Latin and Slavonic for `moon'

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 4/28/99 8:36:39 AM, you wrote:
<<<Proto-Slavic developed from the AgScyths as a lingua franca of trade along
the Russian rivers and up into the Novogrod area.>

-- this is news. (glyph of irony).>>

Please quote me accurately.  What I wrote was:
<<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 Jastorf is minimal until the current era.>>

And this is not news.  The Early Slavs was published in the 80's and it is
just about one of the few modern sources in English on the archaeological
record.  If you are not aware of it, you shouldn't mislead other readers.

<<-- you have inscriptions, or other linguistic data?  Pots are not people.>>

Does this seem disingenuous to you in any way based on the innumerable posts
mentioning Corded Ware and how it proves all kinds of things?

<<Slavic developed from PIE in the same areas of E. Europe in which Slavs are
found in the earliest historical sources, in what's now eastern Poland and
parts of White Russia and the Ukraine.>>

I can't disagree with this.  But as early as @600 ace Fredegar has the Frank
king Dagobert remitting a 500 hide tribute owed by the Saxons in exchange for
their defending the border against the Wends, who are already on the eastern
bank of the Elbe.  Its the pots - not the historical records - that tell us
that they were not always there.

<<Early loanwords from both Iranian and Germanic show that the proto-Slavs
were in contact with both.>>

But the question is when. In the first half of the first millenium bce the
nature of those contacts is not clear.  I repeat:
<<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.>>

S. Long