>Despite Glen's attempts to find an appearance of "Semitish" people in
>the first farmers (Yarmukan) of Palestine, archaeologically the
>situation just does not add up. Farming appears in Palestine to have
>been a northern invention.
Yes...
>Emmer wheat is found on the rain fed slopes of the Zagros to the >Taurus
>mountains, and it is clear that the [...] There is even some
>evidence of obsidian coming from Nemrud Dag (Mt Ararat) which was the
>centre of the Hurrian language. If these people had been Semitic
>they would have recieved their Obsidian from a West Arabian source.
I've been trying for the longest time to try and sway you from the confusion
between the "Semitish" that influenced IE or Kartvelian and the early
Semites. Being that Semitish speakers would by logical necessity be
agricultural, the two are seperate. I don't see how Semitish can't have
adopted agricultural techniques and other inventions from Caucasian peoples
to the north and then spread that way. You haven't established why these
people that you admit are existant in the archaeology aren't speaking
Semitish.
You of all people seem to insist that migrations from Africa into the
northern areas were happening all the time because of scarce resources and
population expansion. One needs to have good land to farm. I'm no farmer but
I'm guessing that overpopulation would be counterproductive to this goal.
>The linguistic and cultural influence would have been
>
> Khattic -----> Yarmukan
> Hurrian -----> culture
And there's nothing to say that this isn't our Semitish speakers.
>Proto-Afro-Asiatic languages at this period would have been contined
>to Africa. There is clear evidence for this.
Not linguistically, which is the best evidence one can find when speaking of
language. There is a strong difference between "evidence" and "one of many
possibilities".
>The desert shrank to two small areas of the interior. This period, >from
>7,000-8,000BCE saw no Afro-Asiatic language outside this region.
After that wild error concerning the date of Proto-Semitic, I won't humour
you on this one. Common AfroAsiatic is dated to 10,000 BCE. By 8000-7000
BCE, AA would most certainly have already splintered into its known
branches. I find it difficult to swallow that Semitic was still confined in
Africa at this point. There are others who appear to take other very
different views on the origin of Semitic, leading me to believe that the
issue is by no means "evidenced" by the archaeology as you claim. Bomhard,
for instance, thinks that Semitic had reached northern and eastern Syria by
this time.
>The Chadic group of Afro-Asiatic may have had some origin at this >period.
Get your facts straight: Remember Proto-AA is 10,000 BCE.
>Thus there was no Semitic languages spoken before 5,300 BCE anywhere >north
>of Southern Lebanon.
This still remains an unproven assertion. Unless you can discuss the
linguistic side of the arguement with me, I won't be convinced.
>To find the linguistic elements that are common to proto-Semitic and
>proto-IE, therefore, you need a different mechanism.
John, Semitic did not borrow its own number system and there can be no
intermediate language that you can supply to explain the linguistic
influnce. So far you have not supplied it, only going on about
archaeological pseudo-evidence which will never say anything conclusive
about pre-historic language patterns. Sorry, it's not working. You will have
to adapt your strategy or discontinue.
>Their word for goat, for instance, probably came from the area where
>wild pre-domesticated goats had once run wild, the same rain fed area >from
>the Zagros to the Tauros Mountains and down into the Anti->Lebanon. It is
>hard to see how Semites, coming from Africa, where >there was no wild
>goats,[...]
Then the most rational thing to do is to accept a Middle-Eastern origin of
Semitic/Semitish, as Bomhard does for one. This is necessary in order to
avoid the unnecessary multiplication of hypotheses such as the religious
assumption of a non-Semitic and yet incredibly Semitic-like intermediate
language between Semitic and IE. In order to believe the latter, one is led
to battle against all the more accepted Comparative Lx theories. How many
times will you make outrageous errors like "Semitic split at 3300 BCE"
before you come to accept the best solution both linguistically and
archaeologically? Smell the coffee.
>This construction seems to fit into the proto-linguistic analysis
>presented for the Afro-Asiatic and Semitic languages in Enclyopedia
>Britanica. Or are they also wrong, Glen?
Leave the analysis to me. :) Your interpretation of the text is wrong, as
was your interpretation of the same text that led you to believe that
Semitic was as young as 3300 BCE. I have identified the page number and
paragraph at which your comprehension took a wrong turn in this regard, if
you're interested.
>Somehow you have to get your "Semitish" folk of southern Anatolia and
>the Balkans "swamped" and to disappear, leaving no evidence in place
>names, long before the historic period begins.
If the northern spread of Semitish were only confined within a millenium
(6000-5000 BCE), this isn't necessarily odd. In fact, who knows where some
of these place names are from. Perhaps they are from languages that were
overthrown by Semitish.
Do you have examples of these place names?
Anatolia always had many languages swimming around and moving about. It was
a linguistic hotbed of activity from ancient times. If Semitish was confined
to the western coast of Turkey and the Balkans, it could easily be wiped out
with one Hattic sneeze and a spread of Tyrrhenian. And then there's that
flood thing, so alot is happening here, all at once, during this time.
- gLeN
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