Latin and Slavonic for `moon'

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 4/13/99 11:22:51 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

<<-- true, and you'll also find that the period of Slavic-Gothic contact
leading to loan-word deposition is prior to the 5th century CE.  The loans
were into Proto-Slavic, not any of the later Slavic languages.>>

How do you know that and why are you so sure of it?  Particularly how do you
date the various sound shifts and on what grounds?  How do you get your 5th
Century date?  How do you know it was Proto-Slavic and not Common Slavic and
is there a difference?  What's wrong with a 6th c. date, for example?
Jordanes is almost 7th Century and he is a cleric who says he speaks Gothic
and he lives in Constantinople.  Some of these sound shifts are described as
*PIE>Slavic, why couldn't it happen that way?

<<Not even Mallory would place the emergence of a distinct proto-Germanic any
later than 1000 BCE or so.  Late isoglosses indicate that Proto-Germanic and
Proto-Slavic (and Baltic) were in continuous contact as they emerged from
PIE. >>

I would be very interested in those late isoglosses and how they were derived.

I wrote:
<<After all, if you follow Mallory or Dolukhanov the proto-Slavs were the
Agricultural Scythians in 500BCE and therefore had contact with the Greeks
before the Germans.>>

JS wrote:
<<-- take a look at the map.  The Greeks sailed to the Black Sea coast, which
was inhabited by _Iranian_ speakers, the Scythians proper.  Beyond the
_Iranian_ speakers were the Slavs, and beyond them -- and
therefore in contact with them -- were the Germanics.>>

It just doesn't shell out like that.  There are the remains of a number of
other distinct cultural groups between the Agricultural Scythians and north
central Europe in the middle of the 1st millenium bce.  See Dolukhanov, The
Early Slavs (pb 1996) the map on page 134, which shows the AgScyths
stretching across the mid Ukraine from the Bug to the Donets, mostly below
the 50th parallel and less than a 100 miles from most of the major Greek
settlements.  Greek artfacts in this area from this period are not uncommon.

On the other hand, Jastrof does not reach the upper Oder River until 500 bce.
 There are distinct concentrations of cultural remains in between
Jastrof and the Central Ukraine and as far as I know very little evidence of
material contact between the two.  There is however both material evidence
and attestation of contact between the AgScyths and the Greeks right about
500bce.

JS wrote:
<<ie., the "Agricultural Scythians" were the southeastern fringe of the
Slavic-speaking area, not the whole of it.>>

Again, I don't know how you can be so sure about these things.  The AgScyths
are of course a name from Herodotus attached to rather distinct
archaeological finds - and they jive well.   If the AgScyths were the
ProtoSlavs, they do not go west of the Daco-Thracian and are clearly
culturally different than the more northern Milogradians. Herodotus simply
says the "Neuri" are north of the AgScyths.  Dolukhanov posits that
Proto-Slavic developed from the AgScyths as a lingua franca of trade along
the Russian rivers and up into the Novogrod area.  But even here the contact
with Jastrof is minimal until the current era.

Mallory discusses the positions of Przeworsk versus AgScyth and Priapet in
ISIE, although he seems to have his dates a little out of whack - Przeworsk
being later and appearing in the Liebersee grave fields near Dresden only
about the ToC. But needless to say all these Proto-Slavs cover a huge amount
of ground - from the Elbe to the Danube to the Donets to Lake Ladoga - about
the size of western Europe.  Which I think shows that nothing is quite as
certain as you suggest.

If - and only if, I do not know for sure - the Proto-Slavs were the AgScyths,
then their contact with Greeks (especially through the "Graeco-Scythian"
Callipidae) is much more probable than with the early Germans.

I wrote:
<<they should have had a *gon/*gnu or *kon/*knu and i-stems quite before they
met the Goths. >>

JS wrote:
<<-- they probably also had words for "house" and "stable" and "loaf of
bread", but all these words were replaced by loans from Germanic in the
Proto-Slavic period.>>

I think the word for house shows up as "dom, domu-" in WS, which looks pretty
PIE to me.  Just curious, do you know any Proto-Slavic words that were
borrowed by Germanic or was it all one way?

And how sure are you of all this?

Regards,
Steve Long