Piotr:
>One should also remember that before ca. 5600 BC the Black Sea
>was considerably smaller than it is now, and in particular the
>western coastal route from what is now the Crimea to Anatolia
>(whether entirely overland or by coast-hopping) was _very_ much
>shorter.
Alright. It's an interesting idea but I still can't get myself to
accept that IndoTyrrhenian was well based in Anatolia. At best, I
could accept that Old IE and Old Tyrrhenian may have travelled to
Anatolia, met up with Semitoid peoples and adopted loanwords that
way.
Actually... wait a minute! I just realized something bad about
the out-of-Anatolia theory. I, for one, am convinced that IE
and Tyrrhenian have NOT inherited the same Semitish loanwords.
They must have been adopted seperately in IE and in Tyrrhenian
since we have, for example, IE *septm (note the Semitic masculine
form of "seven") and Tyrrhenian *sempa (my reconstruction based on
Etruscan /semph/, which is from the _feminine_ form of "seven").
Similarly, "six" is substantially different in form in both
languages as well (Etruscan /s'a/ and *sweks).
So... since there's no evidence to suggest that IE and Tyrrhenian
have inherited Semitoid loans from IndoTyrrhenian, there's no
linguistic evidence to suggest that IndoTyrrhenian was in contact
with Semitic. Rather, the evidence like that above shows that
only IE and/or Tyrrhenian could ever have been in Anatolia to have
acquired those words! But this revelation fragments the
out-of-Anatolia hypothesis since IndoTyrrhenian must have been
somewhere else at the time... like north of the Black Sea
perhaps?
- love gLeN
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