Bandkeramik and non-Anatolian PIE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes:

>And how do we know that they're [lavagtaei and vanaktei] not loanwords from
>Greek?

-- well, it would be highly unusual if they were, since they'd have to be
_very_ early, and the recorded instances of their use in Phrygian are from
times long after those terms were lost in Greek.

"Wannax" was an obsolete term even by Homer's time, largely replaced by
"basileus", from Myceaean "gwasileus", with a semantic shift from "headman"
or "foreman" to "king" and showing the characteristic *gw ==> b.  Reflexes of
"wannax" in Classical Greek referred to religious, not secular posts, if my
memory serves me correctly.

As for "lawagetas", it survived only as an obscure dialect form in Classical
times.

And of course the "w" sound dropped out of Greek even by Homer's time; he has
'annax' for 'wannax'.

So, conceivably, they could have been Bronze Age loans into pre-Phrygian from
Mycenaean Greek; on the other hand, cognates are more likely, I'd say.

"wannax/vanaktei" would both be from PIE *unatks (gen *unatkos), meaning
"leader, lord"; there's a Tocharian reflex, "natak", with precisely that
meaning.