Re: Vinca script, cross bar angle - Ki Ri Ke


John Atkinson wrote:

True. I didn't reply because you got back onto your "GU" hobbyhorse, which
I found too boring to even read.

Known as Peter T. Daniels Syndrom: judging a book or
a message without having much as read it. And, by the way,
my Middle Stone Age word for woman is KU.

I did (the first six volumes). As you noticed, the editors have the authors
prepare short lists of words in categories like "humans" and "kinship",
which made it very easy to select all the "woman" words. I have several
dictionaries and a few dozen grammars of other Australian languages, but I
didn't use them because it would have been more like work, and the 18
languages in the Handbooks provided me with more than enough examples

As I assumed. You consulted Dixon and Blake and just
looked up words for woman. All I say about my method
of proposing an early word and following it along the
arrow of time and pondering how it may have evolved
and developed and split up and survive in an array of
similar words was in vain. Language is a basic feature
of life, words formed along human experience, they are
a most fascinating mental tool, and the only way one is
allowed to look at them is by consulting a dictionary
one way, and following phonetic laws. As if language
were that simple and boring.

[snip!]

"snip" is the most powerful argument in sci.lang.

The Ord (river in the Kimberley region where Chatwin was) is a _much_ more
impressive river than the Garonne and the Dordogne.

Did you ever look at a map of the Guyenne? There is
a river system that links every place and village. No such
a thing in Australia.

"Civilization"? Was there a city there?

The Blombos cave was the center of that civilization,
or one of the centers. Look up the excellent Blombos
cave website by Christopher Henshilwood.

So? Whatever, it wasn't a cold climate.

Cold climates trigger inventions and progress. New ideas
from the north, from the time of the Ice Age, found into Egypt.
And there are other challenges apart from a cold climate.
Desertification that turned the Sahara into an arid zone
in around 7 500 BP and made people venture into the Nile
Valley and tame the "angry river" (Rushdi Said), which was
the great achievement of ancient Egypt, by far bigger than
the building of all the pyramids.

I'll throw in another typical Gnaedinger irrelevancy here, and point out
that Detroit and Chigago are now on the skids as far as industry is
concerned, and that the centres of industry in America are, or soon will be,
on the West Coast and (especially) in the South.

Microsoft is based in Seattle and not in Santa Monica,
where you find the Getty Center of the Humanities.

Others, of course, reason that the Egyption thing started about 10 500 BP in
the eastern Sahara and northern Sudan, from where cattle-keeping people
spread westwards and northwards, the latter becoming Ancient Egypt. The
cold dry spell about 7800 BP may have been a stimulus.

The desertification of the once greener Sahara was the
reason why people ventured into the Nile Valley where
nobody in his or her right mind would have settled before,
as the Nile was an "angry river" (see above).

Leaving out nebulosities like "ideas" and "vitality", Egypt certainly may
well be a combination of south (see above) and north (cereal and sheep
farmers from the Levant, possibly taking to the road to escape the same dry
spell.)

There are two time levels of Egypt, first in around 7 500 BP
when tribes from the Sahara, from Arabia and from Asia Minor
(Levant) began to settle in the Nile Valley, and again in around
5 400 BP when a tribe from Asia Minor if not from Anatolia
entered Upper Egypt via the wadi Hammamat.

In history, all "general rules:" are wrong much more often than not.
(That's a general rule.)

The future belongs Canada and Alaska, mark my word.

Why don't you answer the questions instead of going off on yet another
irrelevant tangent?

I answered all your question, but as you are throwing in
so many points I have to make it short. If you want a long
answer ask me one (1) ((one single)) question.

No comment.

Dito, Franz Gnaedinger

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