>> I'm thinking of renaming "Semitish" to "West Semitic". Does >> anyone have objections? Talk to me, girls. :)
Mark O: >Girls?
I gotta stop hangin' out with my gay friends. Just keep with me here, pop some ecstasy and stop being a mr.-poo-bear.
>'West Semitic' is already taken. I not sure of the exact semantic space it occupies; it seems >to be used by paleographers. I suspect it means 'linguistic remains of ancient Semitic->speakers the Levant', which would include Hebrew. Why not just call it Shemitic, and revive >Japhethic for your pre-proto-IE?
Oh, you're so silly. :) I believe that the biblical "Japhetic" belongs to John already and frankly, he can keep that name. I left the church long ago because I figured I was going to fry in hell no matter what I did and I may as well enjoy myself. You completely misunderstood what I was saying. I meant, could my "Semitish" actually just be a branch of Semitic?
But there seems to be various subcategorisations of proto-Semitic and people don't appear to be agreeing on dates. Some like to divide it into East versus West; some into NW, NE and E; some into NW, NE, E and Arabic. Enc.Brittanica divides things up into North, Central and South. Argh. Can't we all just get along? Most people though seem to agree that Akkadian is seperate from the rest of the Sem.lgs. so we at least have a West versus East scenario.
Anyways, the reason why I'm thinking this is because it would certainly be a more Occam-licious theory (no need to hypothesize a theoretical language). It would mean that a "West Semitic" language area would be in the same place that I theorize for Semitish (Balkans, West Anatolia and Crete) and would thus also be dated around the same time (6000-5500 BCE). The language that affected IE in this scenario would then be a peripheral dialect of West Semitic, located in the Balkans. However, this would push the proto-Semitic language back to around 7000 BCE and East Semitic (Akkadian) would seem to have seperated waaaay early.
Such early dates might sound bizarre but then, maybe West Semitic moved back south again into East Semitic territory (Syria/Palestine), partially melting back together, only to seperate again later (proto-Akkadian) leaving West Semitic _Version 2.0_ in the Syria/Palestine area. In other words, maybe West Semitic version 1.0 would be better called West pre-Semitic. If we accept that, we then have a date for proto-Semitic set vaguely between 7000 BCE and 5000 BCE because of convergeance, making everything happy-happy again, sorta.
Proto-Semitic contains many agriculture terms and thus appears that its speakers played a strong part in the prehistoric economy of 5500 BCE. Linear A, if truely West Semitic as Cyrus says, might then be a residue of the former occupation.
Actually, come to think of it, I've just arrived back to a "Semitish" scenario since West Semitic isn't exactly Semitic... or is it? It would mean two proto-Semitic stages are at work here. Ach, nevermind. This is getting complicated. Carry on.
- gLeN
Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download :
http://explorer.msn.com