--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "aquila_grande" <aquila_grande@...>
wrote:
>
> No, the Germanic languages were not influenced directly by AA, but
> they had contact with Romance and Probably Greek that had been
> influenced by AA.
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------
>
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@>
> wrote:
> >
> > At 4:19:50 PM on Monday, June 5, 2006, aquila_grande wrote:
> >
> > >> There is no reason to attribute any of these to AA
Christopher Culvert's review of
Sprung from Some Common Source: Investigations into the Prehistory of
Languages (Hardcover)
by Sydney M. Lamb, E. Douglas Mitchell, Stanford University Press
(August 1991) on Amazon.com
"For example, he (Saul Levin) asserts that (non-phonemic) initial
glottal stop in Germanic is a special sign of Semitic influence.
Granted, the initial glottal stop was a feature of many
Proto-Indo-European words if we assume a CVC structure, and Germanic
has preserved this when it was lost elsewhere. Levin himself admirably
pointed this out in a 1979 paper published in General Linguistics.
Yet, there's no reason to assume a close relationship between
Proto-Semitic and Proto-Indo-European. Many languages have the glottal
stop, it would be is like saying English and Mari are close because
they both have voiced dental fricatives. I think Levin himself
realizes this, because he admittedly chooses to ignore the existence
of the Afro-Asiatic family, which would undercut his argument. That's
poor scholarship."
posted by M. Kelkar