Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and culturalinfluence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Steve and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Friday, October 15, 1999 1:39 AM
Subject: Re: Nors Josephson's Theory about a linguistic and
    culturalinfluence of Ancient Greek on East-Polynesia

> In a message dated 10/13/99 5:33:08 PM, MF1107 at mclink.it wrote:

> <<I should like to know some scholarly opinion about N. Josephson's theories
> concerning a presumptive linguistic Greek influence on Pacific area (ex. gr.
> cf. N. Josephson, Greek Linguistic Elements in the Polynesian Languages,
> Universitaetsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg, 1987; or Idem, Eine
> archaisch-griechische Kultur auf der Osterinsel, Universitaetsverlag C.
> Winter, Heidelberg, 1999 ).>>

> For those interested, there's a brief page on Josephson's '87 piece with word
> comparisons at:
> http://www.ancientgr.com/Unknown_Hellenic_History/Eng/Words_in_Hawai.htm
> (the url may wrap around in e-mail and have to be deleted back to one line)
>
> S. Long

I have not read Josephson's book so my comments will be based solely on what
can be seen at the website referenced above.

In three examples, the Hawaiian word contains a <t>:

toko-toko, 'wood'; tarra, 'courage'; aeto, 'hawk'.

These are respectively compared with Greek doko's, tha'rros, and aeto's.

While the extreme reduction of the consonantal inventory in Polynesian
languages might lead to a situation where Greek d/th/t *all* show up in
Polynesian as <t>, it would take many more examples than are contained on
the webpage to make it worthy of serious consideration.

Though I am suspicious of misapplications of theories of random coincidences
and the associated mathematical rationales, I see nothing at the website
that would persuade me that these few correspondences are not legitimate
examples of random relationships.

In the case of some words, not containing stops, like angou (suffocate),
nou-nou (thought), manao (think), the possibility of common descent from
some earlier language should be considered.

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
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