Re: Real or Spurious Root Matches? (was OE *picga)

--- In cybalist@..., "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@...>
wrote:

> --- 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?

I imagined the temporal sequence something like this:
1. lush
2. drought

>
> 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,

Sorry, dropped a 'been'

>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'.

You're right of course. Danish doesn't distinguish teach/learn or
lend/borrow; I was being lazy. Actually it was the clause beginning
with ...for there to be... that annoyed me.

>
> 'Between coast and interior' is fine if you want to leave us

guessing

> which coasts you are referring to.

Yup. Modestly I leave part of the discoveries to others.

> 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.

Here's my answer: War. It causes shibboleths to arise (or they may
have formed in the process of polarisation leading up to war).

>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 Northern India.

>Think of Romance or
> Scandinavian for hard evidence.
>

I have some Scandinavian data in

http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html

> 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.

BTW: For several hundred years the now North French coast from the
present Belgian border to Boulogne and beyond was Germanic-speaking.
That means from Hengist and Horsa on there was an unbroken
AngloSaxon - North German dialect continuum.

>
> Richard.

Torsten