IE-Semitic connections

Rick Mc Callister rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu
Thu Feb 4 17:27:20 UTC 1999


	Semitic settlements [more likely trading posts] in the W
Mediterranean go back to c. 1200 BC --according to some sources. Aquitanian
was likely spoken as far south as the coast. The Phoenicians and
Carthaginians dominated trade in that region until the Punic Wars. So there
were very likely contacts between Semitic and Vasconic.

	One can also add Theo Vennemann's idea of an Atlantic branch of AA,
either closely related to or part of Semitic.

	Some have suggested contacts between the French & Spanish
Mediterranean and Berber [or NW AA, if you wish to avoid a possible ethnic
slur]. There are a handful of words common to Berber, Ibero-Romance,
Sardinian and even Basque. Sardinian, from the meager reading I done on it,
seems to have the closest ties to Berber in terms of linguistic and
possibly grammatical substrate [occasional use of t-, th-, tl- as a
prefixed article]. However, given that I don't have access to any material
about Berber, I don't know how close it is to Semitic.

At 11:25 PM -0800 2/1/99, Glen Gordon wrote:
>MIGUEL:
>>The same happens in Etruscan (s'a ~ semph) and Basque (sei ~ zazpi).
>
>Whoops almost missed that one. Good thing I re-read. Basque? This brings
>up that ugly topic again of where Basque got those numbers from. I
>fathomed that they are perhaps some kind of Late Latin/Romance borrowing
>out of a blind guess. Larry Trask would know but he's probably busy
>battling Bengtson's Dene-Caucasian theory right now :)
>
>How would Basque acquire Semitic numbers?? It would be hard via an IE
>language - I can't think of one that would fit. Are you proposing that a
>moyl got lost in the Mediterranean? And what would he do with words like
>"six" and "seven" outside of the Middle East? Things that make you go
>hmmm....
[snip]



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