Dennis,
It's not enough to list a number of connections for anyone to take
them seriously. An etymological proposal should come with a detailed
justification -- an account of the phonological correspondences, of
the cultural and geographical route of the loanword and of its
semantic trajectory, preferably with some epigraphic and historical
evidence to support your claim.
If Bernal simply lists lookalikes in two families, such a list has no
value without a careful analysis of item after item. The burden of
the proof should be on him in the first place, and it makes no sense
to calculate 'the rejection rate' until ALL the items have been
analysed. As I pointed out, the list contains both a number of words
which are doubtless of Afroasiatic origin (and most of them have been
recognised as such for many decades) and a number of words which are
best analysed as IE. The remaining items are in the "grey zone" in
between. Most of the proper name explanations, for example, are
arbitrary and fanciful. The words in question remain etymologically
obscure. But the fact that they have no accepted IE etymologies
doesn't help Bernal very much, since there are no convincing Semitic
or Egyptian etymologies either.
"False friends" are really much more common than many people think.
To a lay person, English day seems to be a perfect match for Latin
dies (both phonologically and semantically), and most people just
can't believe that deus and theos are unrelated. Isn't weave a
borrowing from Swahili (wavu 'net')? Isn't Slavic (j)aje 'egg'
derived from the same source (yai 'egg'). It's easy to compile a list
of such "correspondences", but by doing so we wouldn't even have
begun to prove that the roots of European culture are Bantu.
Piotr
--- In cybalist@egroups.com, "Dennis Poulter" <dpoulter@...> wrote:
...
> Nevertheless, so far we have a rejection rate of approx. 20% of the
words proposed (all culled from Bernal - I don't dare at this stage
propose any of my own speculations).