From: Michael Smith
Message: 29035
Date: 2004-01-03
----- Original Message -----
From: Dennis Poulter
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 5:39 AM
Subject: Re: [TIED] Celtic & Afro-Asiatic languages
Raymond Hickey, an Irish linguist working at Essen University
(Germany) once told me of a whole bunch of syntactic parallels
between Semitic and Celtic when we were discussing
Vennemann's "Atlantiker" hypothesis. I remember at least (1), (3) and
(4) from your list. Hickey was of the opinion that this complex of
features was too rare typologically for its existence in two
unrelated language groups to be coincidental, and that it was a kind
of "syntactic signature" of an Afroasiatic substrate along the
Atlantic seaboard of Europe.
Piotr
Many years ago when I was studying Arabic, and having a smattering of
Welsh from my Welsh-speaking relatives, I too was struck by some
similarities between the two :
1. the word order VSO
2. the frequent prefixing of such sentences with a meaningless
particle (y/yr in Welsh, fa-, wa- in Arabic)
3. the construction of relative clauses; the use of the definite
article (extended with the demonstrative in Arabic) as the link, and
the use of a resumptive (is that the term?) pronoun in prepositional
clauses to refer back to the subject of the sentence.
This "resumptive" pronoun is also used in Arabic where the subject of
the sentence is the direct object of the verb in the relative clause.
I can't remember how Welsh does this.
4. the possessive construction, whereby the thing possessed is
defined by being possessed and no longer takes the definite article,
thus "the garden of the house", Arabic "Hadiiqat al-bayt",
Welsh "gardd y ty".
At the time I just put this down to coincidence.
On the same subject, while looking through this site :
http://www.muw.edu/~rmccalli/subsGerIntro.html I noticed a fair
number of Semitic sources for the non-IE substratum in proto-
Germanic. One in particular that I noticed that was not attributed to
Semitic was :
dan- "low ground, den" >
*dan-jam > denn [OE] > den; Dene [OE] > Dane [cw, rc]
(I was researching dan, danu at the time). This makes a remarkable
fit, phonetically and semantically, with the Semitic root /dny/ that
I was proposing for dan- etc.
At the same site, there is mention of a Theo Vennemann, who claims
that the megalith builders were Semitic-speaking.
So, what is going on here? We now seem to have Semitic
contact/influence/borrowings in Basque, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, NE
Caucasian, Kartvelian, Etruscan. Could it be that there is a Semitic
substratum throughout western and southern Europe, right up to the
Pontic region?
Cheers
Dennis
Meaage http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/2551
This sounds like early neolithic megalithic to me. Hope this helps
Regards
John
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