Re: [TIED] Re: Celtic & Afro-Asiatic languages

>>Marc asked: Very interesting the resemblances between Celtic & Arab (& Spanish? tendency to VSO). I was thinking of a rudiment of an old sea-faring culture (or cultures) along the Atlantic Ocean & perhaps in the Mediterranean ("megalithic"). If IYO the same Semitic substratum worked on related languages, it's difficult to explain why Celtic, Germanic & Greek are so different IMO, eg, why then are German & Greek not VSO?

>Dennis: I only came across this "Atlantiker" idea in Rick McCallister's web page a few weeks ago, despite having been born and brought up within 10 miles of Stonehenge. I don't yet know what to think of it.

Very appealing IMO. Of course it's not sure that all megalithic cultures (Med?) are related, but I guess some of them are. But whether they spoke Semitic languages??

>Celtic - it was you yourself who posted on the similarities between Celtic and AfroAsiatic.

Are you perhaps confusing me with Mark with "k" or somebody else?

>Piotr's posting re Raymond Hickey's view specifies Semitic rather than AfroAsiatic. For myself, I had noticed some curious similarities between grammatical constructions in one Celtic language - modern Welsh - and one Semitic language - Arabic. I hadn't really given it any further thought and certainly had not speculated on any generalised Celtic-Semitic ties. Germanic - I was unaware of this until I looked at Rick McCallister web page. Greek - all my researches in this area are concerned with a Semitic adstratum, not substratum.

......

>Either way, the connections that have been noted for Germanic and Celtic are with Semitic.

Could you please briefly repeat the Germanic-Semitic resemblances?

.....

>>Glen: This root exists. I think I've come across the Hebrew version with /s/ for *T (the expected change). I believe the word means "to plough" in Hebrew. I could swear that there's an Akkadian word /ersitu/ which means "earth". Was I dreaming? The triliterate is probably more accurately defined as "to plough".

>Perhaps you misunderstood my orthography. I used the upper-case D to denote the "emphatic" d of Daad, as opposed to the dental daal. There is an Arabic word /?arasa/ meaning "to till the earth".

I don't know anything about this subject, but I just read today in an interesting book (T.Krispijn, W. van Soldt and others (including Beekes on Persian) 1999 "De talen van het oude Nabije Oosten" Ex Oriente Lux, PB 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, Neth.):

Old Akkadian haràTum (point under h; T as in think) became old Assyian eràSum (S as in she) & old Babylonian erèSum "to plough". I hope this helps?

Marc Verhaegen
http://www.onelist.com/community/AAT
http://www.infres.enst.fr/confs/evolang/actes/_actes74.html