Talk:Paeonian language

Verifying info

After correcting an apparent error introduced into the text by the new material from the Italian article, I want some things double-checked: the etymology of Paionian Pontos does not look convincing; it may as well derive from PIE *pent-, "a path" from which Greek pontos ("sea") derives according to Pokorny, Watkins, etc.; I also looked in Pokorny and could not find *ponktos. I did find PIE *pen-, *penk- ("swamp, water, wet"), which may be the intended source of *ponktos. The Illyrian toponym Pannonia, per Pokorny at least, derives from the aformentioned PIE *pen-. Alexander 007 07:08, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Under PIE *stebh-, "post, pillar, foundation", Pokorny has, among many entries, Old Prussian stabis (rock), Old Church Slavonic stoboru (pillar), Old English stapol (post, pillar), and ancient Greek stephein (to wreathe around, fasten) and stobos (scolding, bad language), but I'm not sure how he explains the semantic development with that last one. Alexander 007 07:53, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

There could be similar to Romanian "a înţepa", which means "to make a wicked remark", which is derived from "ţeapă", a stake or a spike. (cf. Vlad Ţepeş :-) bogdan 09:58, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Could be. Good idea. :-) Alexander 007 10:05, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Question

From the article, The Indo-European voiced aspirates (*bh, *dh, etc) became plain voiced consonants (/b/, /d/, etc)...

By the way, one thing that often trips me out: how does anyone really know that "voiced aspirates became unaspirated, etc." — as in the case of PIE *bh-->b and PIE *dh--->d, etc. — just because the plain letters were used for the sound in writing (ex: Doberos)? Many languages don't distinguish those sounds, which many people don't even consciously notice. In English, for example, the t in tap is usually aspirated, but it is still written tap, no extra letter or even diacritic to show aspiration. Alexander 007 12:03, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

OK I'm responding more than four years later, but you're confusing phonemes and allophones. Speakers don't consciously notice allophones but do notice phonemes. If b and bh were separate phonemes, then you can expect that someone creating their own alphabet from scratch would distinguish them. Obviously alphabets aren't usually created from scratch, so it's possible that a given language has a distinction but doesn't write it because the source alphabet didn't have such a distinction. Benwing (talk) 06:36, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Check out this link for more info about Paionian:

[1]. I came across an interesting thread there. I was just about to resume research to try to locate Lake Prasias on the map today and identify the paprax and tilon fish species, and I found that thread using Google. I think I had also previously considered that paprax may have been the perch fish, when I was checking out what fish are common in lakes of the area. In fact I previously did more research on tilon/psilon also but I put those notes aside and I don't know where I put those notes. 76.208.174.102 (talk) 01:55, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

The identification of paprax and perch looks likely, and identifying tilon as the European chub, common current Greek name Tylinari, looks certain: the European chub is very easy to catch using angling techniques, and that sounds just like the easy-to-catch freshwater lake fish being caught by Paionians as described by Herodotus. 76.208.174.102 (talk) 03:45, 10 August 2011 (UTC)