but it must have got it in a 
way that did not affect the stop consonants, which look more alike in 
Latin and Greek than in Germanic (L,G t ~ E th, L,G p ~ E f, L,G k ~ E h, 
etc.).
-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
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