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I stand by what I said (and I recommend you re-read my post): history happened. For example, imagine that the Byzantines had been victorious over the Arabs in the battle of Yarmouk, much of the eastern Mediterranean would likely still be speaking Greek today. Conversely, had the Arabs been more...

The short answer here is that "ˀabbā" is the Aramaic word for 'father' (its an example of where the New Testament uses Aramaic, the native language of Jesus, spelled out in Greek).

That's a very simplistic and simplified view. What about Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Basque, Albanian, Maltese, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Saami, etc.? Also, they are called the "Romance languages" (Spanish, French, Italian, etc.). They evolved from Latin, yes, but they...

The letters Phi (Φ/φ), Theta (Θ/θ) and Chi (Χ/χ) were pronounced as aspirates /pʰ/, /tʰ/ and /kʰ/ in archaic (e.g., Homeric) Greek and became later fricatives in the Hellenistic period. One example that Phi was still a plosive and not a fricative (yet) is how the word Phoinikioi (Φοινικιοι)...

I won't comment on the entire post because it is quite immense, but I want to make a remark on this. You're completely wrong here: the letters Ββ Δδ Γγ were still pronounced as exactly that, /b/, /d/ and /g/ by the Hellenistic period. Its only in medieval (Byzantine) Greek that the letter Beta...

Do you really think that an ethnic group in Iran was named by a figure that was most likely not even historical? The story of Jason and Medea is a Greek one, and there are many oddieties in the story like there is no language barrier (a feature that is typical of the stories from that time frame).

This is certainly true. One issue you should consider is that you do have words in Balto-Slavic in particular that must be assumed to be loanwords because the cognate in other branches of IE (e.g. Indo-Iranic), or sometimes different words from the same root in Balto-Slavic have a *g or a *k...

I wanted to comment on this, even though I concede that its probably worthwhile to do an independent thread about the Afroasiatic substrate hypothesis. In my opinion such a substrate hypothesis can only possibly hold true for Insular Celtic (Goidelic plus Brythonic), not for the Continental...

One issue that should be brought up, which easily explains why most of these Greek words must be recent loanwords (that is, since the middle ages or later) - is the phonetic evolution of the Slavic languages (and to a lesser degree, the phonetic evolution of Greek). Proto-Balto-Slavic had...

You know, the French might have a word with you. Why should the situation on the Balkans have been any different from the situation in Gaul? Isn't it a little weird that for you these "Thraco-Illyrians" were the disseminators of Christianity? :wary2: We've been there before: Proto-Slavic did...

Well, I can tell you that you haven't read my posts. I have argued that Germanic-speaking peoples in particular were absorbed (somebody else might say, "acultured") by the early Slavic speakers. Which is precisely what we see in the linguistic perspective, because the Slavic languages have...

The Anatolian hypothesis has its own problems, but I feel that should be started in a different thread. Most importantly, Indo-European has common terminology for 'wheel' or 'wheeled vehicle', which makes it implausible to argue for the first farmers in Europe to have spoken PIE. I personally...

I'd like to remind you that we actually do have linguistic data from the Balkans from the Roman period, and that there is no evidence for Slavic languages being spoken in this area before the migration period - in so far the option that Slavic languages developed autochthonous on the Balkans and...

Before you start to randomly dismantling words and claim that speakers of Slavic had language contact with the Akkadians, I would recommend that you read this article. Its a bit older, but its well-written, and it addresses a lot of problems you're facing here.

I'm not calling it "whatever I want". Indo-Iranic and Iranic is obviously not the same, and language classification does not work by randomly attaching labels to a language. Its definitely not. I'm going to repeat saying it here, the *s- > *h- sound shift, which is a key feature of the Iranic...

You know very well why one of the other moderators deleted your post. Because it included a racist remark. Such a behaviour is not tolerated here, and I would have done the same if one of the others did not beat me to doing it. Have you ever seen me claim that the Proto-Germanic homeland was...

And you're trying to convince us you believe all that not because you have the pre-fabricated dogma (that Kurds are the navel of the Indo-European-speaking world), because you yourself are Kurdish, and you try to make everything fit to that to that dogma? :thinking: I might add, if Gamkrelidze...

I'm not convinced. For starters, Aleksi Sahala also brings up what I did mention earlier in this thread, namely the ambiguity of Sumerian. Even if you completely disregard that (which I find to be a huge assumption), some examples he mentions I feel are outright retarted: Donkeys were unknown...

Gregor Gysi is a genuine, communist crackpot, don't listen to him. He's probably still sad and angry that his own country (the DDR) no longer exists, which is why he has destructive fantasies about taking the country apart that absorbed his home country and adamantly payed for rebuilding it...

Jesus, where you do you folks dig up these fishy numbers? That's an urban legend from the 1990s. The second biggest Turkish city after Istanbul is Ankara (the capital city of modern Turkey), which, who might have guessed that, has more people than Berlin. What is accurate is that Berlin has one...