[tied] Re: Black Athena: The Afroasiatic RootsofClassicalCivilizati

Neither I believe in unilateral influence. The influence has
probably gone both ways.

I am also speaking about an areal thing, a Mediterranean areal thing
with mutual influence, but with the AA languages somewhat ahead of
the IE languages in the development of certain features, among
others the definite article.

Egyptian had an indefinite articled derived from the numeral one.
Semitic did not as far as I know. Old Greek did not have that
indefinite article originally, but has got it over time.

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--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
wrote:

>
> On 2006-06-09 13:56, aquila_grande wrote:
>
> > Your examples of other areas having definite article in several
> > languages is actially going in fabour of my assumption, not

against

> > it.
>
> It only shows that the presence of the definite article _may_ be

an

> areal thing. I don't think the Germanic and Romance article

systems in

> Western Europe are independent of each other, but that's because

of some

> characteristic typological features that characterise the "West
> European" convergence area and do not occur in the neighbouring

areas.

> Those features include the coexistence of (preposed) definite

articles

> with indefinite articles derived from the numeral "one" (ein, a,

un,

> etc.) and the rise of the category of determiners, of which the

articles

> are a subcategory. I don't think AA systems are really similar;

the

> affinity is only superficial. Areal developments don't consist in
> unilateral diffusion anyway; the languages of a sprachbund co-

evolve in

> parallel and influence one another reciprocally.
>
> Piotr
>