From: Dennis Poulter
Message: 2553
Date: 2000-05-26
----- Original Message -----
From: John Croft <jdcroft@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, 24 May, 2000 8:15 PM
Subject: [TIED] Re: Dennis on Glen (was Hebrew and Arabic)
> > Why did the Semites have to come from Egypt? Ethiopia, the presumed
> Semitic homeland, is also one of the "centres of origin" of
> agriculture.
>
> Dennis, there was a long discussion about this earlier on the list.
> I
> proposed an Ethiopian origin, crossing the Red Sea to Yemen, and was
> shot down in flames. Despite the fact that Semitic languages in
> Ethiopia are more numerous and more diverse than elsewhere
> (evidence of potential origin sites), it was pointed out that the
> Ethiopian crops for the origin of Agriculture were domesticated only
> post 3,000 BCE, too late for the appearance of Semites to be
> associated with a dispersal zone from Ethiopia.
>
John,
I've gone through the egroups archives and found this. Is this what turned
you against the Ethiopian origin of Semitic?
If so, I have the following comments :
Alexander Stolbov wrote on 28/1/2000
> Still I can't accept the Ethiopian hypothesis.
>
> IMO the key counter-argument is the Nostratic conception. If we
believe in
> the genetic relatedness of the Nostratic languages we must
acknowledge that
> ones upon a time it was a single group whose descendants in many
millenia
> have turned into Yukaghir and Hausa, Gauls and Tamils etc.. It seems
to me
> that the most probable place, time and the reason of fantastic
spreading are > the Near East Region (either Zagros or Levant), 10-12
millenia BP and the
> Neolithic revolution (the Near East variant of it, i.e. goats/sheep +
> wheat/barley).
1. The Nostratic concept is only a hypothesis. It may not be correct, or at
least not correct in all its details.
2. It is not necessarily true that a proto-language will radiate outwards in
all directions from a central point.
3. According to Glen's Webpage, the initial split in Nostratic is into
Eurasiatic - Kartvelian - AfroAsiatic. So could not AfroAsiatic be the
language of those Nostratics who did not migrate?
4. AfroAsiatic itself is not universally accepted, and is based primarily on
mass comparison or words, rather than the meticulous sound laws of IE.
5. The Neolithic Revolution
I have been giving quite some thought to the nature of this revolution. It
strikes me that this was not a technology-based advance, such as microlithic
industry or metallurgy, but rather a knowledge-based revolution.
After all, what is the qualitative difference between pre-agricultural
foraging and cultivation? The foragers would have all the necessary tools to
be cultivators - tools for harvesting the wild grains, digging up roots,
pulling down fruits off trees; the tools for threshing and grinding; and the
containers for storage. What is new, is the knowledge of how plants
propagate, i.e. that you can take the seeds and plant them where you want
them to grow, rather than go to where they grow naturally.
Now, knowledge can be carried by very small numbers of people, even
individuals or individual families. Also it is not limited to specific
plants. The same knowledge will apply equally to millet as to barley. So, it
need not be evidence of ethnic migrations or movements or spreads of
languages.
The linguistic evidence, together with the traditions of the peoples
involved, the archaeology (? - I've not really researched this fully yet)
and plausibility, argue for Ethiopia as the point of departure for the
AfroAsiatic languages, and neither the Nostratic Hypothesis nor the
Neolithic Revolution offer any serious obstacles to this scenario.
BTW, I have read somewhere that the origin of agriculture in Ethiopia dates
from ca.5000BCE.
Cheers
Dennis