This is quite speculative and an area I leave to interested linguists since these kinds of technical linguistic questions are not my main interest.
This has little to do with my syllabic grid in the Ancient Sign Concordance, but I saw this problem and I thought I would mention it.
In Luvian (especially later cuneiform Luvian) one could ask whether the W-based signs, currently transliterated as "syllables" are actually a form of vowel "determinants", which in Luvian would mean that they mark labial, pharyngeal, uvular or velar sounds or something similar, or, possibly mark vowel harmony.
I have read online about "vowel harmony" in the Ural-Altaic languages like Turkish and Mongolian, which I do not speak, so I can not address this issue any further, but vowel harmony could explain the W-based "syllables" in cuneiform Luvian especially, which appear to have been developed to deal with vowel harmony in a language foreign to the original Luvians.
[Here is an updated link to an understandable article on vowel harmony and the languages of the world that have it.]
This would in any case not be an element of the base Luvian Indo-European language and could hence in cuneiform Luvian be a borrowing from Hittite, which I sense to be a Turkish type of language.
Hence, in cuneiform Luvian especially, it might be speculated that the W-based symbols are not "pronounced" per se but instruct the reading of the "modified" vowels in terms of "vowel harmony", where in grammatical elements the subsequent vowel is modified to agree with the vowel of the preceding syllable (base word).
Or, vice versa, someone accustomed to vowel harmony might be trying to write a foreign language using those basic aspects of a language he knows.
That might explain having too many vowels in words the way Luvian is currently transliterated and bring some new insights.
Again, this is speculative and a product of my sensing that original Hieroglyphic Luvian and later cuneiform Luvian are languages that may be wide apart from one another.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
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Sky Earth Native America
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy,
Volume 1, Edition 2, 266 pages, by Andis Kaulins.
Sky Earth Native America 2:
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy,
Volume 2, Edition 2, 262 pages, by Andis Kaulins.
Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".
The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.
Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:
"Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist
that there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America, e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska,
geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.
See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,
American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.
Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:
"These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,
drawing them according to their magnitude.
The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study.
... They were keen observers....
The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomy comparable to that of the early white men."
See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,
American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.
In our book, we take these observations one level further
and show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carving and pictographic rock art in Native America,
together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarks
placed according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry sky
in the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".
That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,
whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens, "immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,
cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.
These landmarks were placed systematically in North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South America
and can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."
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