Dear Danny and Nostraticists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Danny Wier" <dawier@...>
To: <nostratic@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2001 6:47 PM
Subject: [nostratic] A question on Proto-Afro-Asiatic


> Well I've been doing more research on PAA, and I've noticed the reconstructions
> I've seen seem to be closer to Semitic, and Proto-Semitic is most like Arabic.
> Is this really because Semitic and Arabic are such conservative languages, or is
> there a bias involved here?

[PCR]
Being human is, unfortunately, being biased to some extent. "Scientists" probably only ever succeed in minimizing the effects of their biases.

Wouldbe scientists who are aware of this sad situation therefore should try as hard as possible not to be unrealistically dogmatic about any conclusion.

From what I have been able to "see" from my perspective, it appears that Afrasian can be recontructed rather convincingly using a phonology that is very close to Arabic and Semitic.

While I am convinced that one of the characteristics of Semitic is the non-significant value of vowels for the specification of root morphemes, many others differ.

For Afrasian, I am inclined to differ with Bomhard who posits only [a]/[6], more or less along the lines of what some have proposed for Semitic. I suspect that Semitic can be regarded better as a root-vowel-less form of Afrasian, for which vowels should be reconstructed as part of the root.

But the question is exceedingly difficult. We have almost no very early attestations of non-Semitic Afrasian languages; and the recent materials we do have are sketchy, and, in my opinion, marred by very deficient intermediate proto-language reconstructions.

One need only look at the many reconstructions for Afrasian (aka Proto-Afro-Asiatic, and to some extent Hamito-Semitic). Whereas there is almost universal agreement on IE root-forms, every researcher, it seems, has a different idea for any given Afrasian root-form, and even the underlying phonological system.

I could wax vehement on why this is so but what would be the point? Most simply stated, no standard for reconstruction exists for Afrasian; and anyone is free to employ the most specious reasoning to justify his pet theory.

This is doubly unfortunate because it inhibits the comparison between Afrasian and IE!


Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE@... (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138)