Re: Afrasan qwem/kwer/bhe/dwey and PIE kwem/kwel/bha/dyeu?

From: Brian M. Scott
Message: 69760
Date: 2012-06-04

At 6:09:48 PM on Saturday, June 2, 2012, piervantrink wrote:

> Afrasan qwem/kwer/bhe/dwey and PIE kwem/kwel/bha/dyeu?

> When we look at Pokorny dictionnary(1)we see that proto
> indo-european *gwem gave birth to so divergent Latin
> Venire(sometimes pie gw=>Italic v and pie m=>n but not all
> the times this is the rule as for example we have pie
> gwer=>latin gratis), Greek bainein(sometimes pie gw=>greek
> b,pie m=>greek n)

Indeed. So? The conditions governing the different
developments are known.

> and old English cuman,and with so divergent semantic shift
> as lithuanian gemu=to be born);

Not a particularly difficult one: to be born is to come/step
into the world. (The PIE root seems to have meant something
more like 'to step' than 'to come'.)

> this pie root could be a cognate to proto semitic kwm

> Please notice common germanic/arabic infinitive
> ending=en/an as well as analog ablaut (o/u<=>a)
> English:o[present;cOme]=>a[past;cAme]
> Arabic:u[present;yaqUm]=>a[past;qAm]
> qum(he comes-present)/qam(he came-past)

Actually, Ringe reconstructs the Proto-Gmc. infinitive as
*kWemaną and the present indicative active as

*kWemō *kWemamaz
*kWimizi *kWimid
*kWimidi *kWemandi

and the past indicative as

*kWam *kWēmum
*kWamt *kWēmud
*kWam *kWēmun

with past participle *kumanaz. Old English had infinitive
<cuman> and corresponding paradigms

cume cumaþ
cym(e)st cumaþ
cym(e)þ cumaþ

and

cwōm c(w)ōmon
cwōme c(w)ōmon
cwōm c(w)ōmon

with past participle <cumen/cymen>. Your supposed
correspondences are artifacts of later changes.

> Also please read some of the works of linguist BANDER S,
> ALFRAIKH below

> In the conclusion to the first edition to Arablexis I
> stated that my aim in including the Indo-European roots in
> the list of Arabic roots was not to suggest "kinship". I
> left that remark unchanged. It remains to be my aim.
> Kinship is the specialty of Anthropology or Sociology. But
> descent is the word of preference in Comparative
> Linguistics. And descent is different from borrowing.
> Arabic wersh(ah) is much in currency coming through
> borrowing from Eng. "workshop". It has no other
> derivatives besides the plural werash. On the other hand,
> the preterits qa'da, "he sat down(on the floor)", waqa'a
> ,"he fell down", naqa'a, "water formed ponds", waqqa'a
> "it(bird) landed", and other nouns like qa'ar, "bottom",
> qa'a "ground"are descended from the root QA' which happens
> to be the same as Sumerian gi or ki meaning "earth or
> ground". Could not two languages (or more) even when they
> are not in the same family share a root or a variant of it
> as is the case here? Could not Greek be tapping the same
> root in geo-, also "earth"? Should this be the case why
> could not Old Eng. sweart, German Schwarz, and Latin
> sordere be descended from Arabic swd a root signifying
> "dark" objects. This should solve a difficult problem.
> Proto-Semitic has one important advantage over
> Indo-European. In Indo-European one works from the known
> to get to the unknown root. The h of Eng. horn goes to a k
> and this gives corn. After many gradings to the vowels and
> discarding with the suffixes you end up with *ker which is
> not a lexical unit of speech but only a root. In Semitics,
> especially Arabic, we start from the root ker which was
> unknown in Indo-European. Ker is a lexical root in Arabic
> denoting "repetitiveness and circular objects". It appears
> in such phrases as ker wa far "charge, retreat (warfare)".
> From the known we go to the unknown to find that the
> plosive k was changed to a similar consonant q and n added
> as a suffix just like Eng. to prduce qern "horn". We can
> go further into the unknown to find qarin "counterpart".
> This came from the pre-historic practice of yoking an
> inexperienced bull to a trained bull to do plowing. We
> could still go to the very unknown, to the etymon of qiran
> "marriage, which comes from the fact that marriage is
> union or 'yoking'". This finally takes us to zouj or zoug
> "spouse". And zoug becomes, through the Comparative
> Method, the same as the Indo-European root *yeug.

And at this point (if not sooner) one can very safely stop
reading, since the author clearly has no idea what the
comparative method is.

> Here we moved from the known, which is the "root", to the
> unknown, which is the "word". There is also the fact in
> Comparative Linguistics, as it pertains to Indo-European,
> to grade the root and make it sometimes zero-grade. Could
> this be due to an unconscious effort on the part of the
> corporatist to get to Proto-Semitic which is consonantal
> (no vowels)? Or is it merely a predetermined effort to
> make the unknown fit the known?

One is not at all surprised to find the real reason
conspicuous by its absence: it's what the evidence clearly
shows.

> If we turn to Semitic languages we find that Eng. mere and
> Latin mare are descended from Semitic mur "bitter, salty".

No, they don't.