From: John Croft
Message: 2525
Date: 2000-05-24
>>As for how close this "Semitish" substrata is to Semitic, I can onlyGlen wrote in reply
>>quote Malory, (p.150) "unlike comparisons between Indo_European and
>>Finno-Ugric, the Semitic relations do not really have general
>>acceptance despite the fact that there are a number of most
>>energetic supporters of genetic links between the two families.....
>>Indeed, in a recent survey of the supposed Semitic-Proto-European
>>loan words,especially those relating to agriculture and animals,
>>Igor Diakonov has winnowed out all of the supposed connections
>>except for goat, wild cattle and horn, all three of which were
>>probably derived from a common third source (MY SUBSTRATE LANGUAGE).
>But Mallory, like you, fails to offer a valid suggestion for thisHe then offered the following
>"third source" and fails to go into sufficient detail to support his
>claims. It is an opinion, nothing else. This quote proves nothing at
>all except that Mallory's analysis in this regard wasn't a deep one.
>He was quite understandably busier with a more pressing work
>regarding IndoEuropeans (their language, archaeological evidence,
>cultural and technical evolution, etc), than to be dilly-dallying
>with non-IE languages and hypothetical third sources.
>
>But it should be quite evident that the assumption of a third source
>is needlessly complex when the assumption of influence from one of
>these already existant parties into IE and into other languages is
>available. Semitic or Semitish fits the bill perfectly based on the
>linguistics that you like to sweep under a rug. I use "six" and
>"seven" alot because they are known to be Semitic and nothing else.
>Indo-European SemiticAnd now Marc Verhaegen copied for us:
>(s)teuro- Tawru "bull" (T = "th" as in "math")
>weino- waynu "wine"
> LINGUISTICS:together the
> Peering Into the Past, With Words
> Bernice Wuethrich
> Prehistorians typically rely on stones, bones, and DNA to piece
> past, but linguists argue that words preserve history too. Two newstudies,
> both based on endangered languages, offer new insights into theidentity of
> mysterious ancient peoples, from the first farmers to earlyinhabitants of
> the British Isles.people in
>
> Archaeologists have long known that some 10,000 years ago, ancient
> Mesopotamia discovered farming, raising sheep, cattle, wheat, andbarley.
> Andnorth
> researchers knew that by 8000 years ago agriculture had spread
> Caucasus Mountains. But they had little inkling of whether tracesof
> first farming culture lived on in any particular culture today.People have
> migrated extensively through the region over the millennia, andthere's no
> continuous archaeological record of any single culture.Linguistically, most
> languages in the region and in the Fertile Crescent itself arerelatively
> recent arrivals from elsewhere.California,
>
> Now, however, linguist Johanna Nichols of the University of
> Berkeley, has used language to connect modern people of theCaucasus
> to the ancient farmers of the Fertile Crescent. She analyzed theIngush,
> Nakh-Daghestanian linguistic family, which today includes Chechen,
> and Batsbi on the Nakh side and some 24 languages on theDaghestanian side;
> all are spoken in parts of Russia (such as Chechnya), Georgia, andNakh-Daghestanian by
> Azerbaijan.
>
> Nichols had previously established the family tree of
> analyzing similarities in the related languages much the waybiologists
> create a phylogeny of species. She found that three languagesconverge at
> theside in the
> very base of the tree. Today, speakers of all three live side by
> southeastern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, suggesting thatthis was
> the homeland of the ancestral language--on the very fringes of theFertile
> Crescent. To get a rough estimate of when the language arose,Nichols used a
> linguistic method that assumes a semiregular rate of vocabularyloss
> 1000words for
> years, and she dated the ancestral language to about 8000 years ago.
>
> Nichols also found that the ancestral language contains a host of
> farming. The Chechen words muq (barley), stu (bull), and tkha(wool), for
> example, all have closely related forms in the earliest branches ofyoke--all
> Daghestanian, as do words for pear, apple, dairy product, and oxen
> elements of the farming package developed in the Fertile Crescent.Thus
> location, time, and vocabulary all suggest that the farmers of theregion
> were proto-Nakh-Daghestanians. "The Nakh-Daghestanian languages arethe
> closest thing we have to a direct continuation of the cultural andSalt Lake
> linguistic
> community that gave rise to Western civilization," Nichols says.
>
> Population geneticist Henry Harpending of the University of Utah,
> City, has just begun the job of unraveling the genetic ancestry ofyears I
> Daghestanian speakers and is impressed with Nichols's work. "For
> wished linguists would get in the game. Nichols sure is."more clues
>
> Nichols is now reconstructing the ancestral language, hoping for
> to the culture of these early farmers. But she has to work fast,for
> three Nakh languages are vanishing. Although there are still about900,000
> Chechen speakers left, the other two tongues have fewer speakers,and all
> three are being eroded by war, economic chaos, and Russianeducational
> practices, Nichols says.It is interesting that Hurro-Urartuean of the Middle East is supposed
> More than 3200 kilometers away, another linguist is mining Celticthe
> languages--which are also all considered endangered--for clues to
> inhabitants of the early British Isles. Artifacts show that theislands were
> occupied long before Celts from the European continent madelandfall
> 700 B.C. But mysteries remain as to their identity.Anthropology in
>
> So Orin Gensler of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
> Leipzig, Germany, analyzed Celtic languages, including Irish Gaelic,languages
> Scottish
> Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton. Once prevalent throughout Europe, these
> are now spoken only in the British Isles and Brittany in France.Linguists
> have noted surprising grammatical differences between Celticlanguages and
> related languages such as French, while at the same time seeingstriking
> resemblances between Celtic and Afro-Asiatic languages spoken formillennia
> across a swath of coastal Northern Africa and the Near East.found in
>
> In a forthcoming monograph, Gensler studied 20 grammatical features
> both Celtic and Afro-Asiatic languages. He sought these linguistictraits in
> 85 unrelated languages from around the world, reasoning that if thefeatures
> were widespread, their appearance in both Celtic and Afro-Asiaticlanguages
> might be mere coincidence. But if the shared features are rare,coincidence
> is unlikely. Overall, Gensler found that about half the sharedfeatures are
> rare elsewhere. "I think the case against coincidence is about asgood as it
> could be," he says.offers a
>
> And a closer look at a number of features, including word order,
> provocative theory for just how the Celtic islanders acquired theselanguages--the
> linguistic traits. In Gaelic and Welsh--and many Afro-Asiatic
> standard sentence structure is verb-subject-object. But Celticlanguages
> spoken in Continental Europe in antiquity have the verb in thefinal
> middle position. The best explanation for the shift to verb-initialorder,
> says Gensler, is that when Celtic speakers made landfall on theBritish
> Isles, Afro-Asiatic speakers were already there. As these peoplelearned
> Celtic, they perpetuated aspects of their own grammar into the newlanguage.
>no
> Although others are interested in Gensler's idea, so far "there is
> significant northwest African genetic signature ... in Celticpopulations,"
> says Peter Underhill, a molecular geneticist at Stanford Universityin
> California. But in this instance, he adds, the linguists may beahead of the
> geneticists, for researchers need more genetic markers before theycan
> confirm or refute Gensler's idea.It would appear that the mesolithic culture of Spain