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From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Etruscans [was: Re: The Coming of the Greeks]
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Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 22:57:56 GMT
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In article <57a5j3$f2n@dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com>,
Stella Nemeth <S.NEMETH@IX.NETCOM.COM> wrote:

	[...]

>>	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.

>No comment.  I frankly glaze over when all of you start talking about
>vowels. ...

	That's how you do comparative linguistics.

	And at least you know your limitations, which cannot be said of a 
certain squidlike personage here.

	[no "Germans" in 200 BCE...]
>>	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:

>[snip, snip, snip]  Word lists make me glaze over even more than
>vowels do.  <g>

	How else does one do comparative linguistics?

>You haven't answered Steve's question.  Or responded to his
>statements.  Do you agree that there were no Germans prior to 200 BC?
>I, by the way, have no clue as to what the answer to that ought to be.
>If there were Germans, by whatever name you wish to give them, what
>languages were they speaking at that time and what evidence do we have
>for either the peoples or the language?

	That has to be extrapolated from the existing Germanic languages,
since the ancestral Germanic language has gone unrecorded. It's generally
agreed that the Jastorf culture (or at least artifact style) of northern
Germany and southern Denmark was that of the ancestral Germanic speakers. 
I'm sure that Mallory's _In Search of the Indo-Europeans_ can tell more.

>200 BC is well within historical times.  Even if the people in
>question didn't have writing, the peoples who did have writing might
>have described them and/or their languages.  

	It's well within historical times for the Mediterranean basin,
yes, but Greco-Roman authors had shown little interest in languages other
than theirs. 

>>	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.).

>I don't think Steve is claiming any such thing.  I think Steve is
>asking you the same questions I just asked you.  There are other
>languages out there that could be ancestral to the German languages,
>with lots of Latin thrown in for good measure.  Which ones do you
>suggest as said ancestors?

	Like what languages? Trying to figure out which ones will involve 
doing things that will make your eyes glaze over, I'm sure, but how else 
is one to do it?

>Steve tried to get past Greek and Latin in the Egyptian word threads.
>He seems to be trying to get past Greek and Latin in this thread too.
>Unless, of course, you are claiming that IE stops dead at Greek and
>that there is no evidence for anything before it and/or any other
>families beside the Greek one and the Latin one within IE.

	The reason I've been using mostly Latin and Greek for my cognates
-- not necessarily ancestors -- is that that's what my American Heritage
Dictionary most often lists, and it lists only the ones that have gotten
into modern English, whether by descent or by borrowing. It does have some
Celtic, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian ones, but I doubt if it has any Baltic or
Armenian ones, and I'm sure it has no Hittite ones. I could go further and
use Buck's Dictionary of Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European
Languages, but I got that book only recently (it's out in paperback, and
can be ordered from http://www.amazon.com). 

-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
My home page: http://www.webcom.com/petrich/home.html
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