Re: Afro-Asiatic substrate (re "folk" "polk" "pulkas")

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:

>
> --- On Sun, 7/26/09, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> Vennemann gave a convincing Semitic etymology for 'folk'
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/48772
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/48897
>
> ****GK: There are attested presences of this term in three language
> groups: Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic (nothing in Iranic?).

Not AFAIK.

> Now if it came from Semitic to all three, what is the time line of
> the borrowing?

Time of the Sea Peoples in Egypt. Bronze Age.

> On the other hand if the Slavic and Baltic terms are borrowings
> from Germanic, this would imply a time before the Grimm shift.

Actually, most traditional treatments of traditional loans from Germanic to Baltic Finnic presupposes a reversing of Grimm in the process, probably because Grimm was once placed very early. Most linguists now place the Grimm shift around the begin of CE, so do I, seeing it as caused by contact with an Iranian language (Ossetic has something similar). But since I'm beginning an Umwertung aller Werte anyway, I'll get this straight too: it was loaned from Semitic into the ar-/ur- language.

Actually I am having problems with a couple of words which match too well all of Uralic, IE and Semitic. One way to accommodate that is to assume IE at first expanded on the background of Uralic, and that that group (or its ar-/ur- substrate) was in trade contact with Semitic.

> Is that why you are partial to Semitic (:=))?****

It doesn't have any cognates outside of those three IE groups. The root vowel /o/ is also problematic.
Möller proposed it too.


Torsten