Arabic and IE

[Theo Vennemann]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Alice Faber wrote on 30 Jan. 1999:

>If there are Semitic forms or
>structures that aren't widely attested in Afro-Asiatic but that show up in
>Indo-European, insisting that these bespeak a genetic link between Semitic and
>Indo-European also requires explaining away the evidence supporting an
>Afro-Asiatic language family. My understanding of most larger affiliations for
>Semitic is that are in fact filiations for Afro-Asiatic and not merely
>Semitic, but it's worth making that explicit.

Since the similarities are overwhelmingly between Indo-European and Semitic
rather than between Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic as a whole (or Proto-Afro-
Asiatic), they do not owe their origin to genetic relatedness of Indo-European
and Semitic but to language contact between Indo-European languages and Semit-
ic langiages (or--Prof. Trask may be listenig--to chance).

Contacts with Indo-European may have included those branches of Afro-Asiatic
that stand close to Semitic, especially Aegyptian and Berber. To the extent
that
related languages may share certain properties, it is not always trivial to
deter-
mine the donor langiage, so that the designation Hamito-Semitic (as in
Gensler's
dissertation) remains useful. An example would be the VSO syntax of Insular
Celtic.

Theo Vennemann
31 January 1999