Talk:Non-indoeuropean roots of Germanic

Where do we get the idea that North, South, East and West are non-Indo-European? They have cognates in all of the Romance languages. "Called Old European" by whom? -- Zoe

The Romance words come from Germanic. The Latin words are septentrio, auster, oriens, and occidens. The word "west" is Indo-European; its cognates are vesper (Latin), espera (Greek), and vecher (Russian), all meaning evening. Also "south" is related to "sun". -phma


 * Watkins' American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots lists "east" as from *aus- "to shine (said especially of the dawn)", probably related to Latin Aurora, Greek &eta;&omega;&sigmaf;. "North" seems to be from a Germanic-only root (*ner-, "under"). --Brion


 * It doesn't say that it's a Germanic-only root. It just lists only Germanic examples, which means that the only English words known to come from this root are Germanic. -phma


 * True; I was reading one too many "Germanic"s into the definition. Do you know of a more complete source that's web-available? For the heavy duty stuff I can visit a university library, but that's not Wiki-friendly. --Brion

I've removed that statement ("Also, the words representing North, South, East, and West are non-indoeuropean.") for the time being.

The "Old European" language appears to be little known. It is not listed in The Rosetta Project, an linguistic archive covering more than 1000 languages. And a scan of Google articles about controversies or word origins connected to Indo-European turned up not a single reference to Old European. (Incidentally, there were 3690 hits on Indoeuropean and 131,000 hits on Indo-European.

The phrase "Old European" appears only three times in the entire text of Oxford English Dictionary, always as a simple phrase, such as "Cymbalo, an old European musical instrument", etc.

The OED states that the ultimate etymology of ship is unknown.

Skeates' Etymological Dictionary of the English Language connects ship with shape, which he takes back to Teutonic and Lithuanian roots, and allies with the Indo-European roots of the word shave. Eric Partridge's more modern Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English agrees with the supposition.

Webster's Third International traces ship to an Old English word, sceadan, meaning "to divide". Webster's lists 28 "Old" languages that are cited in its etymologies, Old European is not one of them.

The Random House Unabridged says ship is a German word.

Granted, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", and all these sources are concerned with English, but in the absence of any citation of a worthwhile scholarly source, the existence of this language is "not proven". I'll keep looking, because my curiosity is aroused, but I don't think this article is ready for prime time. Ortolan88 20:38 Aug 13, 2002 (PDT)


 * The only references using the name "Old European" I've turned up so far are related to the (controversial) work of Marija Gimbutas, who postulates a pre-Indo-European matriarchal culture. --Brion

- Since when do fish have "manes". I hope this means "names". Even so some examples would be good. --rmhermen
 * Seahorses? Ortolan88

This article isn't getting any better. It is at least as plausible, and far better documented, that king shares Indo-European roots with kin and kind. And the whole thing about irregular verbs is a smokescreen, since the changing of vowels in irregular verbs is a characteristic of Proto-Indo-European.

There is still no documentation for the ship business (see above), but a rewrite has made the undocumented assertions in Non-indoeuropean roots of Germanic even stronger, "Their contribution to the later common heritage was not limited to sea-faring only. Words of a more political and administrative nature like 'king' and 'thing' are also pre-IE." What are these sea-faring words? Why are these unsupported etymologies for king and thing to be taken for granted?

Whoever the source is here, presumably the "controversial feminist scholar Marija Gimbutas", it seems that she has combed the dictionary for words whose history fades out after a thousand or two or three thousand years and arbitrarily assigned them all to "Old European". Maybe this article would read better if it were written entirely in Old European.

Even if you don't believe that the Oxford English Dictionary and the other standard references should be taken as gospel, they can't simply be ignored. They have to be disposed of (which I doubt will happen).

An encyclopedia article should at least meet the standards of a news story. Who says this? What are these contributions? When did it happen? Where is it documented? Ortolan88 10:35 Aug 14, 2002 (PDT)


 * I have it from a book calle 'The world's major languages' it has a chapter on Germanic.

"Old European" does not appear in the index of The World's Major Languages, edited by Bernard Comrie, Professor of Linguistics, University of Southern California, Oxford University Press; ISBN: 0195065115. The index does show more than 50 entries on "Germanic" and another 50 on "German". See:

"I got it from a book" isn't much of an answer to all those questions. Who is this book by? What does it say to document all these very original assertions? When is this article going to answer these questions? Where does all this fit in to the previously known history of languages, which may not go far enough back to suit you, but which works pretty damn well as far back as Sanskrit?

And how come nothing is ever spelled right or spelled out? Or from a known contributor? (Although thanks to the magic of latent text watermarking, I think we all know who it is).
 * Guess not. Wrong again, Tom.  Ortolan88

This is an interesting topic, where did all those words come from ultimately, but this is not an interesting article or even a plausible one at this point. And, in an English encyclopedia, it might be valuable to work a bit on English as a Germanic language.

By the way, Bernard Comrie does make an interesting point on all this:


 * "When we claim that two or more languages are genetically related, we are at the same time claiming that they share a common ancestry. And if we make such a claim about common ancestry, then our methods should provide us with a means of recovering the ancestral system, attested or not. The initial demonstration of relatedness is the easy part; establishing well-motivated intermediate and ancestral forms is quite another matter.  Among the difficulties are:  which features in all of the languages being compared are older? which are innovations?  which are borrowed?  how many shared similarities are enough to prove relatedness conclusively, and how are they weighted for significance?  what assumptions do we make about the relative importance of lexical, morphological, syntactic, and phonological characteristics and about directions of language change?" Copyrighted material.

There's also a spiffy chart about language and inheritance and words common across languages that manages to miss the all-important "Old European" contribution. 

Ortolan88

It's Gimbutas. Helga has started an article on her, too. She was a professor at UCLA, spoke 16 languages...is much loved by many and has been kind of adopted by revivers "the old religions". I have something by her and will re-read it today -- i'll also try to get on Infotrac and get some reviews, but it may take a day or two. JHK 08:30 Aug 15, 2002 (PDT)


 * Looking forward to it. Ortolan88

My speculation is that the Balal (what happened at the Tower of Babel) involved wholesale replacement of parts of languages, that is, producing some languages that have the same grammar, but completely different vocabulary. This would also explain the existence of several Asian language families which all have vowel harmony, postpositions, and agglutination, but different vocabularies. Of course this is as much speculation as Gimbutas's ideas, and without attested samples of Old European, Battleaxese, or Turanian, there isn't much to go on. -phma

I'm not sure there's much point to the existence of this article. What little there is could be treated as a brief paragraph in Germanic languages; Gimbutas's work and the supposed "Old European" culture should be treated separately. --Brion

--- I did not have much time to react to all this. Most of the now deleted article was from my hand, though not the bit about Old European and Prussian. And no I an not Gimbutas. My name is Folmer and I thought in my innocence that what I had read in what looked to me as an excellently written scholarly book would make an interesting topic. I added the topic on ablaut mostly because the book (as referenced above) omits the fact that one Germanic language did lose the Ablaut. I had expected polite discussion.


 * The ablaut stuff would be very nice to have in Germanic languages. As far as the posited non-IE roots, that desperately needs more substance if it's going to be more than mentioned in passing. --Brion


 * Well, the discussion may not have been polite by your lights, but it was an attempt to turn this into an encyclopedia article. You didn't respond to any questions about it, so someone cut it down to what was actually usable as it stood.  If some of those questions were answered in the article, then it would be longer and reflect more of your interest in posting it.  We still don't even know the book you took it from, as the only book of that title I could find was clearly not it, although also an excellently written scholarly book.
 * Also, why not log in and join us? It makes discussion so much simpler.  Ortolan88 20:58 Aug 16, 2002 (PDT)

After much research and careful consideration, the conception and associated remarks about the Norse dualistic pantheon of Aesir and Vanir being influenced by the nonindoeuropean roots (etc) are far off beam and are not supported by this argument. Removed with extreme prejudice. user:sjc