Zompist Bboard Again

I think there's a bit more going on than this in your model. I think you want to throw in absorption of dialects by other dialects, as befits a dialect continuum, with a result that may be interpreted as IE languages having significant IE substrates or superstrates. The answer would be affirmative,...

Indeed, the relationship between Basque and Iberian may be closer than what I speculated about. I have no problems with that. But are the names on the Ascoli Bronze, which are one of the few items where Basque was helpful, really Iberian ? Those soldiers were recruited somewhere near Zaragoza, whic...

I concur with you that (1) the conventional model of IE simplifies some things and (2) the individual branches of IE contain many loanwords from other languages. Many of Pokorny's etymologies have various problems and are probably spurious. Using Pokorny of all scholars as your reference is itself ...

The point is that if both are inherited from PIE, they must have had different initial laryngeals, since Latin aqua can only be from *h 2 ek(')weh 2 ; however, the limited distribution of the latter suggests that we are dealing with a substratum loanword here, and if this substratum was related to ...

The Vasco-Iberian hypothesis (i.e., the hypothesis that Basque and Iberian are related) is one of the least lunatic ideas about the origin of Basque (and R. L. Trask was unfair in tarring it with the same brush as the many crackpot ideas about Basque in his History of Basque - otherwise an excellen...

Welcome back, Octaviano! It was fun before you left ;) Let's hope your etymologies and your discussion behaviour have improved. But this etymology is indeed a good start. It is IMHO not all that implausible. I conjecture the word aqua to be a loanword from what I call "Aquan", a lost bran...

Basque may have borrowed many words from Iberian. The two languages were neighbours in the Ebro valley, and the Iberians were an urban civilization earlier than the Basques. The Basque word for 'city', hiri in Modern Basque and ili in Proto-Basque, is an obvious candidate, considering the many Iber...

Or perhaps vice-versa; *h₂ep- 'water' is attested on most of the periphery and in the most archaic branches (Hittite, Tocharian, Indo-Iranian) while *h₂ekʷ- is only attested in Europe (in Germanic, Latin and perhaps Lusitanic and Slavic.) I think it's consensus that they're probably variants of eac...