From: Michael Smith
Message: 29282
Date: 2004-01-09
> The homeland of Proto-Semitic is posited to be somewhereWhat? I thought the understanding was that it's homeland was in
> around Syria or Palestine. Not in Sumer. Do you agree with
> that?
>*bHebHru-
>
> >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
> >'brown aquatic animal' and Greek _kiki_ 'castor-oil berry'.sufficient
>
> Right, but even still, assuming that we can even coin "wheel" so far
> back into prehistory in the first place, Semitic *galgal- is a
> intermediary. Even so, the "wheel" connection just doesn't lookat
> 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
> all. Thematicized verbs are the most common way to create2fjoin.msn.com%2f%3fpage%3dmisc%2fspecialoffers%26pgmarket%3den-ca
> 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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