Are you proposing that IE European languages were spoken always in
Europe or what? I must say that I don't understand what you mean and
why do yoy stabilish an arbitrary line at 600 BCE, a date that doesn't
fit with any historical or proto-historical event except the
flourishing of Classical Greece and the foundation of Marseilles.
I find very arbitrary to classify the languages on mere geographical
grounds and I don't understand the purpose of it. While Western IE
languages do form a philological sub-family, including most existent
European languages, I see no reason to relate Latin with Basque or
Estonian, being these three examples of the three main "native"
families of Europe. This only using "native" according to your
arbitrary line of 600 BCE. It is dubious that IE or Finnish family
languages were present in Europe, at least in Central and Western
Europe, before a badly defined date that could well be 35000 BCE. There
was surely no relevant presence of IE languages in Western Europe
before c. 1300 BCE (Urnfields expansion). So why don't you place your
line in 6,000 BCE and consider "native European" languages only those
spoken in the Paleolithic?, I wonder. I would say it is a much more
satisfying concept in my opinion.
Better quit using the term "native" and start using "ancient" instead
(but placing the line in a better defined moment, such 1300/1100 BCE or
400/300 BCE). There were cultural transmission processes before the
Greeks and Romans, there were migrations, invasions, cultural genocides
and (a few) powerful states before.
Maju if you had read what i posted under: Archaeology, Anthropology & Linguistics Topic name with SLAV,you wouldnt be so sceptical.
Ulphila's "Gothic"
alphabet(26 letters ) (see characters also in
http://tribal.abv.bg).
Invented by Bishop Ulphila �(Ulfilas, or Wulfila - 4 c. AD) in Roman town Nikopolis ad Istrum, the present village Nikup in the central northern part
of Bulgaria (20 km north from the former capital Veliko Tarnovo). >>
Interesting��
research articles about�
Ulphila, Arians, �Goths� and �Geths� can be found in the very recent
book �Goti i Geti� (Editor A.
Tschilingirov, Publishers �Ziezi ex quo Vulgares�, Sofia 2005 (in
Bulgarian)). In particular the correct name Urphila is noted there instead
of� commonly used�� Ulphila (Ulfila) and Wulphila (Wulfila)..
�First texts
written with Ulphila �Gothic� alphabet: It is accepted that this is the Bible, translated
from Greek in the midle of 4 c. AD by the west gothic bishop Ulphila himself
(in the Nicopolis ad Istrum in central Moesia (present Bulgaria). This translated
Bible is considered as the first literary monument of the German culture. The
oldest available transcript of the translation known as Codex argenteus
was made around a 100 years later in Ravena [see
e.g. E. Staycheva, Literaturen forum, 12 (2002) 496 (electronic version:
estaycheva.htm
, in Bulgarian)] .
The alphabet pictures provided here reveal large similarity, including
coinciding letters, between Ulphila alphabet and the Cyrillic one. ��� Many respectful scholars, ancient and modern ones (in
particular Jordanes (6 c. AD) and G. Tzenoff and S. Lesnoy (20 c.) � see e.g.
the above cited new book �Goti i Geti� (�Goths and Geths� ) by A. Tschilingirov
and the extensive bibliography there in) identify� Goths� from the lower
Danube and Black see area with the Geths of the same territory, and not with
the German (Teuton) Goths (Gothones). In the light of this the arian (aryan) bishop
Ulphila (Urphila),� and his alphabet are
�Gethic�. In the middle ages narratives the terms �Geths� (Getas), �Goths�
(Gothos) or �Schyths' (Schitians) are frequently used for Thracs (Thracians), Slaves or
Bulgarians.� For example, St. Hieronimus
(4c., the translator of the Aethicus Cosmopgraphy, writes about �seven Getic
or Gothic tribes� which live in
the north, since Getas are called by the learned men� Gothos� (�Et certe Gothos omnes retro erudity, magis Getas �
appellare��� -- this citation is taken
from the G. Tzenoff book �The Huns�, Sofia, 2002 (first edition in 1940)), while
on his World map St. Hieronimus notes �Moesia this is (also) Bulgaria� (�Misia hec et
Vulgaria�. On the other hand it is commonly accepted that in the 4 c. AD
Gothos (in particular the gothic bishop Ulphila) lived in Moesia. (Note that in old narratives
Vulgaria = Bulgaria: the change B --> V comes from Greek, where sound B is missing,
the character B being pronounced as V).
When your heart is empty,your
mind is worth nothing.
anonimus
Understanding the history of minority groups in the world was a major topic of Randall L. Jones' lecture, Nov. 20.
Jones, a professor of Germanic and Slavic languages, spoke at an
international forum series hosted by the David M. Kennedy Center for
International Studies. His lecture focused on the Sorbs, a minority
group living in Germany.
"These are not people who migrated here centuries ago from another part
of Eastern Europe," said Jones. "Nor are they asylum seekers who have
recently fled their homeland for a better life. They have been where
they are now for approximately 1,500 years."
Ironically, the Sorbs arrived in Germany even before the German speakers did, he said.
"They are an interesting people who managed to maintain their
linguistics and cultural identity against major odds," Jones said. "It
is a fascinating culture which time seems to have forgotten."
Despite linguistic and cultural differences, the German government and
local German speakers are supportive of their Sorbian neighbors, he
said.
"In the case of Sorbian and Germany, one could say there is peaceful
co-existence," Jones said. "However, most people outside of Germany
have never heard of the Sorbs and can't imagine that the significant
sub-culture exists in one of the largest and most powerful nations in
Europe."
The Sorbs reside in an area of Germany know as Lusatia or Lausitz,
Jones said. The nation of Germany strives to honor the culture and
identity of the Sorbs in Lusatia by maintaining all public signs in
both languages, despite the fact that Sorbs speak both Sorbian and
German.
"Virtually all Sorbian speakers are bilingual: Sorbian and German,"
Jones said. "And yet this is simply a mark of the cultural identity to
help people understand this is a bilingual city."
Although he admitted he doesn't speak Sorbian, Jones said he is
interested in the minority group because it exists in Germany, and
German is his area of study.
"Because the Sorbian speakers are in Germany it is of interest to me
because I have done a lot of work recently with social linguistic
aspects of languages," Jones said.
http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/41121
When your heart is empty,your
mind is worth nothing.
anonimus
To Surbel: don't mix the Goths here, please. That they used a
semi-Greek alphabet doesn't mean that they weren't Germans. And after
all, it doesn't even matter for Amadeo's topic.
You are being very contradictory. You say you will talk not about
Indo-European languages but about European languages in a geographical
sense and then you exclude happily all non-IE languages. You could
argue that Finnish or Etruscan may be West Asian in origin (but, even
in that case, they arrived to Europe as soon as IE or maybe even
before) but you just can't exclude Basque in any case when talking
about European languages, as this is the only survivor that we can say
100% sure that was spoken in Europe (in its primitive form) in
Paleolithic times.
So why don't you change your discourse and start talking plainly about Western IE languages?
Also later, you start happily and contraditorily to compare with Asian
IE languages, what makes no sense unless you do work within the frame
of IE languages that you want to reject.
Anyow some abysmal errors:
the indigenous German or
Germanic language was a very limited language whose generic content was
augmented by other languages
This is a typical abusive pretension. We know that all languages are
very complete for their context. The theories pretending that some
languages are superior to others have long been discredited. True that
languages borrow neologisms from each other but that's all.
We have no
historical knowledge as to how Latin descends from Greek, but the fact
remains that Greek, Latin, and the Romance languages, have innumerable
cognates.
This has two explanations:
a) Simmilar Mediterranean subsratum (Mediterranean Neolithic culture
from Greece to Spain, pre-Hellenic strong Aegean influences in Italy
and Spain - and some in inverse direction)
b) Classical Greek influence
Anyhow the cognates are not enough to pretend that they are closely related.
Persia, for instance, developed
its indigenous language wih the "Levantine" substrate that was
preserved also in Europe. As it was never conquered by "Arab"
people, linguists say to this day that Pharsi is an
"Indo-European language."
But we know that ancient Iranians spoke a totally unrelated language: Elamite, wich has only been related to Dravidian.
We also know that Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages are closely related
(about as much as Germanic or Latin to Slavic) and that they (as a
whole) are related to the rest of IE languages, particularly those that
you arbitrarily call "European" (Western IE).
Finally, Iran was conquered by Arab peoples in the 7th century and
remained under Arab rule for several centuries after that. Exactly the
same that happened to Egypt or Syria or Iraq, none of which had been
before under Arab rule (though Syria and Iraq were Semitic-speaking
regions already but speaking different Semitic languages, most notably
Aramaic).
The Italian Di` and the Spanish Dias are cognate Romance words (from
Latin, part of Aegean) and
the English Day and German Tag are cognate Germanic words. So,
here we have cognates in two super-families
Not sure about Italian but Spanish for day is da (not das, which is days).
Most importantly: you use the term super-family to talk about
sub-sub-families: Germanic and Italic are cognates in all IE
classifications I have ever seen, as much as Baltic is cognate with
Slavic.
I think you should study better the IE theory before you can debunk it with some authority.
I have a thesis which is not fully proven yet: the ancient cognatesof
the European languages [NOT THE WHOLE OF THE INDIGENOUS EUROPEAN
LANGUAGES] are based on two pristine languages: Sumerian and
proto/archaic Greek
I can't deny that there may well be a SW Asian substratum that may have
influenced all or most Western-IE languages in some complex via
Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age influences mostly but put
forward some evidence or at least indications (sources, lists of
words... something!) befor you make such a claim, please.
As you are talking about IE languages, another possibility is that the
"Sumerian" influence could come via Central Asia/Caucasus in the
Neolithic period.
Archaic Greek itself was formed indigenously west of
Sumer (in the Levant-Anatolia area) and had linguistic exchanges with
Sumer.
Untrue. We actually know little about where proto-Greek was formed. The mst likely candidates are in the Chalcolithic Balcans.
Summer was virtually dead by that time. Though I can't exclude some remote Akkadian influx, it must have been very small.
Most of the populations that moved out of the Middle East went
either west or east.
Well... the fact is that genetics is proving each day more that there
were almost no population movements in the Neolithic or later. Except
for the northernmost regions, wich were relatively empty and probably
Greece itself and a few then virgin islands, Europe has kept basically
the population that it had at the end of the Paleolithic.
Also you are arbitrarily (and without any evidence so far) defending
the ulikely out-of-Anatolia theory, that clashes with the evidence that
Hatti (the main aboriginal language of Anatolia) wasn't IE (but
Caucasic) and much other archaelogical and linguistic evidence.
...
I suggest you to look at THIS LIST
of numerals for IE languages, a quite solid evidence of the connection
of IE languages and the difference between them and the rest.
I also suggest you to take a look (just for fun) to THE SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN, a place to post the weirdest pseudo-linguistic theories.
Finally I suggest you to look at this (pretty solid) tree of IE languages, so you get an idea of how they may be related:
This gloto-chronologic tree was created using a standard philological
list of 100 words (maybe 200 - not sure now) and neighbour joining the
results by the two standard systems (applied in genetics) of minimal
and maximal evolution, yielding the same results. (Sorry about the
names in Spanish, anyhow, it's easy to read, considering that most
scientific names are Latin-derived).
In the tree you can see that live IE is divided in two main branches:
Western and Eastern, with two minor longer branches for Armenian and
Albanian. Among Western IE, Greek is the first one to separate,
favoring that it was formed in the Balcans. Then Celtic, for which I
have no good explanation, and then the two main groups:Italo-Germanic
and Balto-Slavic.
Alternative trees I've seen follow the same general structuure, being
the main divergences about the place of the long minor branches. Some
place Albanian with Eastern IE, Greek and Armenian together in a
separate branch and Celtic within the Italo-Germanic group.
And don't tell me now that you are not talking about IE. You are. The
very moment you excluded non-IE European languages, you restricted
yourself to IE.
While you aren't able to demonstrate reasonably a non-IE frame you
can't discuss authoritatively the IE paradigm. For that you would have
to be able to group some IE with non-IE languages and exclude some
major IE languages from that improved frame. I don't think that neither
you can nor you are even interested in going through that stage.
You seem to have a particular aversion to the IE theory. You argue that
it is beacuse that implies that the language would have developed in
South Asia. I see a bit of racism in that reasoning but anyhow...
... No major theory on the origins of IE languages talk of South Asia
as its origin. A fact that seems to bother also natinonalist Indians
(Hindutva). In fact, the original theory was very Euro-centric,
claiming that IE was originated in Northern Europe (hence the absurd
claims of Hitler bout "Aryans"). Fortunately, it's been reasonably
proven so far that whichever the origin of IE it was not in Northern
Europe.
The mainstream theory (first stated by Marija Gimbutas) proposes that
PIE speakers lived somewhere in the steppes ranging from Ukraine to
Khazakstan. It is the "Kurgan tehory". I support this theory with some
corrections on Gimbutas initial assumptions, mostly that the core of
PIEs were in the Volga-Ural region and only later moved into the
Don-Dniepr area, from where they sprang into Europe.
There are some other theories, mostly the ones that state that PIE was
originally spoken by the core of Neolithic farmers spreading into
Europe from Anatolia (Renfrew's theory). Yet this one has many flaws:
from Hattis speaking a non-IE language to the fact that genetics show
now that no major ammount of SW Asian genetic material entered in
Europe with Neolithic difussion, so it's hard to see how a tiny
minority would have imposed their language on the majority without the
military domination that the "Kurganites" are supposed to have brought
with them.
In brief: your racist reasons to fear IE theory are (at least so far)
unfounded (which doesn't excuse the implicit racism anyhow). Most
likely IEs sprung from the Volga region with the following approximate
chronology applied for Europe (all dates BCE):
c. 3500 - Ukraine and nearby areas (separation of Western IE branch)
c. 3250 - Eastern Germany and Poland
c. 3100 - Wallachia (Rumania)
c. 3000 - Eastern Balcans (with great admixture)
c. 2600 - consolidation in Central Europe, expansion to the Panonnian and Western Balcanic region
c. 2400 - Scandinavia and Western Germany
c. 2000 - Greece and Anatolia
c. 1300 - some localized regions of France, England, Spain and Italy
c. 700 - further into Western Europe
c. 600 - they loss of NW Spain to Iberians
c. 300 - further Celtic expansion into the British Islands, Gaul, etc.
c. 50 - Roman Empire: Iberians start speaking IE too
On the Eastern branch, they seem to have migrated into their present
areas in the 1st milennium BCE. Albanian is still a mistery though if
you want my humble guess, I suspect they could be an avant-guard that
came with the misterious Black&Beige pottery invaders c. 5000 BCE
(Dimini-Vinca culture). Just a guess.
Maybe I misunderstood your reasoning but your sentence:
(...) Therefore, once upon a time there was a people [the Aryans or the
Indo-Europeans, somewhere in southern Asia] that spoke P-I-E.
... clearly points to your belief that IE originated in Southern Asia,
aka India and that was the reason of your usage of "European" over
widely accepted IE.
You use a very personal language and while some of your ideas my be
valid the way you put he forth is so confuse that nobody would probaly
accept them.
For instance you use "proto-Greek", what means the precursor of Greek
(the same that "proto-IE" means the precursor of IE languages). But now
you say that:
Proto-Greek
and Greek grew autonomously, but the content of proto-Greek which is
found in non-Aegean languages did not grow autonomously there.
... what seems to point to a different idea: that proto-Greek is not
the precursor of Greek but something totally diferent that, obviously
shouldn't have that name in logical consequence.
You should expose your ideas in a manner that fits the thoughts of the
rest of the world. If I call "rock" to what most people call "water",
nobody will understand me, that's pretty clear, isn't it?
...
So you think that Semitic languages grew out in Ethiopia. I'm
interested because I've always forun the origin of Semitic peoples a
mistery.
...
I still think that all or most languages are able to create "out of
nothing" any term by composition or another arbitrary method. Obviously
a culture that has never seen iron will have to either invent or import
a term for that but that doesn't mean that the language is poor. What
did they need te term "iron" before they saw the first iron object?
In fact foreign influence can be percieved as impoverishing, speciallye
when there are internal alternatives inside the native language (and
almost always they are) to replace the foreign terms. For example in
French it has become common to use "weekend" instead of the longer
native "fin de semaine", yet in Spanish this hasn't happened and the
native neologism "finde" (abbreviation of "fin de semana") is now
becoming very popular and soon will be in the dictionaries. What is
better then? To import words or to make up new ones our of the native
resources. I don't have a strong opinion about that but it seems more
genuine the second option. The existence of synonims is nothing that
says about the richess of a language except maybe for artistic purposes
- unless the synonims are not total synonims but different concepts of
simmilar nature like "roble" and "encina" in Spanish for different
types of oak.
In this sense, with civilization, you can gain new terms but you may
also lose many related with pre-urban activities. The language adapts
to the daily needs and what is not needed anymore is lost eventually.
It's presumptuous to think otherwise. How many terms for snow do we
have in most languages? One, maybe two or three. Inuits have dozens!
Maybe I misunderstood your reasoning but your sentence:
(...) Therefore, once upon a time there was a people [the Aryans or the
Indo-Europeans, somewhere in southern Asia] that spoke P-I-E.
... clearly points to your belief that IE originated in Southern Asia,
aka India and that was the reason of your usage of "European" over
widely accepted IE.
..................................
It's getting worse and worse... The idea that once upon there was a
people that spoke PIE is NOT my idea. It is a consequence of the
theorists of Indo-European languages WHICH I REJECT.
So, there is no point for me to further discuss false attributions.
-------------------------------------
Sorry: but you should start explaining why you do reject the widely
accepted IE theory. Without settling that first there's no possible
further discussion.
Aprioristically rejecting it is no argumentation, no logic, no proof. Just a wild caprice that you seem to have and caress.
And I REJECT that you call "European languages" to a group of languages
that doesn't include the only sure 100% native European linguistic
developement: Basque.
Apples, languages...... same thing.
Seeds, cognates........same thing.
Wrong! Absolutely wrong!
Cognates are not the seeds: Basque and English share many cognates like
"telephone" but that doesn't mean that they are related. Cognates
aren't seeds. You are trying to describe the seed (genetics) from the
mery appearence of some leaves, without considering that these leaves
may all be infected by the same virus, that produces the same sort of
marks.
You don't know how the seed of a tree was by studying the simple appearence of some arbitrarily chosen leaves.
And languages are not biological organisms anyhow. They can perfectly
incorporate easily many novelties, wether from other languages or from
local "random" innovation. Their "genetics" is more like that of the
virus: flexible, incorporating possibly many elements of the cells that
it infects.
To know the "seed", without the "magic" of genetic science, you must
first study the languages in depth. It happens that the IE language
family is the most studied on Earth and, except you, nobody else
questions that they are genetically related.
Now you start with "Nordids" and all that sordid stuff.
Listen: if you cared a little more about genetics and even if you cared
a little more about physical appearence you would know that there is no
Nordic group as such.
If we follow the throught work of Cavalli-Sforza on European genetics,
we see that there are 5 Principal Components (PCs) in the European
genetic pool. None of them fits with the geographic description of
"Nordic". This is very logical when you think about it as many
"racializators" had noticed that the complexion of the "Nordic type" is
close to that of Mediterraneans despite their rather pale skin.
Yet I have personally noticed (I'm also a free thinker but I've learned
to respect others' works as well, critically of course) that when you
fuse the Cavalli-Sforza genetic maps for the main PCs, you get a
gradation that can somehow fit the apparent perception of "racial"
gradation in a N-S axis. But it's not any simple bipolar gradation but
actually a mixture of several polar gradations. the apparently more
mixed area in this regard would be Britain and nearby regions.
In any case the genetics of Europeans (and for the case SW Asians) are
so simmilar to each other that it's trivial to attempt to make any
"racial" diferentiation. Only Sardinians and Lapps stand somehow apart.
I msut also say that ethnicities are cultural constructs and that
normally their core element is language and subjective identification.
Do not mix ethinicities with supposed "races" because that goes
nowhere.
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