Re: [tied] IE language "comes from" Semitic language?

At 10:19:52 AM on Monday, May 22, 2006, house_of_blonde
wrote:

[...]

> I rean this statement by a Greek Bible scholar and this is
> what he said:

> "Concerning the Lacedaemonians, there may be a valid
> argument that they are (at least in part) Semitic peoples,
> descended from the Minoan Civilization (which we know to
> be Semitic because of their Language). But while the
> Semitic roots of the Lacedaemonians may be a possibility,
> to extend this to all the Greeks would be absurd, for
> Greek is, in its grammar and its primary vocabulary, an
> Indo- European Language. [...]"

> _____________

> My opponent has replied to this statement with this:

> "The Orthodox scholar is obviously not a linguist as he is
> wrong on the origin of languages. All Indo-European
> languages come from Proto-Canaanite and later Phoenician,
> a Semitic language."

Your opponent has no business accusing anyone else of
linguistic ignorance: his claim is absurd. At best he's
confusing languages with writing systems, and even for
writing systems the claim is not unproblematic: a Semitic
origin has not been demonstrated for the South Asian
scripts, some of which are used to write IE languages,
though such an origin is not unlikely.

Brian