Peter:
> You're probably right. But there are non-loanable points of
> similarity which interest me (or would interest me if PIE did
> not claim any time I have for this stuff).
> Original two-consonant roots, extended to three consonants.
> Vowels do not carry significant lexical information; consonants do.
> Three types of stop consonants.
> Distinction of active and stative declensions.
> Original use of a case system, at first probably nom, acc, gen.
> Poorly developed system of prefixes.
Yes, but I can't help but be miffed, no offense, by people
comparing IE and Semitic ablaut or the ablaut patterns of IE
and Kartvelian or IE and some-language-and-another. Yes, there
is superficial similarity but only because ablaut is a common
feature of a lot of languages. What I find funny about it
though is that while IE may appear to share the above with
Semitic, let's say, we can all agree that there is more to
compare with Uralic. Most people will accept that IE is
more closely related to Uralic than AA. Yet Uralic doesn't
show the same "Semitic-like" ablaut that IE supposedly
has. Why? Because the comparison is a false one and what is
really being compared are patterns that have independently
developped in the two language groups.
Zero-grading at least is normally accepted, although expressed
in various ways, to have come about by the preIE process
of vowel loss due to heavy stress accent, aka my "Syncope".
That simple change can cause many of the ablaut effects that
you're comparing with the other languages. On the other
hand, the *e/*o ablaut that is so characteristic of IE
is coincidentally absent in Semitic. Again, I think
it's a misguided comparison. Bomhard tries to reconcile
the two and reconstruct ablaut between *a and *& for
Nostratic itself. It doesn't fly although I do think it's
true that IE *e/*o derive from *&/*a.
Another perspective to consider is areal influence because
if it's true that Semitic somehow affected the early stages
of IE, then areal influence should be considered as a
possible reason for many of the commonalities.
The only thing on the list that can be of value to Nostratic
are the "three sets of stops" although there is a danger
with loose sound system comparisons too. Sanskrit has a
retroflex set of phoneemes. Does that mean that Sanskrit is
Dravidian?
Strange, here I am in favour for Nostratic but I'm
certainly against what's been done so far. Maybe I'm
just a crabby person :P
>Yet the evidence seems to suggest any connection between
> Semitic and PIE is remote
There's no choice in the matter. It MUST be remote. Semitic
derives from Afro-Asiatic and if Proto-Semitic predates
Proto-Indo-European by at least a thousand years, you can
imagine how old Afro-Asiatic is.
= gLeN