Re: Cultures whose own name is unknown


noesy_parker wrote:
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:1156772214.940375.262890@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:


Christopher Culver wrote:
"Richard Fangnail" <richardfangnail@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Weren't terms like "Hyksos" made up by historians long after the
Hyksos people died out? Are there other names of cultures like
that?

The "Tocharians" probably weren't the same people referred to as
"Tokharoi" in Greek writings.

There's no "probably" about it. They were handed the wrong label by
the discoverers/decipherers, and it stuck.

Then unstick it. It's done all the time in the sciences, organisms get
renamed and reclassified, pluto was a planet and now it isn't. All you
need is a mechanism for doing it, that's all.

One of the nice things about linguistics is that it's rather
anarchical. You don't pass a test to join the Linguistic Society of
America; it's not a credentialling organization.

Names not infrequently used by specialists are "Kuchean" and "Agnean"
for the two languages.

And "Tocharian" is two
different languages.

.