Raymond Brown wrote:
>At 2:20 pm +0000 1/5/02, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> >Raymond Brown wrote:
>[snip]
>  The
> >>evidence upon which it was constructed was IMO very flimsy, but one had
>to
> >>admire the efforts of the theorists; their 'reconstructed language' was
> >>worthy of the best efforts of this list; fot IMO (and the opinion of
>many
> >>others) what they had produced was a conlang   :)
> >
> >Well, Cyril Babaev has an article about Pelasgian on TIED:
> >http://indoeuro.bizland.com/archive/article4.html
> >
> >It seems quite sane-headed to me, but I'm of course IEist. Was it this
> >Georgiyev guy's work you were in contact with?

That was of course meant to read "... I'm of course no IEist".
>
>Georgiyev certainly!  I don't think there's any problem with it from an IE
>point of view; that's one of the things they did well IIRC - deriving it
>from PIE.  The chief weakness was (and is) the very scant 'evidence' that
>was used to reconstruct a pre-Greek IE language in the Aegean area.  Most
>people would view the fragmentary bits of evidence as co-incidence.
>
>It's rather as tho, say, we looked for words in English that had no clear
>etymology either from Old British, early English, Norman French, and later
>Graeco-Latin borrowings, and with these odd fragments went on to
>reconstruct a 'pre-Celtic IE' language for which there was otherwise no
>evidence.

Sounds like it make a decent passtime! I mean, if intelligent people hadn't
that sort of thing to occupy their minds with, they might invent something
useful, and we all know what happens then ...

> >> >Apart from a TIED page I had
> >> >already seen, I got mostly weird New Age sites
> >>
> >>I can't imagine what the Pelasgian I knew can have to do with New Agers
>-
> >>looks as tho this might be a different Pelasgian!
> >
> >I _think_ the connection was that since the Pelasgians lived in Greece
> >before the arrival of the patriarchal and scientific Greeks,
> >they logically
> >must've been benign matriarchalists who possessed mystic wisdom from
> >beginning of time.
>
>{sigh} "logically"?  Don't these people use the grey cells they were born
>with!  According to this theory, the Pelasgian _were_ 'nasty patriarchical'
>IE speakers.  If - and it may have been so - the Minoans were matriarchal
>(tho not possessing mystic wisdom from the time of Big Bang); but the
>Minoans were most certainly not IE speakers. If they had been, Linear A
>would've been deciphered years ago as would the later Eteocretan.  But
>neither has been deciphered.
>
>Methinks, from what you say, these New Agers are confusing Robert Grave's
>"Pelasgians" with the very different "Pelasgians" of Babaev & Georgiyev.
>

And what's Robert Grave's Pelasgian?

                                            Andreas

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