Torsten:
>What's logically necessary is boats. The Kurgan culture when it first
>appears is concentrated in a number of places along the rivers of the
>Pontic, especially the Don river.
Well, of course they hung around water because they needed to
drink something! That doesn't mean that they travelled far and wide
in boats, just because they knew of *xapo- and owned *naxu-. IE was
affected by Semitic, but NOT vice versa. So this suggests that there
was indeed an intermediary, one that brought cultural and
technological innovation into Europe and hence into the hands of IE
speakers.
The archaeological record shows that this direction of influence moved
AWAY from Asia Minor into Europe, especially during the neolithic. This
fact alone negates the idea that IE speakers came to the Semitic
since this is against the observed cultural flow. Yet it can't be Semitic
directly because Semitic appears to have started in the Palestine environs,
not Europe!
If we presume that Semitic spread far northward, this northward dialect
area was certainly wiped out by other languages by 3000 BCE when
other very non-Semitic languages are recorded. Yet this is the only way
to account for the adoption of Semitic words. This automatically
suggests the existence of a a para-Semitic language, "Semitish", since
it would need to spread outside the core area in Palestine or Syria,
commonly attributed to Proto-Semitic as we know it.
If a Semitic-like language hadn't spread northward only to be eradicated,
then the only other feasible option is to propose a non-IE, non-Semitic
language. Unless we carelessly assume more than we have to, we require
the involvement of an existing language group in this area like Tyrrhenian.
While Tyrrhenian appears to me to be an intermediary at a later date, we
don't see a form like *septm in these languages. We see that Etruscan
/sempH/ is attested but lacks /t/, suggesting a _feminine_ form
*sab`u-, clearly unlike the IE or Kartvelian reflex but much like what is
found in Basque /zazpi/.
This _is_ Occam's Razor at work, I'm afraid. Semitish is an inevitable
conclusion.
= gLeN
_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/photos&pgmarket=en-ca&RU=http%3a%2f%2fjoin.msn.com%2f%3fpage%3dmisc%2fspecialoffers%26pgmarket%3den-ca