Ri - to cut with something toothed

[oldeuropeanculture]

Hi all. I hope you are all happy and healthy.


In this post I would like to talk about the development of the toothed (serrated) cutting implements and the words used to describe these implements and the actions performed with them. I started my investigation as a pure linguistic one. I tried to find the origin of the Croatian, western Serbian word "rista" meaning harvester. But this investigation lead me to discovery of the word cluster is based on the root word "ri" which means something sharp and pointy like a tooth, cutting with something sharp and pointy like a tooth, chewing, scraping, gouging. What is amazing is that this word cluster actually describes the way these tools were developed in Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic, through people imitating nature. This word cluster has actually preserved the story of how humans invented toothed (serrated) blades by literally making artificial jaws. And this story was confirmed by the archaeological data, which I present in this post as well. This word cluster also offers the explanation why we find deer jaws in the oldest layers of the temple dedicated to the agricultural cult based around wheat.


The words from this cluster are found in In many European languages but the main concentration of these words is in Slavic languages, Germanic (particularly North Germanic) languages and the Irish language. However the full etymologies of all these words can be built using base words found only in Slavic languages. The distribution and etymologies of these "ri" words point to the possibility that these words could originally have come from the old language of the Neolithic or even Mesolithic I2a people.


I think that here we have a true linguistic fossil.


You can read more here:


http://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.ie/2015/04/ri.html

 

[Taranis]

No offense to you, but I'm sceptical of these supposed "paleo words". As per this article, the whole idea was in the news a while back (two years ago, actually). Any two languages, however unrelated, will have words that are randomly similar. If you go back sufficiently far, it becomes impossible to distinguish true cognates from loanwords from words that are just _randomly_ similar. Considering how languages are evolving, and how different languages were in ancient times (take Irish and Greek as good examples there), and how for example Germanic, Romance and Slavic families are all fairly "young" (especially the latter), I find it presumptuous to think that there could be words that endure from the Mesolithic.

You might also want to read this article.

 

[oldeuropeanculture]

I don't understand your argument Taranis. What exactly do you disagree with in this article and why?

 

[Taranis]

I don't understand your argument Taranis. What exactly do you disagree with in this article and why?

Well, if I go back here:

I started my investigation as a pure linguistic one. I tried to find the origin of the Croatian, western Serbian word "rista" meaning harvester. But this investigation lead me to discovery of the word cluster is based on the root word "ri" which means something sharp and pointy like a tooth, cutting with something sharp and pointy like a tooth, chewing, scraping, gouging. What is amazing is that this word cluster actually describes the way these tools were developed in Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic, through people imitating nature. This word cluster has actually preserved the story of how humans invented toothed (serrated) blades by literally making artificial jaws. And this story was confirmed by the archaeological data, which I present in this post as well. This word cluster also offers the explanation why we find deer jaws in the oldest layers of the temple dedicated to the agricultural cult based around wheat.

The way it presents itself to me, you've been looking for words that start with "ri-" (that's a very lax criterion) in modern European languages that relate to "carving" or "sharp, pointed objects". Another severe problem in your method is that you dismantle words, without a concern if you're actually looking at a compounded words or not. Even if we I'd take all of that for granted (and at that point its quite outstepping my personal disbelief), the idea that these words are leftover from the Neolithic or even Mesolithic is quite dubious, especially if you consider how many times languages must have switched in the areas you discuss. If I take the example of Croatia, Croatian is a Slavic language, and it wasn't spoken there until the Migration period. Before that, the region was part of the Roman Empire (meaning that the pre-Slavic population presumably spoke some form of Romance). Before being absorbed into the Roman Empire and becoming latinized, Paleo-Balkan (Liburnian) and Celtic languages were spoken in the area. And that's just the past 2000-2500 years covered. Unless you're an adherent of Mario Alinei's Paleolithic Continuity Theory (are you?), you have to consider that - at a minimum - two additional changes in languages occured in the area, namely - one with the introduction of the Indo-European languages, and two - with the introduction of farming. You have to ask yourself (and that's where my scepticism stems from), just how likely is it for a word to endure multiple language changes? In my opinion, not very likely at all. This is why I become very sceptical when people assume that there's such "ice age" words that are supposed to have endured millennia unchanged.