"The explanation for Semitish"... one more time :)

Marc V:

>Some questions (excuse my ignorance):

Doesn't a question automatically imply ignorance? And since when was a
question offensive? :) I find people who _don't_ ask questions offensive.

>- If I understand you well, IYO the Bandkeramiker must have spoken
>Tyrrhenian? Is Hittite a Tyrrhenian or an IE language IYO?

Of course not. Hittite is securely an Anatolian language of the IE family.
Etruscan has been often compared to Anatolian languages but I feel that many
of the similarities derive from inherited archaicies as well as from later
loanwords that one would expect between Anatolian and Etrusco-Lemnian (the
southern branch of Tyrrhenian).

>- At that time 7000-6000 BC, the Balkan was Anatolia, since the >Bosporus &
>the Black Sea did not yet exist?

Well, yes. But I'm refering to the Balkans as they now stand :)
Technicalities, technicalities.

>- Could the replacement of "Semitish" by Tyrrhenian-speaking people >have
>something to do with Noah's flood? (when was that? 5300 BC?)

Ick! Can't we call it Utnapishtim's flood instead?? It sounds less
Fundamentalist Christian. Now, as much as the flood is impressive, I don't
want to jump to conclusions and blame everything on that flood like so many
bible-thumpers and doomsdayers have done in the past, only to be proven
embarassingly wrong later on. There could have been many factors to this
linguistic turn of the tables... that is, _assuming_ that Tyrrhenian did
take over Semitish as the major language of the area. I'm still tweaking the
theory, you have to understand.

>I just read in my newspaper about a recent paper in Nature by Dublin >etc.:
>our European cattle did not descend from the indigenous Bos >primigenius
>(ie, it was not domesticated here), but from cattle >introduced here a few
>thousands of years ago from the Middle-East.

But how does that relate to Semitic *Tawru-? And how come there's no Mad Cow
outbreaks in the Middle-East :P

- gLeN

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