Paleo-European languages

[bradrn]

Um, Hittite is an IE language, so how can you have a non-IE word which is cognate to a Hittite word?

The same way an IE word can be cognate to a non-IE word, although in the case of 'apple' we're likely dealing with an ancient Wanderwort: Uralic *omena/*omVrV 'apple', Basque udari, udare 'pear' < *u-malV, Caucasian *mhalV-/*mhanV- 'warm'.

Yes, that is true. Stupid question, I suppose.

[Talskubilos]

Frankly, I don't know what he is up to! He never explains, and uses terms for hypothetical linguistic entities, such as "Paleo-IE", "Europic" etc., in his own senses which do not seem to agree with what these terms were originally coined for.

As bradn sagasciously pointed out, I'm a bit bad at explaining my own ideas.

He likes to appeal to Francisco Villar, a Spanish linguist who maintains some quite bizarre ideas about European linguistic prehistory (which I can't easily explain because I haven't really got them well, my Spanish being too limited to make sense of difficult linguistic writing).

He has studied OEH and other toponyms of Europe and SW Asia. Interestingly, he was a former disciple of the late (he died last July) Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, a Spanish Indo-Europeanist who also held non-std views about the dialectalization and the splitting of PIE.

Adrados.jpg (147.83 KiB) Viewed 11859 times

Basically, it seems, as if Villar (and apparently also Talskubilos) entertains the notion that the languages of Europe evolved in situ and frantically exchanged loanwords all the times, which created the illusion of the language family known to mainstream scholars as Indo-European.

Not exactly. Villar implictly recognizes there was an extensive language replacement in the Metal Ages, whose result is what we currently know as the IE family. But this doesn't preclude the existence of older strata (which he calls "Paleo-IE") in those languages. Here's a short quote from his last book Lenguas, genes y culturas en la prehistoria de Europa y Asia suroccidental (translation is mine):

Actually, the dialectal relationships of the Indo-European languages are enormously complex and suggest an Indo-Europeanization process equally complex, resulting from multiple events in several chronological stages, instead of a unique event such as Neolitization, despite attempts to complement it with the reduced secondary event of élite dominance for Indo-Iranian.

At any rate, there are indeed worse crackpots than Talskubilos. His ideas are not 100% nonsense, though I feel that his procedures yield far too many false positives to be of any value.

I think I'm much less "crackpot" than some years ago, as my work has improved over time by learning from my and other people's mistakes.

[Ares Land]

Aren’t most etymologies unprovable? Or was this one somehow more unprovable than most?

No, they aren't. For recent languages, we have textual evidence; for ancient ones we have regular correspondences pointing at a common ancestor. There are disputed or unclear etymologies of course, but the key thing is not to run wild with these.
One disputed point (among others) was the -combre- element in French décombres, encombrer. The thing is, the etymology of the French root is only tentative -- a Gaulish origin is most likely, but otherwise unattested. I believe Talskubilos linked that to Baltic... Possible, of course but unproveable. (The traditional explanation involving Celtic makes just as much sense, if not more so.)

But Talskubilos, as far as I can tell, is not denying that IE is a family. He’s proposing that most reconstructed PIE words are actually from substrates. If he were arguing against the existence of IE, I agree that this would be not even wrong.

I understand that, but the thing is: there's no proof for those substrates; they seem based on such faint resemblances that we can neither prove or disprove them. From a Popperian perspective, the theory is already disqualified.
And besides, it's not like that theory explains any unexplained phenomena about IE, or make useful predictions. It leads to far-fetched conclusions about IE (such as an inordinate number of loanwords), and it contradicts the accepted understanding of IE, which may be wrong, but at least offers some reasonable explanations.


I don't hope to change Talskubilos' mind, nor do I really want to. Everyone is free to hold whatever opinions they want.

My point is really, we should apply the same standards to linguistics (and all soft sciences, really) is we do with the rest of science.

If you have no proof for your theory, well, so much for your theory. If nothing can prove or disprove your theory, well, it's just useless and baseless speculation.

[WeepingElf]

Frankly, I don't know what he is up to! He never explains, and uses terms for hypothetical linguistic entities, such as "Paleo-IE", "Europic" etc., in his own senses which do not seem to agree with what these terms were originally coined for.

As bradn sagasciously pointed out, I'm a bit bad at explaining my own ideas.

Fair. And hence I (and probably some others here) have no good idea of them, and misunderstandings arise. I understand that for a non-native speaker, it can be difficult to say what one is trying to say in English (I am also a non-native speaker). One source of misunderstandings is that, as I said, you sometimes use terms for linguistic entities in non-standard ways, or you use terms that are not commonly in use but fail to explain what you mean by them.

He likes to appeal to Francisco Villar, a Spanish linguist who maintains some quite bizarre ideas about European linguistic prehistory (which I can't easily explain because I haven't really got them well, my Spanish being too limited to make sense of difficult linguistic writing).

He has studied OEH and other toponyms of Europe and SW Asia. Interestingly, he was a former disciple of the late (he died last July) Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, a Spanish Indo-Europeanist who also held non-std views about the dialectalization and the splitting of PIE.


Adrados.jpg

This chart is indeed quite in agreement with my own thinking, and is AFAIK also pretty much in accord with mainstream opinions (though terms as "Horda Septentrional" and "Horda Meridional" are idiosyncratic, but the groupings they refer to are IMHO real).

Basically, it seems, as if Villar (and apparently also Talskubilos) entertains the notion that the languages of Europe evolved in situ and frantically exchanged loanwords all the times, which created the illusion of the language family known to mainstream scholars as Indo-European.

Not exactly. Villar implictly recognizes there was an extensive language replacement in the Metal Ages, whose result is what we currently know as the IE family. But this doesn't preclude the existence of older strata (which he calls "Paleo-IE") in those languages. Here's a short quote from his last book Lenguas, genes y culturas en la prehistoria de Europa y Asia suroccidental (translation is mine):

Actually, the dialectal relationships of the Indo-European languages are enormously complex and suggest an Indo-Europeanization process equally complex, resulting from multiple events in several chronological stages, instead of a unique event such as Neolitization, despite attempts to complement it with the reduced secondary event of élite dominance for Indo-Iranian.

OK, then I misunderstood. Thank you for clearing this up. You are knocking at an open door with me when you say that at least some words commonly reconstructed for PIE are probably loanwords (e.g., this dictionary contains so many homonyms and synonyms that one can hardly believe that any language ever had all of them), and that the family tree model does not account of the facts very well. You know that I am more inclined towards the wave model. Also, I think that the pre-IE languages of Europe were not simply wiped out but contributed to the IE languages that replaced them.

At any rate, there are indeed worse crackpots than Talskubilos. His ideas are not 100% nonsense, though I feel that his procedures yield far too many false positives to be of any value.

I think I'm much less "crackpot" than some years ago, as my work has improved over time by learning from my and other people's mistakes.

Fair. You have become a good deal less cranky than you appeared to be when you first joined the ZBB. And I am not the person to rigorously defend the mainstream scholarly opinion, as that can be wrong. (Consider how much the standard reconstruction of PIE was changed by the acceptance of the laryngeal theory, for instance.) I maintain some non-mainstream opinions on European linguistic prehistory myself, so I should be careful. Also, as someone who doesn't have a relevant academic degree myself, I couldn't dismiss amateur work on such grounds even if I wanted to. But in fact, I believe that there is nonsense published by people with relevant academic credentials, and insightful and valuable work done by amateurs.

[Talskubilos]

I understand that, but the thing is: there's no proof for those substrates; they seem based on such faint resemblances that we can neither prove or disprove them. From a Popperian perspective, the theory is already disqualified.
And besides, it's not like that theory explains any unexplained phenomena about IE, or make useful predictions. It leads to far-fetched conclusions about IE (such as an inordinate number of loanwords), and it contradicts the accepted understanding of IE, which may be wrong, but at least offers some reasonable explanations.

I'd recommend you read what I wrote in an earlier post:

Most interestingly, there're instances of two words A and B (and more rarely, even a third word C) which would be linked through a long-range correspondence within the reconstructed PIE. Take for example (A) *prt-u- 'passage, way' (Latin portus, English ford) vs. (B) *bhrodh-o- 'ford' (Russian brodъ 'ford'). These can be derived respectively from the verbs *per- 'to pass through' (Latin portāre, English fare) and *bhredh- 'to wade, jump over' (Russian bredu, bresti 'to wade', Albanian breth 'to jump'). Given that e ~ o is the "canonical" Ablaut pattern and external comparanda (e.g. Berber *a-barid 'road') have got voiced stops, my bet is (B) belongs to the "real" PIE and (A) is a loanword from another language.

[Richard W]

Most interestingly, there're instances of two words A and B (and more rarely, even a third word C) which would be linked through a long-range correspondence within the reconstructed PIE. Take for example (A) *prt-u- 'passage, way' (Latin portus, English ford) vs. (B) *bhrodh-o- 'ford' (Russian brodъ 'ford'). These can be derived respectively from the verbs *per- 'to pass through' (Latin portāre, English fare) and *bhredh- 'to wade, jump over' (Russian bredu, bresti 'to wade', Albanian breth 'to jump'). Given that e ~ o is the "canonical" Ablaut pattern and external comparanda (e.g. Berber *a-barid 'road') have got voiced stops, my bet is (B) belongs to the "real" PIE and (A) is a loanword from another language.

There are just so many possibilities for distantly related words. Could (A) be related to PIE *pent- 'path; bridge; travel', possibly via a heteroclitic stem *pe-n/r? A variant of *bher 'to carry'? For related AA stems, Egyptian 𓉐 prj 'to come forth' made me think of Semitic triliterals starting p-r-, though of course the corresponding Egyptian forms have aleph, e.g. Egyptian 𓊪𓅮𓄿𓆃 pꜣj 'to fly'.

As to Berber *a-barid 'road', you've seen it traced to Arabic بريد at http://lughat.blogspot.com/2009/03/no-b ... rabic.html.

[Zju]

Basque udari, udare 'pear' < *u-malV

I'd really like to know how you got d from m.

Please don't tell me it's *u-malV > *ubale > udare or *u-malV > *unale > udare.

Hmmm.... Proto-Basque lacked **m, but the PoA shift is still unaccounted for.

[Talskubilos]

There are just so many possibilities for distantly related words. Could (A) be related to PIE *pent- 'path; bridge; travel', possibly via a heteroclitic stem *pe-n/r?

In case the correspondence with Altaic *béta/*péda 'sea, ford' is correct, the nasal would be an infix rather than a suffix.

A variant of *bher 'to carry'?

Phonetically it'd be possible: on the one hand, we'd got *per- ~ *bher-, and on the other, *pr-t- ~ *bhre-dh-/*bhro-dh-, with Schwebeablaut. But I'm afraid semantics doesn't fit very well.

As to Berber *a-barid 'road', you've seen it traced to Arabic بريد at http://lughat.blogspot.com/2009/03/no-b ... rabic.html.

The thing is Arabic barīd means 'postal service', which is quite different from 'road'. Its etymology is in turn disputed, as some authors are inclined towards an intra-Semitic one, while others propose a borrowing (through a Greek intermediate) from Latin veredus 'post horse', in turn a loanword from Gaulish *uo-redos.

[Talskubilos]

I'd really like to know how you got d from m. Please don't tell me it's *u-malV > *ubale > udare or *u-malV > *unale > udare.

What about *u-malV > *ubale > *uHare > udare, with d in place of r (tap rhotic) by dissimilation to the following rhotic (cfr. *ub- > ur, u(h)- 'water')? On the other hand, we've got adar 'horn' ~ abar 'branch' from an earlier *kam-ar.

Hmmm.... Proto-Basque lacked **m, but the PoA shift is still unaccounted for.

Excuse me, what does "PoA" mean?

[Zju]

Place of Articulation (and MoA is Manner of Articulation)

What about *u-malV > *ubale > *uHare > udare, with d in place of r (tap rhotic) by dissimilation to the following rhotic (cfr. *ub- > ur, u(h)- 'water')? On the other hand, we've got adar 'horn' ~ abar 'branch' from an earlier *kam-ar.

Meh... could be, but too far-fetched for my taste. From what I can check, the etymology of adar 'horn' is uncertain and among other things the word is sometimes compared with Old Irish adarc 'horn'. Where did you get *kam-ar from?

[Talskubilos]

From what I can check, the etymology of adar 'horn' is uncertain and among other things the word is sometimes compared with Old Irish adarc 'horn'.

That's right, but the Irish word would be rather linked to the Gaulish glosses adarca (Pliny), adárkê(s), adárkion, adárkos 'reed'.

Where did you get *kam-ar from?

Caucasian *kˀĕmhV 'arc; an arched, curved body part', which would be the source of IE *kamar-eh2 'vault'.

[Pabappa]

it's Basque .... an isolate .... what else can we do but admit that the etymology is unknown? A word like horn is basic vocabulary ... I'd expect it to be an atomic root going back at least to the stage of Old Basque, and that means we can't know more. trying to "explain" the etymology of an atomic root makes no sense if you have no external cognates to look for.

[Talskubilos]

As regarding Celtic *longā 'boat, ship', Latin lanx and Greek lékos, lakánē 'dish', Mallory & Adams (2006) reconstruct an IE protoform *lonk-o-/-eh2 'valley' > Lithuanian lankà 'valley, river-meadow', OCS lǫka 'gulf, valley, meadow, marsh', Tocharian B leṅke 'valley' and Late Latin (< Gaulish?) lanca 'depression'. The semantic shift 'vessel' > 'valley' is straightforward, as in e.g. Spanish nava 'flatland' < IE *neh2w- 'ship' (Latin nāvis).

[Richard W]

As to Berber *a-barid 'road', you've seen it traced to Arabic بريد at http://lughat.blogspot.com/2009/03/no-b ... rabic.html.

The thing is Arabic barīd means 'postal service', which is quite different from 'road'. Its etymology is in turn disputed, as some authors are inclined towards an intra-Semitic one, while others propose a borrowing (through a Greek intermediate) from Latin veredus 'post horse', in turn a loanword from Gaulish *uo-redos.

Wiktionary lists the meaning of the Arabic word as

1. post, mail
2. messenger, courier, express
3. a measure of distance, about 16 miles

Spanish/Portuguese vereda is listed as a descendant of veredus]; they have, inter alia, the meaning 'road, path'. The basic general meaning is 'something to do with the royal courier service'. The measure of distance appears to be the distance between the relay stations of the barid. The value given seems to be taken from an equation of the barid with 4 farsakhs.

[Talskubilos]

Spanish/Portuguese vereda is listed as a descendant of veredus]; they have, inter alia, the meaning 'road, path'.

This link is problematic, and Wiktionary says "perhaps", so I'm inclined to think we're dealing with two homonymous words, one meaning 'road, path', and the other 'courier (horse), mail'.

[Ares Land]

EDIT: nevermind, I'm just wasting time and energy by engaging a crackpot.

[Talskubilos]

EDIT: nevermind, I'm just wasting time and energy by engaging a crackpot.

[Richard W]

Spanish/Portuguese vereda is listed as a descendant of veredus]; they have, inter alia, the meaning 'road, path'.

This link is problematic, and Wiktionary says "perhaps", so I'm inclined to think we're dealing with two homonymous words, one meaning 'road, path', and the other 'courier (horse), mail'.

Or a complicated interplay of Latin, Arabic, Berber and African and Hispanic Romance! It appears that the barid, at least sometimes, had a responsibility for road maintenance, which increases the likelihood of sense transference.

[Talskubilos]

One can hardly talk about sound correspondence when there's a single pair of words present and no sounds match up (Caucasian *ttsˀăqˀV 'strength, power' ~ IE *seģh- 'to hold').

I'm sorry. The right correspondence would be IE *yēgʷ- 'power (of youth)' > Greek hḗbǟ (Doric hḗbā, Aeolic ā́bā) 'youthful prime, youth', Lithuanian jėgà 'power, strength', Lettish ję̃ga 'power, sense'. My thanks to Beekes!

[WeepingElf]

EDIT: nevermind, I'm just wasting time and energy by engaging a crackpot.

Yes.

There are some common mistakes that many people make when dealing with crackpots. One is to assume that crackpots are dumb, They aren't. In fact, they usually are smart people. Building and maintaining a crackpot theory is an intellectual exercise. Another mistake is to assume that crackpots are insincere, trying to sell people things they don't believe in themselves. Most crackpots are sincere, they really believe they have found out something. And they believe that the methods they use are appropriate. Erich von Däniken never said, "Hmm, I could make big bucks by writing books in which I claim that alien visitors helped the ancient civilizations". Nope. He believes that alien visitors helped the ancient civilizations; he believes he has found evidence in favour of that. Of course, he soon found out that his books sold well; but that was not his primary motivation to write them, I think. The third mistake is to assume that crackpots will readily abandon and correct their theories once they are presented the mainstream scholarly opinion. Most crackpots are highly emotionally attached to their ideas after all the effort the have spent on them, and won't let themselves be persuaded otherwise.

So how do you deal with such people? Well, it is quite simple: just ignore them. They thrive on other people's attention. You won't convince them they are wrong, no matter how often you tell them; if you do, they will start arguing, which is something they revel in and their pride dictates them. This is not always easy, I have to admit; most people feel a strong desire not to leave standing what they perceive to be fallacious.

Now, Talskubilos is not the worst crackpot, not even the worst linguistic crackpot, I have eve heard of, but I think that it is more than just the glazing that is cracked here