Re: [tied] Re: PIE's closest relatives

> I wonder if any of you who know about Semitic have an opinion about the
> theses presented in Heinrich Wagner's book Das Verbum in den Sprachen der
> britischen Inseln from 1958. I remember reading it when it was not very
> old, and it made a colossal impression on me. The main idea is that there
> is a substratum underneath Insular Celtic identifiable with Berber. In
> this Wagner comes very close to the old view of Morris Jones' 1900 article
> Pre-Aryan syntax in Welsh which points out parallels in Egyptian. Wagner
> was a pupil of Pokorny, so the focus on substratum influence was a natural
> thing.

But is the evidence anything more than the VSO syntactic parallell?
VSO is typologically the rarest of the SO word orders but it's not
that rare (If I recall correctly it's about 10%) that it alone can force
the conclusion of a substrate influence.

mvh,
Harald