Peter:
> This does not make them loan words! Any more than French
> chanter is a loan from Italian cantare. They are inherited
> in both PIE and Semitic (or whatever).
Or "whatever"? It hasn't been proven in the slightest that
IE and Semitic share common vocabulary (outside of
pronominal elements at least). Of all the hypotheses
available, this is the unlikeliest. The more likely is that
rather than these words surviving intact for some 10,000 years
from the wane of the last Ice Age, it's more probable that
the common words are either an accident or loanwords. Since
*septm is no accident, I take the latter view, that they
are loanwords, to be the most optimal idea. Nostratic
inheritance in these circumstances are weakly proven and
you will notice that many of Bomhard's IE-Semitic
correspondances consist only of the two groups. That just
smells fishy to a sensible linguist that is sensitive to
methodological issues.
> Bomhard's whole thesis collapses if all these words are
> loans,
That's an exaggeration. His views don't solely rest on
IE-AA connections, but certainly if these are really loans
instead of inherited words, it would only point to the
obvious -- that AA is a very remote member of Nostratic
and hence has very little in common with IE.
> and he tries deliberately to exclude loans so as
> not to skew the evidence.
Erh. That's false. He includes *septm as part of yet
another IE-and-Semitic-only cognate set, in order to
reconstruct a word for "seven" in Nostratic. Evidently
he didn't pay attention to whether these could be loans
at all, caring more about reconstructing as many
words as possible than proper analysis. Not saying
that all of what Bomhard has to say is bunk but I'm
just emphasizing caveat lector.
= gLeN