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  1. K

    Albanian and Illyrian

    I know that the subject has been widely debated here, but could someone summarize in a few words, and without the interference of politic considerations, what is the typology of Albanian and its relation with the Illyrian languages ? No tricky question here, I'm not an expert of this matter.
  2. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    I think there is a rule where proto-Uralic *p → Hungarian f. I was reading a paper about Mansi lately, an Uralic language from the Ob river - and actually ugrian, not fennic. You have f.ex. Hungarian fü "grass" = Mansi pum. I don't know the Finnish equivalent. I don't draw any conclusion out...
  3. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    Well, there will be a HUGE divergence of opinion there : the idea of a Copper Age proto IE is, to me, just a joke. Not only is it unproven, as well genetically as archaeologically, but it is, from a strictly linguistic point of view, a pure impossibility. In a time span of 1000 years, you could...
  4. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    about rix: Yes, but it doesn't make any difference whatsoever : k → χ before s is a purely Celtic lenition process, Grimm's Law has nothing to do with that. Moreover, this is "allophonic" as you mentioned, thus only a variant of the same sound. *ē > *ī is Celtic too, hence I don't see why this...
  5. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    A quote from Meillet's Caractéristiques des Langues Germaniques, written about a century ago in the context of an overwhelmingly structuralist and ideologically aryan academic world : Quand une population change de langue, elle est sujette à garder, dans la nouvelle langue adoptée par elle...
  6. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    If two words show the regular sound changes of their respective language family, then the words are inherited from the same source (IE or not) and are in no case considered as loanwords. Considering that words having undergone Grimm's Law can be originally Celtic appears to me as very...
  7. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    PIE *g → Germ. [k] → Celt.[k] : borrowing from Germanic to Celtic, no wonder here. There is no *ō in bhrāgo. Maybe you are referring to the one in the PGmc. reflex brōka, but the rule applies to PIE, not to borrowings from an IE language to another (if it did, intervocalic [k] should have...
  8. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    I suppose you are talking about borrowings from Celtic to Germanic ? But if a word has undergone the effects of Grimm's Law, then it is Germanic, and the Celtic word is a loanword from Germanic. As a matter of fact, this is how loanwords are spotted. ex: PIE *bhrāgo → PGmc. *brōka (OHG bruoh)...
  9. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    Grimm's law states that, under certain conditions, PIE p* is adapted as an f in Germanic. You postulate (as most linguists do) that, by way of purely mechanistic evolution (assimilations and dissimilations), you finally end up with an [f]. Now my question is : why ? Why in Germanic your *p...
  10. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    That's quite impossible since Etruscan had no voiced stops nor fricatives at all, so the [v] hypothesis is excluded (it had not even the [z] sound). This absence of voiced consonants (except for the standard series l, m, n, r) tends to indicate that the unvoiced ones are native. The...
  11. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    my defense : Exactly, hence, at the time when Etruscan was spoken, there was no [f] in Gaulish. ... under the influence of Etruscan, according to Bonfante (and may be others, I'll check). And it is attested already around 600 BCE on the Prenestine Fibula (as far as it is authentic, at...
  12. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    Since you probably don't have Bonfante's book at hand, here is how the flexion looks like The word is clan "son" (see also Irish...) SINGULAR Nom/Acc: clan Gen: clen-s Dat: clen-si Acc Def.: ? Loc: *clen-thi PLURAL Nom/Acc: clen-ar Gen: *clen-ar-s (clenars) Dat: clen-ar-aśi (clenaraśi)...
  13. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    Thank you for your answer, Taranis, I'll try to answer to your objections regarding an hypothetic etruscan/germanic connection. - [f]: the sound is generally germanic and not IE (Grimm's Law), I wasn't talking about the affrication process in Old High German (an interesting matter, by the way)...
  14. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    My source is "The Etruscan Language : An Introduction" by G & L. Bonfante. The book is very factual and doesn't try to connect Etruscan with anything - or yes, it compares very thoroughly Latin and Etruscan, which is very interesting. It tends however to connect the Etruscans with the...
  15. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    OK, I take it: which are the connections between Etruscan and Klingon ? :) Well, to be honnest, my remark was completely amateurish, I was just reading the book and found these similarities rather curious - I have heard many theories about Etruscan connections with many languages and people...
  16. K

    Number of phonemes (vowels, consonants) by language in Europe

    32 vowels in Danish, 33 consonants in Irish... I think that the guys who listed the phonemes included all the possible dialectal and allophonic variations - same for Norwegian, Russian, etc. And I'm still trying to find 17 vowels in French...
  17. K

    Etruscan and Germanic

    Well, let's be clear right from the begining, I won't propose nor defend any theory about the origins of the Etruscans and the Germans based on daring speculations about their haplogroups. I just happened to be reading Bonfante's "The Etruscan Language" earlier today, and noticed a few...
  18. K

    Non indo-european Germanic words

    I wouldn't connect these words to any haplogroup in particular (R1b is also pre-IE for the most part). But incidentally, I wrote two papers related to this matter: one is devoted to the possible non-IE lexicon in Danish (Scandinavian), and the other about the non-IE roots shared by Celtic and...
  19. K

    About "track" and "trace"

    Trugarez vras deoc'h - ha da ho respont ivez ! I agree, but I cannot find the germanic etymon... the proposed "trechen" (to pull) goes back to the problem of meaning we both mentioned already ("pull" is semantically unrelated with "trace"). That's it. We need [-kti-] sequence to...
  20. K

    Did Latin merge with Celtic languages to form Romance languages ?

    That's right, and this is accurately the point. In this respect, it is very interesting to look at the way creole languages appeared in the Carribean islands: French creoles have a French lexicon, but a clearly African (Niger-Congo) pronunciation and grammar. It is especially obvious when...
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