LL-L "Language history" 2010.07.21 (01) [EN]

Wed Jul 21 15:01:54 UTC 2010

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From: Mike Morgan <mwmbombay at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language history" 2010.07.16 (01) [EN]

Paul @wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk wrote:

the pre-Indo European language that forms a substrate to much Germanic
language - the speech that Claiborne calls "Folkish". He picked that name
because "folk" and its equivalents is a good example of a Germanic but
non-IE word.

Well, maybe.

In fact though, Russian *полк* /polk/ "troop" going back to Common Slavic **
pъlkъ* -- although previously generally argued to go back to a borrowing
from Gothic (which i guess then would have borrowed it from a non-IE
substrate?) -- and clearly related  Lithuanian *pulkas* "crowd, herd, troop"
and Latvian *pulks* "troop, multitude" (ok, I know! Baltic COULD also have
borrowed from Gothic... directly or via common Slavic), all seem to have a
clear and simple IE etymology (< *pel- etc (Pokorny I, 798ff) "fill",
"multitude" + IE suffix -k- / i.e. Pokorny's -go-) .. an etymology proposed
already in the 1880s by Miklosich.

AND, although with different nominal suffixes or other add-ons, we have
Latin *plebs* (semantically very close to the idea of a "folk"), Greek *
Πλειαδες* "Pleiads" (thus related  *πληθος* as in *plethora,* and also to
Persian name for the same star cluster پروین /parvin/ it would seem, pacem
Greek folk etymologies to the contrary), Welsh (sic) *lliaws* "multitude"
... and this is the SAME root, without any add-ons in Indic
*-**पुर**:*/pura/ "city" (as in Singapur, as well as Jaipur,
Gorakhpur, Janakpur, etc)
and related Greek *πολις* "city" ... also being, like a "folk", basically a
collection of a multitude of people

The IE word would be expected to be related to e.g. Latin *genus* -

Expected? Why? (see below)

 and indeed we do see such a word, in English "kin" for example. Germanic
seems to have a large amount of such duplicates.

As do most IE languages ... and, as too did IE itself. There is absolutely
NO reason to assume that proto-IE itself had no synonyms/"duplicates" ... in
fact, it woudl be very un-language-like if it didn't!  Whether these IE
duplicates (or half of them, anyway!) were borrowed from some pre-common-IE
(or pre-proto-Indo-Hittite) substrate is of course another possibility, but
... well that chain of argumentation can go back ad infinitum ... and of
course the answer will ALWAYS be "maybe". Borrowing is as natural to ALL
languages (even Icelandic!) as not borrowing is.

THIS is NOT to say that many (most???) Germanic words are NOT originally
from non-IE substrate(s), just that I don't find the argument for a
necessarily non-IE origin for the specific word "folk" convincing ... as
there seem to be equally good alternative(s) ...

Even if the arguments for "folk" do fail,it is only ONE word ... and there
are plenty of OTHER examples which might be better support for Germanic's
non-IE substrate roots.

That could be just dumb luck - we don't have a huge sample of Gothic after
all.

I totally agree... MOST of historical linguistics relies on such "dumb luck"
... and a good dose of argumentation and counter-argumentation

And Ron/Reinhard wrote:

Perhaps these substrate languages were related to (poorly) known
non-Indo-European languages of the Iberian Peninsula, such as Iberian,
Tartessian and Aquitanian (the latter of which is the ancestor of modern
Basque).

And, of course, Basque itself may have a number of borrowings from Germanic,
including ehun "100" < Gothic ain hund (which would yield exactly this
expected Basque form) ... though as Trask says in his excellent "The History
of Basque" (Routledge,1997), of the many proposed borrowings from the
Visigoths or Franks (historically the most likely donors).  "there is not a
single instance of an undeniable loan from these languages" (p. 262)

Historical linguistics is a messy business ... and i am one who just LOVES
to get his hands dirty ;-)

         U C > || Mike Morgan
==========================
                 linguist

    soon to be @ IGNOU-UCLan

Applied Sign Linguistics Programme

            New Delhi, India

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