Many years ago when I was
studying Arabic, and having a smattering of Welsh from my Welsh-speaking
relatives, I too was struck by some similarities between the two :
1. the word order
VSO
2. the frequent prefixing of
such sentences with a meaningless particle (y/yr in Welsh, fa-, wa- in
Arabic)
3. the construction of relative
clauses; the use of the definite article (extended with the demonstrative in
Arabic) as the link, and the use of a resumptive (is that the term?) pronoun in
prepositional clauses to refer back to the subject of the sentence. This
"resumptive" pronoun is also used in Arabic where the subject of the sentence is
the direct object of the verb in the relative clause. I can't remember how Welsh
does this.
4. the possessive construction,
whereby the thing possessed is defined by being possessed and no longer takes
the definite article, thus "the garden of the house", Arabic "Hadiiqat al-bayt",
Welsh "gardd y ty".
At the time I just put this down
to coincidence.
On the same subject, while
looking through this site : http://www.muw.edu/~rmccalli/subsGerIntro.html
I noticed a fair number of Semitic sources for the non-IE substratum in
proto-Germanic. One in particular that I noticed that was not attributed to
Semitic was :
dan- "low ground, den" >
*dan-jam > denn [OE]
> den; Dene [OE] > Dane [cw, rc]
(I was researching dan, danu at the time). This makes a remarkable fit,
phonetically and semantically, with the Semitic root /dny/ that I was proposing
for dan- etc.
At the same site, there is mention of a Theo Vennemann, who claims that the
megalith builders were Semitic-speaking.
So, what is going on here? We now seem to have Semitic
contact/influence/borrowings in Basque, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, NE Caucasian,
Kartvelian, Etruscan. Could it be that there is a Semitic substratum throughout
western and southern Europe, right up to the Pontic region?
Cheers
Dennis