--- In cybalist@..., "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> That's why I imagined it must have loaned at a time
> when AfroAsiatic roamed a lush Sahara for there to have been a
> unbroken linguistic connection between coast and interior (yuck -
is
> this English?).
Drought refugees from a still lush Sahara?
On Grammar:
I think we'd have to take a vote on the correctness of 'it must have
loaned'; I'm uncomfortable with the lack of an object, the idea of a
language 'loaning' things out, and I don't much like the
verb 'loan'. It's the recipient language that does the borrowing,
the donor does nothing. I'd have said 'the words must have been
borrowed'.
'Between coast and interior' is fine if you want to leave us guessing
which coasts you are referring to.
On Diffusion:
Your notion of an 'unbroken linguistic connection' is one I'd hoped
to see explored for early Indo-European. I'd asked what breaks up a
dialect continuum, and got the curt answer 'laziness' from gLeN. I
had wondered if there were some size limit beyond which a continuum
would break up, like Roche's limit for satellites. I'm not sure how
well words would diffuse within a continuum. Think of Romance or
Scandinavian for hard evidence. You've already speculated on
language differences within the continental Celtic dialect continuum
with your suggestion of an alien lingua franca (Germanic) being
adopted. The Turkic and Mongol variations may provide a better
example for Afro-Asiatic.
Richard.