Richard:
>I thought Palestine was part of the fertile crescent, so I don't
>agree with your literal statment about the distance.
The homeland of Proto-Semitic is posited to be somewhere
around Syria or Palestine. Not in Sumer. Do you agree with
that?
>IE's being in Eastern Europe doesn't rule out its also being in
>Anatolia.
Yes, it does because there is no trace of it before the arrival of
the Anatolians.
>I'm still tempted to put Proto-Indo-Hittite in Anatolia.
You must resist the temptation. It's a fringe theory that doesn't
pay attention to Uralic. We've gone through this a million and
one times before.
>You've already got Tyrrhenian off the South coast of Anatolia.
Well, if we're talking around 4000 BCE, I don't think that far.
More like Greece and NorthWest Turkey.
>I think the deduction of 'Semitish' speaks volumes about how a
>priori implausible you found the IE-Semitic contacts.
IE _was_ affected by Semitic or something close enough to be
mistaken for it but even still there is a rift between _inland_
Eastern Europe and Palestine. You seem to be under the
mistaken belief that IE speakers were largely coastal fisherman...
???? Since we know that they couldn't have been, there is
no way to directly get from Eastern Europe to Palestine,
let alone Sumer.
>Picking a fight with Jens, eh? (See
>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/17933 .)
"I understand it to be Whittaker's thesis that the Sumerians took
at least part of their writing system from a neighbouring IE
population." If you can't see how immediately nonsensical that
concept is, flying against all data known, then you shouldn't
be allowed to operate heavy machinery.
>How common is this IE noun formation? I can only think of *bHebHru-
>'brown aquatic animal' and Greek _kiki_ 'castor-oil berry'.
Right, but even still, assuming that we can even coin "wheel" so far
back into prehistory in the first place, Semitic *galgal- is a sufficient
intermediary. Even so, the "wheel" connection just doesn't look
solid. The reduplication is common enough in IE to be native
nonetheless. When you think of it simply as a reduplicated verb
stem (suggesting iteration) with a thematic vowel it's not strange at
all. Thematicized verbs are the most common way to create
derivative nouns. This verb stem here only happens to be
reduplicated but only for valid semantic reason and your extra
example of *bHebHru- negates what you say.
= gLeN
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