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I would say that any etymology is speculative. However, I would like to make two points regarding the name "Illyria". The first issue is that Classical Greek "y" represents an earlier /u/ sound (in modern Greek, the letter is pronounced as /i/). This gives us a stem "illur". The other issue is...

In my opinion, there's a twofold problem of linking Albanian "lirë" (free) with the name "Illyria". The first issue is that the ancient name is consistently written with an "y" (which to me suggests that it was probably transmitted through Greek), and not with an "i". I'd also like to point out...

Welcome to Eupedia, though I would suggest that maybe this thread isn't the best starting point. With all respect, but Albania (or Caucasian Albania) was a historic territory in the Caucasus (on the approximate area of the modern - Turkic - country of Azerbaijan). Wether it bears any relation...

I think you're making a number of leaps here. First off I don't think that such a solid case can be made certain Y-Haplogroups being "exclusive" for a certain ethnic group (for instance, U-106 seems to have been in Britain before the invasion of the Germanic Anglo-Saxons). Second, its highly...

For sure. You also have Old Irish "cuire" ('army'), Gaulish "corio-", and further Greek "koiranos" (κοιρανος - 'ruler', 'master' or 'commander').

Sorry, but that looks to me like a logical fallacy: what you're basically saying there - if I get you right - is that because they lived on the area of modern Poland, and because Poles today speak a Slavic language, therefore they (the Lugii) must have been Slavic, too. By the same logic, the...

As I may have eleborated on earlier in this thread, the Przeworsk culture is not compatible with a Proto-Slavic homeland for several reasons. Notably we do have Przeworsk culture names attested in contemporary Greco-Roman sources. With your proposed etymologies, I'd like suggest caution...

Minoan itself was for sure not a Semitic language. Semitic languages have the distinct feature of having consonantal roots (which is why you can write the consonants alone and the meaning of a word isn't lost - which is a feature of the original Phoenician alphabet). I'm not ruling out that one...

While I agree that this belongs in a different thread, I wanted to sumarize my thoughts on that: I personally think the methodology of Gray and Atkinson is fundamentally flawed, first because it assumes that replacement of words in vocabulary would be regular (which is absurd), second, because...

I don't have much to disagree on up to there, Garrick. However, about the following: Sorry to say that, but even if you make some admissions for the phylogentic method, Gray & Atkinson's tree makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The only thing that actually makes sense is that the Anatolian...

Yeah, that's why the Romans made their boundaries between Gallia Aquitania and Gallia Lugdunensis at the river Loire. Because that marked a significant ethno-linguistic boundary. And we all know that 19th century Europeans were very wise and foresightful when they drew borders onto the map for...

Sorry for the delayed reply, I've been very busy lately, so I can't give as much time to reply in full in here, but I'll try to summarize my points: - In my opinion, Illyria (Roman Illyria, I should specify) did not speak a homogenous language. Therefore, to say Illyrian was a language...

Actually, my reason is exactly correct, and there's two good examples from history there that prove my point, namely where major Islamic polities ceased to exist because they engaged in orgies of intolerance and extremism. The first is Al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) under the Almohads, who were much...

People are fleeing en-masse from an entity that is literally the wet-dream of radical Muslims (the so-called "ISIS" or "Da'eesh"), do you really think its plausible that people who flee from this would become supporter of the same ideology? In my opinion, the mere existence of Da'eesh is...

As I said before, it strikes me as implausible that you reverse the direction by which the Indo-Europeanization spread in Western Europe (west-to-east, as opposed to east-to-west), especially because this leaves it unexplained how the Celtic languages share common innovations with the Italic...

There's not a "million" possibilities. There is a key constraint: Proto-Indo-European evolved in the east (according to the Kurgan model, in the Pontic-Caspian steppe), and this has been my key point of objection to the Celtic-from-the-West scenario. Another point is that it assumes an...

I wanted to comment on this. I must say, the "Celtic languages originated in what is now Portugal" scenario strikes me as completely implausible, and I say that after having reviewed John Koch's "Celtic from the West", and after having read reviews of it by other celtologists, notably Joseph...

Gheg is the more conservative of the two dialects, most notably the sound shift *n > *r is absent from it. However, in my opinion, the difference between Tosk and Gheg did not arise until some time in the middle ages. For certain, Latin loanwords (Vinum > verë) are subject to the change. The...

I wanted to comment on the above quote in particular. I've argued on several instances in the past that in my opinion, Afro-Asiatic languages originated in the as an early farmer's language Near East , despite the fact that only one branch of Afroasiatic (Semitic) is spoken there today. Barring...

Both. :-p If you compare modern Greek against ancient Greek (in particular Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age), it is obviously not the same language (phonologically, modern Greek and Mycenaean Greek are radically different). Strictly speaking, it Modern Greek is the daughter language. This is...