INDO-EUROPEAN HOAX

1. TRUBETZKOY’S SIX INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY CRITERIA 

a) Absence of harmony of vowels (synharmonism). The disproof: What’s the point of taking that into account? What exactly is taken into account? The way the word is spelled or pronounced? For example, in Russian the surname “Romanova” has no synharmonism on paper, but does have it phonetically - [ramanava]. Besides, every language has words consisting of the same vowel in every syllable. In Ukrainian that would be ‘boloto’, ‘palanka’ and ’ ‘moloko’ among many others. In Spanish that would be ‘otoño’, ‘poroto’ and ‘Salamanca’ among many ’ others as well. In English it’s ‘nevertheless’, ‘Everett’ or ‘bottomhole’. Moreover, synharmonism is understood differently. Some imply repetition of the previous vowel, some insist on conformation to the previous vowel in terms of softness or labiality. So, there are no Indo-European languages free of synharmonism, while a non-Indo-European Georgian language reveals no clear tendency towards the harmony of vowels. Disproved. 

b) The number of consonants at the beginning of a word is not scarcer than the number of consonants inside the word. The disproof: Just a lie. The Russian word ‘навзрыд’ has one consonant in the first prefix and three consonants ‘inside the word’. Actually, and word starting with a prefix that consists of just one vowel and is followed by a root with several consonants, does have scarcer number of consonants at the beginning (none) than inside the word: ‘убран’, ‘овдовевший’, ‘approximate’, etc. In case if Trubetzkoy was talking about prefixless words, the instances like ‘бовдур’ or ‘pastrami ‘ ’ clearly show he did not know what he was talking about. But the most important is to remember that the consonants’ density in no way may be considered an Indo-European characteristic (Slav, to be exact) for the simple reason of Kartvelian languages not only boasting the same fea- ture, but both families sharing totally identical words, hugely crammed with consonants: კრწუნი-крцун (weasel) or კრკო-крко (acorn). Finally, an attentive reader won’t leave unnoticed the fact that in the definition Trubetzkoy speaks about the number of the consonants, while in the body of the text he pontificates on the qualitative difference between consonants at the beginning and inside the word. Disproved. 

c) A word is not obliged to start with a root. The disproof: Does it mean that non-Indo-European languages use no prefixes? Of course, it does not. Then, what’s the point? Obviously, none. The Georgian language is heavily prefixed. Disproved. 

d) The words are formed by alternation of vowels within the stem, among other ways. The disproof: In 1990 Tamara Tsopurashvili from Tbilisi University wrote a thesis on ‘Verbs with Alternating vowels in Ancient Georgian language’. The same phenomenon is typical for Finnish language: http://ru.wikibooks.org/wiki/Suomen_kieli_käyttöön Actually, the well-known Turkic umlaut is also an alternation of vowels within the stem. Finally, the synharmonism of vowels which was attributed by Trubetzkoy exclusively to non-IE languages in the first paragraph, in fact is nothing else but such an alternation between vowels in the stem, which the same Trubetzkoy attributes now to exclusively IE languages. Disproved. 

e) Alternation of consonants while making grammatical forms. The disproof: Yes, such alternation is typical for Slave languages and is not for Kartvelian ones. But you can’t say Georgian language doesn’t have it at all: 

• first, you’ll see such an alternation when conjugating verbs from ‘dgoma’ (დგომა) family, where ‘გ’ turns into ‘ქ’ in Simple Past Perfect: ვიდექი [videki] – ‘I’ve stood’; 

• second, the ‘ვ’ in პოვნა [povna] verb turns into the vowel ‘უ’ (or, more exactly, the semi-vowel): ვპოულობ [vpoulob] when conjugating in Present;
• the fundamental ყოფნა [qopna] verb alternates between ‘ფ’ and ‘ვ’ in past tenses: ვაყავი [viqavi]. Another fundamen- tal ყოლა [qola] verb conjugates as მყავს [mqavs], which gives us the ‘ლ-ვ’ alternation; 

• the verb დუმილი [dumili] has a გაჩუმება [gachumeba] future form, where ‘დ’ has clearly turned into ‘ჩ’; 

• finally, the დადება [dadeba] verb turns ‘ბ’ into ‘ვ’ while conjugating in Simple Past Perfect: დავდევი [davdevi] Besides, what grammatical forms are we talking about in, say, Indo-European English language? Disproved. 

f) The subject of an intransitive verb is interpreted as the subject of a transitive verb. The disproof: This is a too plain (unacceptable for Trubetzkoy) interpretation of non-ergativity of IE languages. Yes, the IE languages seem to have no ergative case. Today. But some of them clearly had it in ancient times. At least, Ukrainian language has preserved the traces of ergative construction in the famous cossack surnames Убийвовк, Стрижикурка, Плетикоса and the like, which are combinations of an imperative verb form and a direct object. The object in these surnames is used in nominative case, which is impossible for IE languages, but obligatory for ergative constructions. It proves that IE languages used to be ergative. Disproved. So, are there any criteria according to Trubetzkoy, that would make us call a language exceptionally Indo-European one? No. Is there a single Trubetzkoy’s IE criterion that is not equally applicable to the non-IE Georgian language? No. 

2. SWADESH LISTS 

Correspondence of words across the IE family is considered to be the main reason to believe in Indo-European language family. But first, we have to acknowledge that a mere imperialistic conquest (like the Roman one) would make huge territories of diverse ethnic and linguistic origin use the same vocabulary, once the conqueror decides to impose his language on the occupied territories. In times of Russian empire/USSR vast lands of totally different nations were forced to speak Russian. The Swadesh lists would coincide in Moldova, Yakutia, Karelia, Caucasus, Ukraine despite local nations pertaining to totally different language and ethnic groups and families. But it wouldn’t make us think of a Russian language family, would it? Note that every word from a Swadesh list in any Indo-European language has a number of synonyms. In most cases the synonyms are older than the Swadesh word. In most cases these older synonyms are not Indo-European. A classical example would be the Russian conjunction ‘и’, which has an older synonym ‘да’, highly Russian, but totally non-Indo-European. But how Indo-European are the words from the Swadesh lists? 

Here is the Swadesh list in Russian: http://geo.koltyrin.ru/spisok_svodesha.php?jazyk=russian Only a quick superficial glance at it is enough to single out 32 words (out of 207, more than 15%) that are of clear Kartvelian (which is, non-Indo-European) origin: 

• этот (this) – clear cognate with Spanish ‘ese’ and further with Georgian ‘es’ in the same meaning; 

• тот, та, то (that) – the Ukrainian neutral gender of this demonstrative pronoun ‘te’ totally coincides with Megrelian demonstrative pronoun ‘t(h)e’, which further leads to the true origin of English definite article ‘the’ (for definite articles being, in fact, demonstrative pronouns); 

• все (all) – the word originates from Kartvelian masdar ‘vseba’ meaning ‘to fill’. The phrase ‘выпей весь стакан’ means ‘выпей полный стакан’; 

• один (one) – cognate to Georgian ‘oden’ meaning ‘only’; 

• два (two) – in Georgian ‘du’ means ‘two’ in backgammon game; 

• четыре (four) – the origin (which so far has been the Greek word ‘tettara’) may go as deep as to a combination of Georgian/Svan morphemes ‘titar’ (titi + ar) meaning ‘place of fingers’ ‘ (with the opposable thumb deducted); ’ 

• пять (five) – the diphthong and soft sign conscious reading would give the true pronunciation of the word as [piati]. With ‘ati’ being Georgian ‘ten’, ‘pi ‘ -‘ should have something to do with ‘halving’. It does indeed in Georgian, where masdar ‘peba ‘ ’ (with p- as root) means exactly ‘splitting’. In old Russian the ‘pa ‘ -‘ prefix used to bear the meaning of exactly ‘half-a-…” like in ‘падчерица’ – ‘step-daughter’; 

• великий (big) – comes from Georgian ‘veli’ – “field’; 

• муж (husband) – cognates with Laz ‘kimozh’ in the same meaning; 

• мать (mother) – derivation from Georgian ‘muteli’ – ‘female genital organ ‘ ’; 

• зверь (animal) – derivation from Svan ‘dzver’ in the meaning of ‘meat’; 

• собака (dog) – cognate with Georgian ‘tsibaki’ in the same meaning; 

• палка (stick) – distant cognate to Georgian ‘palo ‘ ’ – ‘lone’, ‘only’; 

• кора (bark) – cognate to Georgian ‘kerki’ in the same meaning; 

• шкура (sheep’s skin) – cognate to Megrelian ‘shkuri’ in the meaning of ‘sheep’;
• рог (horn) – cognate to Georgian ‘rka’ in the same meaning;

• знать (to know) – cognate to Georgian ‘zneobiti’ in the meaning of ‘inner, moral’; 

• думать (to think) – cognate to Georgian ‘dumili’ – ‘to be silent’; 

• царапать (to scratch) – cognate to Georgian ‘tsarapi’ – ‘high bush’; 

• ходить (to piss) – cognate to Megrelian obscene ‘khodua’; 

• замерзнуть (to freeze) – cognate to Georgian ‘mzrali’ – ‘frozen ‘ ’; 

• река (river) – cognate to Georgian ‘reka’ – ‘muddy river’; 

• море (sea) – cognate to Georgian ‘marili’ – ‘salt’ and Svan ‘morel’ – ‘salt source’; 

• песок (sand) – derivation from Georgian ‘psma ‘ ’ – ‘to piss’ with Greek ‘psami ‘ ’ as intermediary; 

• туман (mist) – cognate to Megrelian ‘dumani’ in the same meaning; 

• гора (mountain) – cognate to Kartvelian ‘gora/gola’ in the same meaning; 

• ночь (night) – derivation from Megrelian ‘nochva’ – ‘carbonized’; 

• день (day) – cognate to Georgian ‘dena’ – ‘passing of time ‘ ’; 

• теплый (warm) – cognate to Georgian ‘tpili’ in the same meaning; 

• прямой (straight) – derivation from the Old Kartvelian root ‘pri ‘ ’ meaning ‘great, right’; 

• и (да, and) – correspondence to Georgian ‘da’ in the same meaning 

Thorough elaboration of the rest of the words from the list is likely to yield even more correspondences. The Spanish version of Swadesh list immediately reveals a bit less correspondences to Georgian words – 14: http://geo. koltyrin.ru/spisok_svodesha.php?jazyk=spanish But again, that’s at a superficial glance. For example, one of the most fundamental Spanish verbs – ‘comer’ – taken for analysis right while writing this article, easily showed the Georgian masdar ‘edeba’ as the source for Latin ‘edere’ and its span-offs: Spanish ‘comer’ and English ‘to eat’. Words like ‘ese’, ‘dos’, ‘madre’, ‘palo’, ‘mar’, ‘noche’ are cognates to the similar words in the Russian list, whose Kartvelian origin was explained above. Let’s add several more: 

• me (indirect declension form of ‘yo’) – total cognate to Georgian ‘me’ meaning ‘I’; 

• aquí (here) – total cognate to Georgian ‘ak’ in the same meaning; 

• marido (husband) – cognate to Georgian ‘kmari’ in the same meaning; 

• pie (foot) – cognate to Georgian ‘pehi ‘ ’ in the same meaning;

• agua (water) – derivation from Georgian აყუ (a+ku) which is the definite article ‘a’ combined with ‘ku’ – ‘water’; 

• rio (river) – cognate to Georgian ‘rioni’ – ‘lots of water’; 

• cielo (sky) – cognate to Georgian ‘tsa’ in the same meaning; 

• bueno (good) – derivation (through Latin ‘bene’) of Megrelian ‘beni’ meaning ‘useful’ 

The number of Kartvelian cognates in the English Swadesh list would be 17 with a big chance to grow rapidly upon scru- pulous analysis: http://geo.koltyrin.ru/spisok_svodesha.php?jazyk=english Words like ‘me’, ‘this’, ‘two’, ‘mother’, ‘eat’, river’ and ‘ ’ night’ have been explained, while the rest of correspondences are as follows: 

• when – cognate to Georgian ‘vini’ – ‘whence’; 

• one – cognate to Georgian ‘vin’ in the meaning of indefinite article ; 

• big – cognate to Megrelian ‘ bigva’ in the same meaning; 

• man – Georgian ergative form for ‘he’ pronoun; 

• dog – cognate to both Georgian ‘ dzagli’ and Megrelian ‘jogori ‘ ’; 

• drink – cognate to Georgian ‘ tro’ in the same meaning; 

• know – comes from Georgian ‘gon-‘ meaning ‘understand’ through Latin ‘gnarus’; 

• kill – cognate to Georgian ‘ klva’ in the same meaning; 

• moon – comes from Geogrian ‘mnati’ meaning ‘illuminating’; 

• earth – cognate to Georgian ‘erthi’ – ‘first ‘ 

All the correspondences mentioned in this chapter are explained and grounded exhaustively in Between Two Iberias project. The total number of world’s toponyms explained etymologically from Kartvelian point of view is 400+, the total number of world’s vocabularies’ words explained etymologically from Kartvelian point of view is 1000+. The interpretation is morphologically based. The above shows that the Swadesh lists can not be accepted as a ground to create the Indo-European language family for, at least, two reasons: (1) the nations may have been forced to use the conqueror’s vocabulary; and (2) many of the Swadesh words are of Katrvelian (which is, non-IE) family.

3. INDO-EUROPEAN INFINITIVES 

But if Trubetzkoy’s criteria and Swadesh’s lists don’t work, the indoeuropeists appeal to Indo-European infinitive formants, which differ from non-IE infinitives and are similar over the Indo-European family. One of the tightest ties that connect Slav languages to Sanskrit, forming together the Indo- (Sanskrit) European (Slav in particular) family, is correspondence between Slav and Sanskrit infinitives. Indeed, ‘брехати’ and ‘brhati’ in the same meaning impress. Although, ‘brhati’ is not an infinitive form, it’s a third person singular present tense form. Sanskrit infinitives end with ‘-tum’. We’ll need this knowledge a bit later. Nevertheless, Slav infinitives are truly unique (seemingly) for their ‘-ти’/‘-ть’/‘-ti’ endings. Quite a significant effort of mind might equal it to the English ‘to’ particle used at the beginning of English infinitive forms. From the other hand, the Roman (Latin, to be exact) infinitives have a typical (which is, Indo-European) ending of their own. Let´s keep in mind all that too. Now to the real stuff. Did you ever know that the best direction to search congeners to the Slav infinitive ‘-ti’-ending is not only totally oppo- site to the Indian course, but also will bring you to a totally non-Indo-European land? Land of Basques and language of Basques… The Basque infinitives in their majority end with ‘-tu’. They are so similar with the Ukrainian ones, that sometimes would leave you speechless: balakatu (to flatter, to calm down) and балакати (to talk, to speak), goritu (to burn) and горіти (to burn). You’ll find a lot of other interesting things like pisatu, txitatu, letatu and many more. So, the Ukrainian/Russian infinitives that had been looking so wonderfully Sanskritian and hence, Indo-European, in fact look much more Basquish and hence, non-Indo-European. How come? Since the Basque language has been considered as pertaining to the Proto-Kartvelian language family, and since the proj- ect Between Two Iberias has proven that all the ancient world used to speak languages of that same proto-Kartvelian (Pankartve- lian, if you want) language family, the secrets of the Indo-European infinitive endings should be looked for the keys to exactly in the Kartvelian family. What is Kartvelian infinitive? It’s masdar, a specific part of speech that serves both as infinitive and a verbal noun de- rived from such infinitive (or vice versa). Georgian masdars may have various forms, sometimes unpredictable. But nevertheless, most of them can be classified into distinct groups bearing specific endings: -oba, -eba, -deba, -vla, -ma, -na, -reba. What is infinitive/masdar from logical point of view? That’s a word that denotes an action. So, if an infinitive clearly consists of two parts, one of which repeats in multiple different infinitives, wouldn’t it be right to assume that this second repeat- ing part is actually the word that means ‘action’? Yes, it would. And yes, it is. I mean, the second part indeed means ‘action’ like in case of ‘-deba’. The Rayfield’s diction- ary gives the following translation of Georgian ‘deba’ (which is a masdar itself too):’making’, ‘having’, ‘being’. The rest of mas- dars endings also have similar meanings: ‘eba’ – ‘being fixed to sth.’, ‘being involved in sth.’; ‘(s)vla’ – ‘going’; ‘reba’ – ‘walk- ing’, ‘going’. Thus, we see that by the typical endings we can sort the Georgian masdar according to the type of action. Looks like no big deal, quite understandable. But can’t we apply the same method when trying to decipher the Indo-European infinitive endings (so far never even tried to be deciphered)? Yes, we can. The Basque/Ukrainian infinitive ‘goritu’/’goriti’ can be clearly split into ‘gori + tu’ and ‘gori + ti’. As we did it with Georgian masdars, lets assume the latter part – ‘tu’ or ‘ti’ – is the word meaning ‘action’, or, more appropriately, ‘doing’. If we believe that European languages derived from Kartvelian family (which we do), then we should get back to the Georgian language and look scrupulously at the masdar ‘deba’ which means ‘doing’. It also has the ‘-eba’-ending which leaves us with ‘d-‘ as the root. Logically, it must be followed by a vowel, which, ac- cording to Trubetzkoy, has high chances to be whichever, thanks to the specificity of Indo-European languages to alternate vowels. Thus, we suddenly come to a discovery of genuine etymology for the mysterious English ‘do’, as well as to its Ukrainian/ Russian cognates ‘дія’/‘дея’ [dia]/[dea]. Both took the Kartvelian ‘d-‘-root from ‘deba’ and added the vowel they deemed proper. ’ By the way, the English people did it both ways, thanks to what we ended up having not only ‘do’, but also ‘deed’.

So, if you have followed attentively so far, you should find yourselves as being tried to get persuaded that ‘gori + tu’ = ’ ‘gori + do’, and ‘gori +ti’ = ‘gori + dia’. How likely is that? Totally. First, a quick glance at the Basque ‘goritu’ infinitive is enough to make us want to rearrange it into ‘tu + gori’ (the English ‘gore’ is clear cognate to the Basque ‘goritu’, which also means ‘poner al rojo vivo ‘ ’), which is already the etymology for the English ‘to’-particle. It is nothing else but ‘do’. Second, we prove the ‘do-to-tu’ correspondence through the etymological dictionary where the article dedicated to ‘do’ refers us to the Old High German word ‘tun’ (and now it’s the best moment to recall the Sanskrit ‘-tum’ infinitive ending). So, yes, ‘do’ , ‘to’ and ‘-tu’ are cognates. Now, what happened to the Ukrainian infinitive? Why did it turn into ‘-ti’? We have two possible answers here: (1) they borrowed the root of Georgian ‘deba’ masdar as ‘di-’ from the very beginning; or (2) the ‘u’ turned into ‘i’ due to the notorious ‘upsilon problem’, which left us huge amount of totally mangled historical names and toponyms. The Greek upsilon sounded as [u] in Ancient Greek language, but was made sound as [i] after it was borrowed into the Latin alphabet. So, the conclusion is as follows: the non-IE Basque infinitive ending ‘-tu’, as well as the IE Ukrainian infinitive ending ‘-ti’, as well as the IE English infinitive particle ‘to’ are the same thing meaning ‘doing’ and derived from the Georgian masdar ‘deba’. Quite a blow at the Indo-European concept, isn’t it? And that’s not all… What about the Latin infinitive ending which is ‘-re’? Do you remember what we did to the Georgian masdar ending ‘-deba’ (which is a masdar itself)? We got the ‘ ’ d-‘-root out from it. Why wouldn’t we do the same to another Georgian typical masdar ending ‘reba’? What would it be? It would be ‘re’. In this case the word ‘re’ would also mean ‘doing’. We can check it on the Latin/Russian pair ‘vertere’/’verteti’: verte +re = verte + ti. Since ‘-ti’ has already been proven as ‘ ’ do’, the equation lets us conclude that ‘re’ also means ‘do’. A very cool example would be the verb ‘danzare’ that comes from Georgian ‘dandzreva’ which is, according to our method, ‘dandz + re‘ (danzare). So, all the Latin infinitives ‘re’-endings in fact also translate as ‘doing’ and are derived from the Georgian masdar ending ‘reba’. The final conclusion is as follows: the Indo-European Slav and English infinitive formants as well as the non-Indo-Euro- pean Basque infinitive formant are Georgian words. The overall conclusion to this article is as follows: there is not a single reason to consider Indo-European language family as such. It’s a branch of the Kartvelian family.