Re: The palatal sham :) (Re: [tied] Re: Albanian (1))

Miguel:

> The different gender forms are the least of it. The -m,
> or lack of it, is decisive.

It is decisive of nothing. It neither suggests a different
time for the two loans, nor a different source. I will
give you credit for the possibility of there being
different sources and/or times but I would say that it is
the sibilant that is more the deciding factor. The
petrofact morphology of the word says little at all.

>>This cannot be supported seriously. Putting aside the fact
>>that Semitic is not sufficiently diverse to even consider
>>such a ludicrous date, reconstructions like *kaspu "silver",
>>*ti?n- "olive", *kuna:t_- "emmer", *h.int- "wheat", *s'i`a:r-
>>"barley", *`inab- "grape", *gapn- "vines" and *wayn- "wine"
>>negate your untenable point of view completely.
>
> Why?

As above. The date is too deep. It's not realistic. Even
American Heritage says that the terms reconstructed point
to the late Neolithic/early Chalcolithic:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/10.html

> No it isn't. Cushitic does not have the typically Semitic
> distribution of masc.numeral + fem.noun and fem.numeral +
> masc.noun.

In that sense, you're correct. You're speaking specifically
about numeral gender polarity, and I'm talking about gender
polarity in morphology as a whole. At any rate, the gender
polarity that you're speaking of still exists in
Proto-Semitic and it's interesting that "6" and "7" as
evidenced in IE are declined with opposing genders.

> NW Semitic was spoken in Palestine and Syria, not in
> Western Turkey.

I KNOW that. This is the supposed theory. However why is
it guaranteed that they could not have been Western Turkey?
Do you have a time machine, because I don't think anything
else is going to show that they weren't there. And frankly,
it doesn't make sense that Western Anatolia was too scary
for Semites to enter.


= gLeN