Veneti - Slovenian Ancestors

[kyashan]

I did notice the similarity between ancient venetic and modern slovenian, but how does that cope with the traditional classification of venetic as an Illyrian language? An Illyrian substratum of modern slovenian who has been later slavicized, perhaps?

[Galaico]

I read some time ago that the Spanish city of Palencia (Palentia) had been founded by the Illyrians thousands of years ago. Does anyone know if the ethymology of Palentia shows an Illyrian origin?

[Caesar Princeps]

Originally Posted by kyashan

I did notice the similarity between ancient venetic and modern slovenian, but how does that cope with the traditional classification of venetic as an Illyrian language? An Illyrian substratum of modern slovenian who has been later slavicized, perhaps?

I would propend for this idea, but it is not easy to sort out the problem, in my opinion.

[Menydh]

Originally Posted by Galaico

I read some time ago that the Spanish city of Palencia (Palentia) had been founded by the Illyrians thousands of years ago. Does anyone know if the ethymology of Palentia shows an Illyrian origin?

Palentia, like Numantia, was a city of the Vaccei, a Celtic tribe. However, the suffix in the name of Palentia (like that of the city of Numantia) is Iberian: lentia, lantia, mantia.

[Kylfing]

Veneti teaching tablet

Finnic view:

At the end of each OEKA is one of the Venetic characters. Thus what
we see here is something analogous to the Estonian ‘õige A, õige B,...’
translating as ‘The correct (way of writing) A, the correct B, etc’

Finnish Estonian Venetic
oikea a õige a oeka a
oikea b õige b oeka b
oikea d õige d oeka d
oikea e õige e oeka e
- etc - - etc - - etc -.

The purpose of the repetition is obvious. It is a technique used by
teachers - the main concept is repeated. If the teacher asks “What is the
proper way of writing A” then the student is asked to repeat “The proper
way of writing A is. . . .” It drums in the concept. Most people recognize
this teaching method in terms of mathematics: “Two times one equals two;
two times two equals four; two times three equals six, etc”
In our view, therefore, the tablets were inscribed by student scribes
under the authority of a teacher. It explains why there are a number of
them all of the same form, even with handles at the end. After practicing
the characters with OEKA, the students were taught to write some common
sentences, and they filled up the other part of the tablet with their
exercises. Indeed, this was practice, was not serious, because in many
cases, running out of space, the students continued into the handle! We
must allow the Venetic writing students to be human like us today!

Slovenic view:

Looking at the text, Bor suddenly had a new perspective: what if the inscription should be read from the top? If he further left out the row of letters “o” as having only a separating function? He tried it, and came up with an answer that made sense. The result was stunning and beyond expectations. He discovered a recognizable Slovenian verb, set out with grammatical forms still current in modern Slovenian.

E E E E E E E E E E E
K K K K K K K K K K K
A A A A A A A A A A A
E H B T IS R Š P J D V

With the inclusion of the letters from the damaged part of the tablet, which Venetologists had already provided, and leaving out the top row of letters “o”, Bor got the following words:

Ekae, ekah, ekat, ekais, ekar, ekaš, ekap,
ekan, ekam, ekal, ekak, ekaj, ekad, ekav.

He made a further assumption that “e” is pronounced as “je” (ye as in yes), which is the case in Old Church Slavic (9th century) and in present day Russian. In Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian it is both spoken and written as “je”. The result were forms of the verb jekat (to cry, wail or mourn, eg. at a funeral), its meaning and endings still current in Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian:

jekat (inf), jekam (1st p. sg.), jekaš (2 nd p. sg),jekaj (imp. sg.),
jekal (past part. masc.), jekaje (present part.), jekah (aorist 1 st p. sg.)

Bor made another important discovery - a segment on Venetic phonetics, with consonants and tautosyllabic consonant pairs, such as kr, kn, kl, tr, tn, tl, sr, sn, sl, mr, mn, etc., another teaching tool.


WHAT IS YOUR OPINION?


Michelangelo Naddeo:

At the beginning of the second millennium B.C. a runic alphabet consisting of 16 letters was already in existence in Flavia, a region in the north of Europe. It was used by the Finno-Ugric, Flavio populations of Europe and created by the need to write a Finnic language from which modern Finnish is derived.

When the Indo-Europeans arrived in Europe from the steppe, they did not have an alphabet and were not able to write.

In the second half of the second millennium B.C. the Germanici, a population of mixed Flavio-Steppico origin, began to use the Flavio runic script and to modify the pronunciation of some letters. Then they started to add letters to the end of the alphabet and, finally, to insert other letters into the alphabet. Altogether they added an “ætt”. The Runes became an alphabet of 24 letters.

But as soon as the Germanici left, the Vikings went back to writing with a 16-letter alphabet which was in keeping with their ancient phonology. Such a strange and drastic reduction of phonemes had so far remained unexplained and inexplicable!

The Indo-Europeanists maintain that Indo-European was an [o] language, that became an [a] language for a certain, proto-germanic period and then returned to being an [o] language in modern Germanic languages. The [a] period was a mutation brought about by the underlying Finnic substratum, which did not have the [o]. For the same reason, in Flavia, the movable Indo-European accent became fixed on the first syllable.

When the Indo-Europeans arrived, the Finnics already knew not only how to write, but even how to .... speak!!!

The phonology of ancient Europe was very limited, while that of the Indo-European newcomers was rich in aspirated and sonorous consonants. Modern European phonology developed from the mixing of the languages of these two peoples. This process was, however, incompatible with some of the “laws” of Indo-Europeanism.

One of Grimm’s laws was …. just another of his fairy tales.

Before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, Europe almost certainly had its own phonological homogeneity, if not a complete linguistic one, with the sole exception perhaps of the Basque lands.

Were the Veneti Slavic? From various ancient sources we know of three different
tribes bearing the name of the Veneti or Venedi.4 A large tribe of the Veneti, first mentioned
by Herodotus, lived along the northern shores of the Adriatic Sea. A few surviving place
names and brief inscriptions suggest that the Adriatic Veneti spoke an Italic dialect. The memory
of the Italic Veneti survives in the names of the province Venetia and the city of Venice.
There was also a Celtic tribe of the Veneti living in the Morbihan district of Brittany. According
to Caesar, the Veneti of Brittany excelled “in the theory and practice of navigation.”5
Today several French place names, such as Vannes or Vendée, remind us of this tribe’s existence.
Finally, a tribe of the Veneti was mentioned by Pliny the Elder (a.d. 23–79) who located
it along the Vistula. Tacitus (ca. a.d. 55–120) identified the Vistula Veneti as the eastern
neighbors of Germania, while Ptolemy placed them along the southern shores of the
Venedic Bay (Ouenedikós kólpos), that is, of the Baltic Sea. The Veneti are also mentioned
twice on a Roman road map known as the Tabula Peutingeriana whose protograph may go
back to the third or fourth century a.d.
Since the Vistula/Baltic Veneti left no written records, their linguistic affiliation can only
be gleaned indirectly. Tacitus was alone among the ancient authors to tackle the problem of
their ethnic origin. After hesitating whether to classify them as Germanic or Sarmatian, he finally
decided in favor of the former on the basis of their cultural similarity with the Germanic
peoples. Yet, in most investigations dealing with Slavic prehistory, the Baltic Veneti are not
considered Germanic, as Tacitus would have it, or Illyrian, like their namesakes on the Adriatic,
or Celtic, like the Morbihan Veneti. Rather, they are generally regarded as Slavic. To
justify such an identification, which if correct would directly confirm the autochthonous theory,
three circumstances are mentioned. It is noted, in the first place, that the Veneti of the
first and second centuries a.d. and the historic Slavs of the sixth century inhabited the same
area. Second, the name of the Veneti has survived in German as Wenden or Winden, where it
designates the Slavs who live in the closest proximity of Germany. And, last, the sixth-century
Gothic historian Jordanes (1.10) applied the terms Veneti and Slavs to the same ethnic
community (Niederle 1923:32–33).
These arguments, however, are not decisive. There is no reason to doubt that by the sixth
century the Slavs were on the Vistula (though it is quite unlikely that they had by then reached
the Baltic). This does not mean, however, that they had to be there in the time of Tacitus. During
the intervening four hundred years Europe underwent its most momentous transformations,
as the fall of Rome and the Hunnic invasions started the ethnic whirligig known as the
Great Migrations. To assume a lack of change during the period of such profound ethnic perturbations
is to strain the laws of historical probability.
Nor can the German practice of designating their Slavic neighbors by the names Wenden
or Winden help us in solving the question of the ethnic character of the Veneti. Transfers of
names from one ethnic group to another have frequently occurred in history and signify no
more than some kind of spatial and temporal contiguity between the two communities. The
German usage may merely indicate that some non-Germanic Veneti lived in the area occupied
later by the West Slavs and that the Germans transferred the name of the former to the
latter. In an analogous way the Lithuanians transferred the name Gudai (Goths) to the East
HISTORICAL SETTING · 3
4. The alternation of t and d is due to the so-called Grimm’s Law in Germanic (2.3). In this book the term Veneti
is used throughout, regardless of its spelling in the ancient sources.
5. Caesar, Gaius Julius (1933), The Gallic War, trans. H. J. Edwards, London: William Heinemann.
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Slavs or the Germans referred to the Czechs as the Böhmer, which was the name of the Celtic
tribe of the Boii who lived in Bohemia before the Czechs. There is no reason, however, to
assume that the transfer of the name Veneti to the Slavs occurred much before the sixth
century.
There is also no compelling evidence to justify the claim that Jordanes’ identification of
the Veneti with the Slavs reflects an ancient situation. The Slavicization of the Veneti is possible
in the sixth century but most improbable in the first. To take an analogous example, the
Franks in eighth-century France were already fully Romanized and could be identified with
the native Gallo-Roman population. It would be absurd, however, to extend such an identification
to the fifth-century Germanic Franks, who were then just embarking upon their conquest
of Gaul.
Quite aside from these considerations, the very fact that the ancient sources locate the
Veneti on the Baltic provides the most persuasive argument against their identification with
the Slavs. The point is that Slavic vocabulary does not contain any indication that the early
Slavs were exposed to the sea. Proto-Slavic had no maritime terminology whatsoever, be it
in the domain of seafaring, sea fishing, boat building, or sea trade.6 Especially striking is the
absence of a Proto-Slavic word for amber, the most important item of export from the shores
of the Baltic to the Mediterranean. In view of this, the very fact that Ptolemy refers to the
Baltic as the Venedic Bay appears to rule out a possible identification of the Veneti of his
times with the Slavs.
It is interesting to recall in this connection a story that many scholars, from QafaÇík
(1862:133–138) on, have adduced in support of the identification of the Veneti with the
Slavs.7 The story originated with Cornelius Nepos, the Roman historian of the first century
b.c., and was repeated after him by Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder: “Cornelius
Nepos . . . reports the testimony of Q. Metellus Celer who . . . said that when he was a proconsul
in Gaul, the king of the Boti presented him with several Indians [Indos] and that when
he inquired whence they had arrived in this land, he found out that a violent storm snatched
them away from the Indian sea [ex Indicis aequoribus] and that, after traversing [the expanse]
that lay in between, they were thrown out on the shores of Germany.”8
Could one claim that the Indi of this account were Slavs? In suggesting that this indeed
could have been the case, QafaÇík had to accept a number of hypotheses: that Nepos’ story
was not fictitious; that a sea voyage from India (or some other place referred to as India) to
Western Europe was not feasible in or before the first century b.c.; that Indi and Indicus are
to be read as Vindi and Vindicus; that the Indi (now identified as the Vindi) were in fact the
Venedi  Veneti; that the Indi (now identified as the Veneti) arrived on the shores of Germany
from the Baltic rather than from some other sea, like the Adriatic; that the watery expanse
[aequora] which the luckless sailors had to traverse was merely the Kattegat and the
Skagerrak; that the Indi ( Vindi  Veneti) were Slavs; and that the Slavs were capable of
making long sea voyages in or before the first century b.c. The degree of probability of most
of these assumptions is fairly low, and QafaÇík was duly cautious in advancing his hypothe-
4 · HISTORICAL SETTING
6. Proto-Slavic morje ‘sea’ originally meant a marsh (incidentally, from the same Indo-European root) and dialectally
still means a lake. Similarly, Proto-Slavic ostrovC, composed as it is of o- ‘around’ and str- ‘flow’, suggests a river
island rather than a sea island (Meillet 1927:8).
7. Gil’ferding (1868), Pogodin (1901), Niederle (1925), and many autochthonists of the modern period.
8. Mela, Pomponius (1880), Chorographia, text established by Karl Frick, books 1–3, Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, book
3, 5.45.
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sis (“we surmise that should our interpretation of this matter be correct, it would throw more
light on [Slavic] antiquities,” 133). QafaÇík’s followers, however, show no hesitation in considering
his surmise a proven fact.9
Another piece of evidence countering the claim that the Veneti of the times preceding the
Great Migrations were Slavic is furnished by Henry of Livonia (Henricus de Lettis), who in
his Latin chronicle, dating from the very beginning of the thirteenth century, described a
clearly non-Slavic tribe of the Vindi (German Winden, English Wends) which lived in Courland
and Livonia (on the territory of today’s Latvia). The tribe’s memory lives on in the name
of the river Windau (Latvian Venta), with the town of Windau (Latvian Ventspils) at its mouth,
and in Wenden, the old name of the town of C’sis (East Slavic KesB) in Livonia. The location
of this tribe coupled with recently discovered archaeological evidence (Ochman¿ski
1982) suggest that the Vindi of Courland and Livonia may well be the descendants of the
Baltic Veneti.


• 1206 wurde Wenden (Cesis) erstmals urkundlich erwähnt und feiert 2006 sein 800-jähriges Jubiläum. Auf dem Nußberg (Riekstu Kalns), nahe dem Fluss Gauja, stand die sog. Wendenburg, die im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert von den Wenden bewohnt wurde. Der finno-ugrische Stamm der Wendenlebte ursprünglich an der Venta (Windau), einem Fluss in Kurland . Er wurde von den Kuren vertrieben und ließ sich im heutigen Cesis nieder. Die Stadt hat dadurch ihren ursprünglichen Namen Wenden erhalten.

Finno-Ugrian tribe called Wenden lived originally at Venta, river in Curland.

[wilpuri]

Kylfing, you wouldn't happen to be Ariston from NoFo, would you?

[Kernunnos]

An entire downloadable book is available here on the finnish - adriatic origins of the Veneti (amber trade people, romanized and slavicized later), it is password protected but there is an hint for finnish users to discover it (and let us know it)

VENETI LANGUAGE - An Ancient Language from a New Perspective

The book content are largely described


The paduan "Tavola da Este" tablet can be read in literary / old slovenian, work by professor Ambrozic

THE “TAVOLA DA ESTE” INSCRIPTION by Anthony Ambrozic,

Excerpt:

VENETI: Traders of Ancient Europe

The name VENETI appears in historical documents dating back to Homer, who mentioned Eneti coming to the aid of Troy in his Iliad. By about 500BC the largest center of their activity was in northern Italy. Greek writings describe a wealthy people who were the Greek source of amber. In ancient Europe, tribes became specialized along the lines of clans and tribes, some dedicating themselves to fishing, others to farming, others to herds, etc. Clearly the Veneti were trader families and tribes, originating from among the northern boat-users, and stimulated by the valuable product amber, only found in two locations in the north - on the eastern coast of the Baltic, and the coast of the Jutland Peninsula bordering the North Sea.



With the stimulus of amber trade, Finnic-speaking traders developed into intrepid traders through the riverways of Europe, following paths such as those shown in the map. (Routes along the coasts of the seas are excluded for simplicity.) With the rise of the Roman Empire, the Adriatic Veneti became Romanized. Elsewhere, they assimilated into the most useful language for their continued trading. For example the Venedi who carried goods between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic seas, were from about the fourth century AD speaking Slavic as with the expansion of the Slavs, it was the dominant language of their customers.

VENETI LANGUAGE - An Ancient Language from a New Perspective

VENETI LANGUAGE - An Ancient Language from a New Perspective

Password: manuscript-09-06