Re: [TIED] Celtic & Afro-Asiatic languages

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2551
Date: 2000-05-26

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Dennis Poulter
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 5:39 AM
Subject: Re: [TIED] Celtic & Afro-Asiatic languages

Raymond Hickey, an Irish linguist working at Essen University (Germany) once told me of a whole bunch of syntactic parallels between Semitic and Celtic when we were discussing Vennemann's "Atlantiker" hypothesis. I remember at least (1), (3) and (4) from your list. Hickey was of the opinion that this complex of features was too rare typologically for its existence in two unrelated language groups to be coincidental, and that it was a kind of "syntactic signature" of an Afroasiatic substrate along the Atlantic seaboard of Europe.
 
Piotr
 
Many years ago when I was studying Arabic, and having a smattering of Welsh from my Welsh-speaking relatives, I too was struck by some similarities between the two :
1. the word order VSO
2. the frequent prefixing of such sentences with a meaningless particle (y/yr in Welsh, fa-, wa- in Arabic)
3. the construction of relative clauses; the use of the definite article (extended with the demonstrative in Arabic) as the link, and the use of a resumptive (is that the term?) pronoun in prepositional clauses to refer back to the subject of the sentence. This "resumptive" pronoun is also used in Arabic where the subject of the sentence is the direct object of the verb in the relative clause. I can't remember how Welsh does this.
4. the possessive construction, whereby the thing possessed is defined by being possessed and no longer takes the definite article, thus "the garden of the house", Arabic "Hadiiqat al-bayt", Welsh "gardd y ty".
At the time I just put this down to coincidence.
On the same subject, while looking through this site : http://www.muw.edu/~rmccalli/subsGerIntro.html  I noticed a fair number of Semitic sources for the non-IE substratum in proto-Germanic. One in particular that I noticed that was not attributed to Semitic was :

dan- "low ground, den" >
*dan-jam > denn [OE] > den; Dene [OE] > Dane [cw, rc]

(I was researching dan, danu at the time). This makes a remarkable fit, phonetically and semantically, with the Semitic root /dny/ that I was proposing for dan- etc.

At the same site, there is mention of a Theo Vennemann, who claims that the megalith builders were Semitic-speaking.

So, what is going on here? We now seem to have Semitic contact/influence/borrowings in Basque, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, NE Caucasian, Kartvelian, Etruscan. Could it be that there is a Semitic substratum throughout western and southern Europe, right up to the Pontic region?

Cheers

Dennis