On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 00:14:26 -0800 (PST),
enlil@... wrote:
>>>This cannot be supported seriously. Putting aside the fact
>>>that Semitic is not sufficiently diverse to even consider
>>>such a ludicrous date, reconstructions like *kaspu "silver",
>>>*ti?n- "olive", *kuna:t_- "emmer", *h.int- "wheat", *s'i`a:r-
>>>"barley", *`inab- "grape", *gapn- "vines" and *wayn- "wine"
>>>negate your untenable point of view completely.
>>
>> Why?
>
>As above. The date is too deep. It's not realistic. Even
>American Heritage says that the terms reconstructed point
>to the late Neolithic/early Chalcolithic:
>
> http://www.bartleby.com/61/10.html
Actually, what I said was:
"I would put the (Pre-)Proto-Semitic area in Palestine, at the
beginning of the Neolithic (Natufian) [9th millennium, if I'm not
mistaken],"
You snipped it at this point, but I went on:
"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."
The point is that even if some of these words cannot go back to the early
Neolithic (and I'm very skeptical of even that: why would the Proto-Semites
not have had words for plants and animals that were indigenous even if not
yet domesticated?), all that is needed is for the Proto-Semites to have
stayed put in or close to their homeland for a couple of millennia in order
for them to acquire these words. Even after the dispersal, the area
inhabited by Semitic speakers was sufficiently compact and uninterrupted
for words (e.g. *kasp-) to spread from Mesopotamia to Syria/Palestine to
Arabia or viceversa with relative ease.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...