Re: The palatal sham :) (Re: [tied] Re: Albanian (1))

On Thu, 05 Feb 2004 20:06:57 -0800 (PST), enlil@... wrote:

>Me:
>>>Following your reasoning
>>>then: Since Mandarin speakers always pronounce it as /d3/ and we
>>>have /d3/ in our sound system, the idea that "Beijing" is a
>>>borrowed name from Mandarin "must be abandoned".
>
>Miguel:
>> I wasn't aware that writing had been invented at the time we were
>> discussing.
>
>I wasn't aware that the topic of commonly mispronouncing foreign
>words had any relevance to writing.

People who pronounce Beijing as /beiz^IN/ have probably not been exposed to
much spoken Mandarin. It's not a case of "mishearing" at all. It's
"misreading". Clearly that's irrelevant to the question of early
Semitic-IE contacts.

>>>> PIE, to my knowledge, didn't have /ts/,
>>>
>>>Why wouldn't they?
>>
>> They just didn't.
>
>Now you're just being inane. What is *po:ds? Are you going to
>split hairs now because it's a *d instead of a *t?

PIE didn't have /ts/ within a single morpheme. The rules are clearly
different across morpheme boundaries (it *is* /po:ds/ and not */po:ts/, so
without assimilation across a morpheme boundary).

In any case, the transformation from s^idc^- to s^iks^- need not even have
taken place in Indo-European. It may have happened in an intermediary
language. Other than in the case of "7", where a borrowing directly from
Semitic is likely, in the case of "6" the likelihood that the borrowing was
indirect is much greater, given the total lack of Semitic morphology.

>>>But "_Why_ do you prefer #2?"
>>
>> Because Proto-Semitic is too old and to remote for it to have
>> been in contact with PIE.
>> Because it's more likely that a form with "advanced" features
>> like gender polarization and mimation was borrowed later than a
>> form without such features (both are Semitic innovations with AA,
>> so we'd expect them to have arisen late rather than early).
>
>Still doesn't make sense. Can we not date Proto-Semitic to around
>6000-5500 BCE? If extended to Western Anatolia

Surely not. I would put the (Pre-)Proto-Semitic area in Palestine, at the
beginning of the Neolithic (Natufian) [9th millennium, if I'm not
mistaken], from where it then [by the time of Proto-Semitic, so a couple of
millennia later] spread South (-> Arabic, South Arabian/Ethiopic) and East
(-> East Semitic), the stay-behinds remaining as NW Semitic. East Semitic
then made contact with Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus. There never was,
or at least there's not a shred of evidence for, significant Semitic
presence in Western Anatolia.

>Secondly, since we're dealing with Proto-Semitic itself or later
>variants like North Semitic, your objection that we should find
>Semitic-specific innovations "later" doesn't make sense. By the
>time Mid IE is in contact with Semitic or para-Semitic, it is
>fully Semitic already, complete with all the special "Semitic
>innovations on AA". Your second point is moot.

I don't think so. Gender polarity was used inconsistently in the oldest NW
Semitic sorces (Ugaritic), which might indicate that it was a recent
innovation at the time, although other explanations are of course possible.
Mimation in the singular only occurs in Akkadian and Sabaic, and it's
completely absent from NW Semitic and Arabic, so the presence of mimation
in Proto-Semitic in the singular remains doubtful (perhaps it had nunation,
perhaps it had neither). All of which means that a form *sab`atum (the
undeniable source of *septm.) can only be East Semitic. NW Semitic has
*s^ab`(at)u, which is unsuitable on two (or three) counts, Arabic
(sab`atu(n)) and South Arabian (*sab`atum) are unlikely sources on
geographical grounds, and Proto-Semitic itself is too early, was not in
contact with Anatolia or the Caucasus, and most likely did not have
mimation in the singular.

>>>It would most logically be easier for IE to have adopted
>>>Semitic loanwords from the west than from the east
>>
>> Not at all. What language were the documents first showing
>> evidence for Hittites/Luwians in Anatolia written in? Where did
>> Mesopotamia get its metal ores from? The NW Semites weren't in
>> contact with much anybody until the Phoenicians built themselves
>> a fleet, but that was much later.
>
>You're confusing Anatolian with Indo-European.

No. I'm saying that East Semitic peoples (specifically the Assyrians and
their predecessors) had very early contacts with Anatolia, the Caucasus
[metals!] and perhaps (although there's no evidence for that) a bit beyond
(Balkans?, Transcaucasia?). The NW Semitic area had early contacts with
Egypt, but did not interact much with regions to the North. Even today, as
through all of history, the Iraq-Turkey border is much more "interesting"
than the Syria-Turkey border.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...