LL-L: "Celtic connections" LOWLANDS-L, 26.OCT.1999 (08) [E]

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From: UB82DN at aol.com
Subject: LL-L: "Celtic connections" LOWLANDS-L, 26.OCT.1999 (06) [E]

Liewe Laaglanders,

  The Italo-Celtic-Tokharian grouping rests primarily on passive and
impersonal verb formations ending in -r, which also occur, if memory serves,
in Hittite.  The Slavo-Balto-Germanic grouping seems to depend, in
particular, on dative/instrumental sg. and pl. endings in -m < earlier -sm-,
e.g. German "dem" < Gmc *thesmo < *tesmo; this -m is preserved in English
"him," Swedish "honom," etc.  All these groupings seem to be a bit rough and
intuitive.  Lately, T.D. Griffen has suggested a "Germano-European" family,
away from which the other Indo-European languages ALL moved.  To be more
precise, he sees Germano-Armenian as preserving the original system of
consonants (this involves a complicated discussion of "lenition" as opposed
to voicing/ nonvoicing).  Thus the Germanic sound shift is actually the
Indo-European sound shift, with Germanic and Armenian being closer to the
original system.  This in turn is complicated by Armenian's shift of the
k-series to s-series (that is, its joining the Satem group, at a later stage).

   Even worse, we now have to keep up with the partisans of "glottalic"
consonant theory, which seems to be part of a larger argument in favor of an
earlier IE-Semitic connection.  And then the Nostraticists have their take on
it all.  I'm fairly conservative about these things, but I think the
Nostraticists are onto something.  As far as IE consonantism goes, I think
Szemerenyi's argument (circa 1966) still holds water, although he probably
made some enemies by maintaing that Proto-IE had only _one_ laryngeal, @,
realized sometimes as /h/.  But, of course, Szemerenyi's view of IE
consonants might be true for a particular IE timespan and not for
"pre-proto-IE."   It's very hard to keep up with all this, esp. when many
thousands of years without written evidence are involved.

Cheers,
Joe Stromberg

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