Just a short notice this time ...
I went as usual to the Language café, but there were very few people. However I got a very interesting discussion with a man from Iran, who also knew Turkish and some other languages which I don't speak. So we started out in Danish and then switched to English just to have some fun. The discussion became really interesting from the moment we discussed the position of Farsi among the Indoeuropan languages. I have focused a lot on the Europan branches of this group and less on the Asiatic ones, but I knew the thing about the centum/satem distribution: "centum" expansion from North of the Black sea Westwards to form the Hellenic, Italoceltic and Germanic families, Eastwards to Central Asia where Tocharian languages for a time were spoken .. and "satem" Northwards to form the Baltoslavic family and South/Southeast-wards to the Middle East and India. Hittite must have arisen from an earlier phase of Indoeuropean expansion, but it died out.
And then the picture was complicated by a Turkic expansion from Central or even Eastern Asia Westwards, which cut through the Indoeuropean area like a knife. Today there are large Turkic speaking populations in Asia (like for instance the Uzbeks and Afghans), and the Azeri of Azerbaijan form a bridge down to modern Turkey, which is the most populous Turkic speaking area today. And then we got to discuss what language Cyros II the Great or Elder of Persia ( (c. 600 – 530 BC) actually spoke. We used the computers of the library to ascertain that he and the later rulers of Achemenid did indeed speak Ancient Persian, which i surmise was a satem language, and that the Achemenid rulers wrote their inscriptions in Cuneiform, which is a system originally invented by the Sumerians (who spoke a linguistic isolate) and passed down by mostly Semitic speaking peoples to the Indoeuropan speaking Hittites and Persians.
And the Turkish people then came rather late, but I didn't know the exact chronology - only that the Ottoman empire was established after the empire ruled from Bagdad had been squashed by the Mongols. And that the expansion through South Eastern Europe was delayed by the Byzantinians, but they were seriously weakened by the fourth so-called crusade, which was rerouted at the proposal of the alarmingly shortsighted Venetian doge Dandolo (actually he was blind physically, but here I'm considering his political level). Maybe the Ottoman expansion couldn't have been halted completely, but the stupidity and greed of one Venetian doge potentially resulted in the Balkan area being under Ottoman rule for one or two hundred years more than necessary.
I don't think I actually said anything wrong during this discussion, but afterwards I felt somewhat uneasy about knowing so little about such a large and complicated topic, so I have spent several hours this evening reading about the languages and peoples of the Middle East up through Central Asia, and I noticed some things I hadn't suspected - like connections between proto-Mongols and Proto-Turkic people and the possibility that Attila's Huns actually spoke a Turkic language (where most other sources assume they spoke something Uralic). Other Turkic connections go down to India, where Wikipedia mentions Hyderabad as the last survivor among a string of small states governed by people of Turkic extraction - I remembered Hyderabad mainly for the fabulous riches of its last 'nizam', who was deposed in 1948, but not for being a pocket remnant of Turkic expansion.
PS: see also my comments in Kraut's latest
thread about the Yamnayas - I mention the Hungarians there, and Árpád apparently led a genetially mixed group of warriors into Hungary, some of which may have been of Turkic stock, others of Uralic.
Apart from that I am in the process of preparing for my first trip abroad since February 2020 - a wee trip to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in Germany, where a group of chamber musicians is going to play a "
Rostocker Trio" for clarinet, viola and cello which I wrote for them earlier this year. It is a rare combination of instruments, but I had - almost by accident - already written a small trio for that combination a few years ago, and when they found it at the site IMSLP they contacted me, and I decided that they deserved to have something more substantial to play. During the 80s I played cello with two flutes, and I remember that I had to make transcriptions and write new works myself to get something to play
at all for those instruments, so it can't be easier for musicians playing clarinet, viola and cello together. I am quite curious to find out what the people from Rostock have played until now - and also curious to hear some of my own music played by others for the first time in thirty years.
Rostocker Trio.jpg
DE: "Trio" is in der Tat ein Neutrum-Wort auf Deutsch, aber wenigstens für meine Ohren hört sich *Rostocke
s Trio" ganz unmöglich an, nur "Rostocker" geht hier - und ich weiß nicht genau warum! Ich weiß aber, daß "Blatt" auch Neutrum ist, aber trotzdem heißt es "Hamburger Abendblatt" und nicht *"Hamburge
s Abendblatt", so vielleicht liegt darunder einen alten Dativ Pluralis - etwas für Rostocker bzw. Hamburger geschrieben. Wie wird dies von den einheimischen Experten erklärt?
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