# Semitic & Germanic similarities



## CyrusSH

There are long discussions about some similar words in these languages, such as burg and earth.

The main question is that "is it just coincidence?" Don't you think that there is a strong relation which has been ignored by linguists?

For example let's look at some words for body parts:

(Consider g>y & k>s sound changes)

Body part:

Proto-Semitic *buday* (Akkadian _būdu_, Arabic _badan_, ...)
Proto-Germanic *budag* (Old English _bodeg_, English _body_, ...) 

Head:

Proto-Semitic *kulla* (Aramaic _kalla_, Arabic _kullat_, ...) -> Persian kalla
Proto-Germanic *kulla* (Old Norse _koll-r_, Old English _coll_, ...)

Eye:

Proto-Semitic *ayn* (Hebrew _aiyn_, Arabic _ayn_, ...)
Proto-Germanic *augon* (Danish _øie_, English _eye_, ...)

Ear:

Proto-Semitic *auzan* (Akkadian _uznu_, Hebrew _ozan_, ...)
Proto-Germanic *auzon* (Gothic _auso_, English _ear_, ...)

Nose:

Proto-Semitic *nasa* (Jibbali _nisa_, Arabic _naša/našq_(sniff), ...) 
Proto-Germanic *nasu* (German _nase_, English _nose_, ...)

Tongue:

Proto-Semitic *lissan* (Akkadian _lišanu_, Arabic _lisan_, ...)
Proto-Germanic *likkon* (German _lecken_, English _lick_, ...)
Compare to Persian _lis_ and Latin _lingo_ & _lingua_ (tongue)

Throat:

Proto-Semitic *halk* (Ethiopian _helk_, Arabic _halq_, ...)
Proto-Germanic *hals* (German _hals_, Old English _heals_, ...)

Neck:

Proto-Semitic *hnka* (Aramaic _hunka_, Arabic _unuk_, ...)
Proto-Germanic *hnekk* (Old Norse _hnakkr_, English _neck_, ...)

Chest:

Proto-Semitic *brak* (Soqotri _berak_, Arabic _bark_, ...)
Proto-Germanic *brust* (Gothic _brust_, English _breast_, ...)

stomach:

Proto-Semitic *mayda* (Arabic _ma'ida_)
Proto-Germanic *magen* (Dutch _maag_, English _maw_, ..)

sole:

Proto-Semitic *xuaf* (Arabic _xuff_) 
Proto-Germanic *xofa* (German _huf_, English _hoof_, ...)


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## Ben Jamin

It's not enough to compare "Germanic" (from what period?) words with Protosemitic, you should take account of the reconstructed PIE forms.


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## fdb

Ben Jamin said:


> It's not enough to compare "Germanic" (from what period?) words with Protosemitic, you should take account of the reconstructed PIE forms.



The theory that is presented here is that there was some kind of pre-historic contact specifically between Semitic and proto-Germanic, not between Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European. It is a marginal view, but it does have (very few) adherents.

Otherwise, I do not think there is much point is discussing long lists of supposed cognates. We could discuss each one in a separate string, but maybe after looking them up in standard dictionaries and trying to transcribe them correctly?


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## CyrusSH

Ben Jamin said:


> It's not enough to compare "Germanic" (from what period?) words with Protosemitic, you should take account of the reconstructed PIE forms.



There are certainly much older texts in Semitic languages than Germanic but I don't think it can be a reason that proto-Semitic is considered older than proto-Germanic, in fact we don't know how old these language are.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> There are certainly much older texts in Semitic languages than Germanic but I don't think it can be a reason that proto-Semitic is considered older than proto-Germanic, in fact we don't know how old these language are.


There is not a shadow of a doubt that Proto-Germanic and Proto-Semitic are from completely different periods. When we are talking of the breakup of the Proto-Germanic continuum, we are about 1700-1900 years in the past; when we are talking of the breakup of the Proto-Semitic continuum, we are more (probably much more) then 4000 years in the past.

As fdb said, the theories floating around linking Proto-Germanic to Seminic do not postulate a contact between Proto-Seminic and Proto-Germanic but an influence of Semitic languag*es* (Phoenician/Punic is a popular guess) on Proto-Germanic.

By the way, you should be a bit more careful with "sound change" laws. Sound shifts follow certain patterns that should be part of a theory postulating them. A sound shift certainly does not mean that you are free in ignoring variations of the sounds involved and in particular not that you can freely apply they in either direction as you did here:


CyrusSH said:


> Tongue:
> 
> Proto-Semitic *lissan* (Akkadian _lišanu_, Arabic _lisan_, ...)
> Proto-Germanic *likkon* (German _lecken_, English _lick_, ...)
> Compare to Persian _lis_ and Latin _lingo_ & _lingua_ (tongue)
> 
> Throat:
> 
> Proto-Semitic *halk* (Ethiopian _helk_, Arabic _halq_, ...)
> Proto-Germanic *hals* (German _hals_, Old English _heals_, ...)


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## rayloom

There's a book about it called Germania Semitica by Theo Vennemann.


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## berndf

I am sure, Vennemann was one of the


fdb said:


> (very few) adherents


fdb was referring to.

But Vennemann's theory is a bit different. His hypothetical Semitic substratum is from an slightly earlier period, influencing not only Proto-Germanic but also other Western European language groups, notably Celtic.


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## rayloom

berndf said:


> I am sure, Vennemann was one of the
> 
> fdb was referring to.
> 
> But Vennemann's theory is a bit different. His hypothetical Semitic substratum is from an slightly earlier period, influencing not only Proto-Germanic but also other Western European language groups, notably Celtic.



I see. That would be prior to any Punic influence on IE in that case I suppose.


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## berndf

rayloom said:


> I see. That would be prior to any Punic influence on IE in that case I suppose.


Or very early Punic at least.


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## CyrusSH

I believe the possible connection between ancient Semitic and Germanic people occurred in the west of Iran where from the first millennium BC Iranian peoples such as Medes, Scythians and Kurds lived there, but in the 2nd millennium BC according to ancient Semitic sources , those who lived in this region were *Suedi*, *Almani* and *Guti* people. In the Babylonian inscriptions, like the inscription of Agu-kak-rimi, the Kassite king of Babylon, the names of these people have been mentioned together that show they lived in the same region and related to each other.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> There is not a shadow of a doubt that Proto-Germanic and Proto-Semitic are from completely different periods. When we are talking of the breakup of the Proto-Germanic continuum, we are about 1700-1900 years in the past; when we are talking of the breakup of the Proto-Semitic continuum, we are more (probably much more) then 4000 years in the past.



We should actually talk about the breakup of the Indo-European continuum, it seems to be clear that it also happened more than 4,000 years ago, there are 3,700 years old Hittite inscriptions, I don't think that you consider Germanic as a subgroup of another Indo-European language, so proto-Germanic exists more than 4,000 years.


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## CyrusSH

I want to know what a Germanic word is, is it a word from Indo-European, a language which was spoken more than 5,000 years ago? Or a word from Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, ...?


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> those who lived in this region were *Suedi*, *Almani* and *Guti* people.


There is also an Akkadian inscription that mentions in the North, roughly the area you are talking of, a country called _Ar-ma-ni_. Will you be telling us that this evidence that Italian fashion was invented there? Seriously, these tribes formed much later, the Allemans and the Goths certainly during the migration period. The tribal names attested in earlier Roman sources were very different from the ones we know from later times.


CyrusSH said:


> We should actually talk about the breakup of the Indo-European continuum, it seems to be clear that it also happened more than 4,000 years ago, there are 3,700 years old Hittite inscriptions, I don't think that you consider Germanic as a subgroup of another Indo-European language, so proto-Germanic exists more than 4,000 years.


There are more break ups in between, notably Germanic, Baltic and Slavic separated much later. Proto-Germanic being spoken in the Black Sea/Caspian Sea region 4000 years ago is absurd.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> There are more break ups in between, notably Germanic, Baltic and Slavic separated much later. Proto-Germanic being spoken in the Black Sea/Caspian Sea region 4000 years ago is absurd.



I don't know what you mean, do you want to say for example 2,500 years ago when Persians, Medians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Scythians, ... needed translators to speak to each other because proto-Iranian was a dead language and no one knew a very long time before it, Indo-Iranian also existed, there were still some people who spoke proto-Indo-European?!


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> I don't know what you mean, do you want to say for example 2,500 years ago when Persians, Medians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Scythians, ... needed translators to speak to each other because proto-Iranian was a dead language and no one knew a very long time before it, Indo-Iranian also existed, there were still some people who spoke proto-Indo-European?!


No. I don't understand how you could possibly read this into my words.

I said there were more development steps from PIE to PG. PG emerged long after the break up of PIE. If you wanted to develop such a theory as you did you would have to reconstruct a development stages that would predate the Balto-Slavic-Germanic break up and notably all the sound shift of Grimm's law, which apply only to Germanic languages.


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## rushalaim

Some historians say that there was huge migration of Turks into Germany earlier. And even German pronunciation had changed. For example, "t"-sound in Germanian became be pronounced like Arabs are pronouncing it. And Germans got black hairs. By the way, that's why Germans like to rest in Turkey!? Turkey is their Fatherland. ))


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> No. I don't understand how you could possibly read this into my words.
> 
> I said there were more development steps from PIE to PG. PG emerged long after the break up of PIE. If you wanted to develop such a theory as you did you would have to reconstruct a development stages that would predate the Balto-Slavic-Germanic break up and notably all the sound shift of Grimm's law, which apply only to Germanic languages.



Existence of Balto-Slavic-Germanic sub-branch of Indo-European can be interesting, it can explain both k>s and s>k sound changes in my initial post, but those who claim this strange mixture of Satem and Centum languages existed should reconstruct its words, not me.


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## Treaty

CyrusSH said:


> but those who claim this strange mixture of Satem and Centum languages existed should reconstruct its words, not me.


_Satem _and _centum _grouping is not indicative of a single primal division of PIE, i.e., something like proto-_centum_ and proto-_satem_. Considering the much later dating for proto-Slavic, -Baltic and -Germanic, their common post-PIE ancestor (or "North European", if any) could have existed when Proto-Indo-Iranian was already _satem_ized and Proto-Hellenic was already _centum_ized. That proto-SBG might have not even yet undergone either _satem_ or _centum_ treatment.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> but those who claim this strange mixture of Satem and Centum languages


True. The obvious idea of a single early Satem-Centum split ran into some difficulties and as far as I understand current academic views on the topic, different sub branches IE are thought to have developed their status as Centum and Satem languages independently. Remember that the Satem-Centum split is not a collection of some random exchanges of s and k (which would indeed have to have been a unique event) but the systematic outcome of different mergers of PIE_ *k'_.

I did not want to give the impression of postulating a Balto-Slavic-Germanic subgroup. Much too little is known for sure about early splits of PIE. But if we are going back as far as you are trying it is certainly not safe to assume a Germanic branch with all its characteristics, notably Grimm's Law, was already in place.

Edit: Crossed with preceding post.


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## CyrusSH

In another thread I have talked about Grimm's Law in the Iranian languages but the point is that unlike in Germanic, it is not a certain law in Iranian, in fact Germanic seems to be closer to proto-Indo-European with no intermediation but Iranian was just under the influence of this Law, so Germanic could be older than Iranian.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> In another thread I have talked about Grimm's Law in the Iranian languages but the point is that unlike in Germanic, it is not a certain law in Iranian, in fact Germanic seems to be closer to proto-Indo-European with no intermediation but Iranian was just under the influence of this Law, so Germanic could be older than Iranian.


Grimm's law describes a chain shift. It is not sufficient just to look at the spirantisation part of it. Spirantisations happened in many different languages for different reasons independently.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> Grimm's law describes a chain shift. It is not sufficient just to look at the spirantisation part of it. Spirantisations happened in many different languages for different reasons independently.



Yes, for this reason I say Germanic was directly from proto-Indo-European, not a sub-group of it, because of this exact chain shift, from the Germanic words by an inverse law we can reconstruct proto-Indo-European words.


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## berndf

Grimm's law is not suffient to reconstruct PIE words. It requires assumptions about previous shifts, e.g. the Centum-merger to have happened before. If you apply Grimm's law in a Satem language you would get different results. E.g. if Germanic had had a Satem merger before you would expect _*sundred_ instead of _hundred_.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> Grimm's law is not suffient to reconstruct PIE words. It requires assumptions about previous shifts, e.g. the Centum-merger to have happened before. If you apply Grimm's law in a Satem language you would get different results. E.g. if Germanic had had a Satem merger before you would expect _*sundred_ instead of _hundred_.



From proto-IE _*sengʷʰ-_ "sing", there is proto-Germanic _*singwaną_ but from this PIE root in the Centum languages there is Greek _omphē_, if you apply Grimm's law in a Centum language you would get a word similar to Greek one.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> From proto-IE _*sengʷʰ-_ "sing", there is proto-Germanic _*singwaną_ but from this PIE root in the Centum languages there is Greek _omphē_, if you apply Grimm's law in a Centum language you would get a word similar to Greek one.


Sorry, that is nonsense. Greek is has undergone different sound changes and this an true PIE _s_ and has nothing to do with Centum-Satem whatsoever. Centum-Satem is about the outcome of _*k' _and _*g'_.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> Sorry, that is nonsense. Greek is has undergone different sound changes and this an true PIE _s_ and has nothing to do with Centum-Satem whatsoever. Centum-Satem is about the outcome of _*k' _and _*g'_.



I was referring the last letter, proto-IE _*gʷʰ_ has been changed to "ph/f" in Centum languages but "g/gh" in the Satem, so in this case Germanic is more similar to Satem than Centum.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> I was referring the last letter, proto-IE _*gʷʰ_ has been changed to "ph/f" in Centum languages but "g/gh" in the Satem, so in this case Germanic is more similar to Satem than Centum.


The shift to _pʰ_ is specific to Greek. The spirantisation to _f_ is post-classical. In Germanic the outcome is _*gʷ. _The further shift to_ g_ after _n_ is West Germanic. In a North Germanic, the labialisation was lost only after the Old Norse stage. In Gothic the labialisation was also still present.


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## CyrusSH

Anyway, do you think proto-Germanic belongs to which era? 500 BC?

Compare to Old Persian:

Indo-European (3000 BC) > Indo-Iranian (2500 BC) > Iranian (2000 BC) > Western Iranian (1000 BC) > Old Persian (500 BC)

Indo-European (3000 BC) > X (2500 BC) > X (2000 BC) > X (1000 BC) > proto-Germanic (500 BC)


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## berndf

About 500BC-200AD.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> About 500BC-200AD.



By 3,000 BC (maximum 2,500 BC), proto-Indo-European was extinct, so all sound laws about PIE consonants, including Grimm's law, couldn't be applied after this date, for this reason it really doesn't matter proto-Germanic existed before 500 BC or not, the important point is that at least 2,000 years before it, proto-Indo-European was developed into a language similar to proto-Germanic, I'm talking about this language here.


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## berndf

We have no idea what this language was and what properties it had. But it is very unlikely it resembled PG in any meaningful way besides being a lot closer to PIE.


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## heterônimo

Just out of curiosity, how Vennemann explains his propositions historically?


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## Treaty

See here:
Atlantic (Semitic) languages - Wikipedia


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> We have no idea what this language was and what properties it had. But it is very unlikely it resembled PG in any meaningful way besides being a lot closer to PIE.



Ok, the only important thing for me is *Grimm's law* of proto-Indo-European, like *k > h [x] (Arabic ح), for example as I mentioned in another thread the word _hablo_ (cable) doesn't exist in the Germanic languages but Akkadian _ḥablu_ and Arabic _ḥabl_ could be a loanword from it but some words exist like Arabic xuff/ḥafir (hoof) that I mentioned above.


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## CyrusSH

Or in this X language the word for "cavity" could be _*xawr_ which doesn't exist in Germanic, cognate with Latin _cavus_ and Avestan _sura_ (Persian _surax_), compare to Arabic _ḥafr_.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> Ok, the only important thing for me is *Grimm's law* of proto-Indo-European, like *k > h [x] (Arabic ح), for example as I mentioned in another thread the word _hablo_ (cable) doesn't exist in the Germanic languages but Akkadian _ḥablu_ and Arabic _ḥabl_ could be a loanword from it but some words exist like Arabic xuff/ḥafir (hoof) that I mentioned above.



That is not Grimm's law. Grimm's law is the totality of the shift and not only a small part of it. What you are doing is calling every mathematical formula "Relativity" if they contain a + sign only because some of Einstein's formulae contain a + sign as well. What you mean is _spirantisation of k._
Grimm's law applies to PG and not to PIE.
Arabic ح in not [x] and not a plausible outcome of spirantisation of _k_. This could only possibly make sense (and even then I don't agree it does) for Semitic languages that have subsequently merged [x] into [ħ] (=ح), like Hebrew. Arabic is not one of them.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> hat is not Grimm's law. Grimm's law is the totality of the shift and not only a small part of it. What you are doing is calling every mathematical formula "Relativity" if they contain a + sign only because some of Einstein's formulae contain a + sign as well. What you mean is _spirantisation of k._[/LIST]



If you look at my initial post, there are also other sound shifts, like **g > k / *gʷ > kʷ*, from proto-IE *g(ʷ)Alǝw proto-Germanic _*kulla_ (head), cognate with Latvian _galva_, Russian _golová_, ... 



> Grimm's law applies to PG and not to PIE.



What do you mean? PIE - Grimm's law > PG, do you believe another process?!



> Arabic ح in not [x] and not a plausible outcome of spirantisation of _k_. This could only possibly make sense (and even then I don't agree it does) for Semitic languages that have subsequently merged [x] into [ħ] (=ح), like Hebrew. Arabic is not one of them.



I never said Arabic ح is outcome of spirantization of _k_, if this thing really happened then it could be said that those words that I mentioned in my previous post were actually from a Centum language, like Hittite, not Germanic.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> I never said Arabic ح is outcome of spirantization of _k_,


Sure you did:


CyrusSH said:


> like *k > h [x] (Arabic ح)


ح  [ħ] has nothing to do with either k, h or [x].


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> Sure you did:
> 
> ح  [ħ] has nothing to do with either k, h or [x].



I thought you mean Semitic _k_ was spirantized to Arabic ح, by *k > h [x] (Arabic ح) I meant Semitic _Heth_ which represented both Voiceless pharyngeal fricative (hard _h_) and Voiceless velar fricative (_x_).


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> I thought you mean Semitic _k_ was spirantized to Arabic ح, by *k > h [x] (Arabic ح) I meant Semitic _Heth_ which represented both Voiceless pharyngeal fricative (hard _h_) and Voiceless velar fricative (_x_).


No, it doesn't. Those are distinct sounds and distinct phonemes. [x] is خ. They are merged in Hebrew but not in Arabic and not in Semitic in general. That is a very specific merger in certain Semitic languages.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> No, it doesn't. Those are distinct sounds and distinct phonemes. [x] is خ. They are merged in Hebrew but not in Arabic and not in Semitic in general. That is a very specific merger in certain Semitic languages.



We are talking about early loanwords in Semitic and Germanic languages here, not modern Arabic and English languages, for example about Hebrew _pésaḥ_ (Passover), there is فصح in Arabic but _pasxa_ in Indo-European languages.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> We are talking about early loanwords in Semitic and Germanic languages here, not modern Arabic and English languages, for example about Hebrew _pésaḥ_ (Passover), there is فصح in Arabic but _pasxa_ in Indo-European languages.


You have to make up your mind if you want to talk about sound shifts or loans. Here you are talking about both at the same time:


CyrusSH said:


> I thought you mean Semitic _k_ was spirantized to Arabic ح, by *k > h [x] (Arabic ح) I meant Semitic _Heth_ which represented both Voiceless pharyngeal fricative (hard _h_) and Voiceless velar fricative (_x_).


That is actually makes sense but them you would be looking for Semitic k/q vs. Germanic h correspondences. There are actually some loans from languages from the wider region. Greek _Cannabis_, e.g., is probably a Scythian loan that arrived in Europe not too long before 500BC. In Germanic it arrived as English _hemp_/German _Hanf_. That means it has entered the predecessor language of PG before the 1st Germanic sound shift. This loan actually helps us gauge the timing of the shift: It could not have started too long before 500BC but must have been completed before the first contact with the Romans no known Latin loans underwent the shift.


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## fdb

berndf said:


> Greek _Cannabis_, e.g., is probably a Scythian loan that arrived in Europe not too long before 500BC.



More likely from Sumerian kunibu.


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## berndf

fdb said:


> More likely from Sumerian kunibu.


Ultimately, yes. But from there it didn't enter Greek, did it?


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## fdb

Via Akkadian qunnabu, Aramaic qanpā. I don't see where Scythian fits in.


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## CyrusSH

What do you think about Arabic خنیف (xanif)?


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## rayloom

CyrusSH said:


> What do you think about Arabic خنیف (xanif)?



Arabic borrowed it as قنب qunnab (also qinnab).


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## CyrusSH

rayloom said:


> Arabic borrowed it as قنب qunnab (also qinnab).



Yes but according to my dictionary, Arabic _xanif_ (plural _xonof_) has also a similar meaning.


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## rayloom

CyrusSH said:


> Yes but according to my dictionary, Arabic _xanif_ (plural _xonof_) has also a similar meaning.



xanīf refers to low quality linen. Nothing proves it came from qnb.


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## berndf

fdb said:


> Via Akkadian qunnabu, Aramaic qanpā. I don't see where Scythian fits in.


That is what you get told in _Germanistik _departments about the _erste Germanische Lautverschiebung_. I have never thought much about it why. I guess that is the reason:


> Herodot berichtet in seinem berühmten Geschichtswerk, dass die Griechen bei den Skythen den Hanf kennengelernt haben u. dieses Wort f. den Skythen übernommen haben


Skript aus der Uni Wien.


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## Delvo

The concept of how sound shifts work in the original post here and the suggestion of getting getting خنیف from قنب appears to pay no attention to detail. Vague similarity between words means nothing because sound shifts happen in specific directions at specific times. You suggest Arabic /q/ becoming /x/ in one word, but it needs to be part of a paradigm in which /q/ _normally_ becomes /x/. You suggest Arabic /b/ becoming /f/ in the same word, but it needs to be part of a paradigm in which /b/ _normally_ becomes /f/. And in both cases, since Arabic still has /q/ and /b/, it would need some way of narrowing down in what circumstances this process happened and in what circumstances it didn't.

Back to the original post, you've equated English /st/ with Arabic /k/ in words for "chest", but Arabic /s/ and Akkadian [š] with English /k/ in what you presented as words for "tongue" (even though it's actually the verb "lick" in the Germanic example and the Latin example isn't even related to it). So which way does this work: do you think it's Germanic /k/ and Semitic /s,š/, or Semitic /k/ and Germanic /st/? These two things are almost exact opposites, so it can't be both unless anything near /s/ and anything near /k/ are just randomly interchangible, which isn't how these things work. Exactly which sound converted to exactly which other sound in which language, and when?

Your representation of the words for "eye" in Semitic languages is inaccurate. They start with a consonant, /ʕ/ [ع,ע,ܥ], which gets ignored in some romanizations. I suppose someone with an approach as haphazard as yours might try to equate that with the Germanic /g/, but then you'd be reversing the sound order because the Semitic /ʕ/ comes before the /a/ and the Germanic /g/ comes after it, and you'd also lose any illusion of similarity based on "y" or "i" because that's separate from the /ʕ/ in the Semitic words but the English "y" and "g" are functionally the same thing; they were never two separate things in any form of the word at one time. And that's on top of the timing problem: English's shift from "g" to "y" happened recently, well within recorded history, and never happened in German at all, but the Semitic words for "eye" have had roughly the given form since Proto-Semitic, before writing began, millennia earlier. So even if the phonetic matches really worked, there's no time in history in which the transfer could possibly have happened. (You might even think you could salvage this by equating the /ʕ/ with the _*h₃_ in PIE _*h₃okʷ-_, but then it only gets worse; the connection would then need to be throughout IE, not just Germanic, and there's no "i" or "y" in sight that early and you'd now have two velars/gutterals to explain instead of one.)

Is this the kind of thinking you applied in all of the listed cases? If I tried to look into any of the others in your list to anywhere near that level of detail, would I find a similar mess there again, or are any of them better supported than this? I actually tried a few, but in the first few of your words that I looked up, the translator told me you weren't even using the right words for the meanings you offered anyway.

Then there's the issue of semantic "fields". Usually, if Language X imports words from Language Y, it's because the word indicates something from a "field" that Language X's culture wasn't previously exposed to, or which people speaking language Y took over in Language X's former territory. For example, English has French words for government-related concepts (the "field" of government) because England's government was once run by French people. But we all have the same type of body, so why would that semantic field be the one that has a bunch of words transfer from language to language?


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## fdb

Herodotus 4,74-75 (Godley’s translation):

"They [the Scythians] have hemp growing in their country, very like flax, except that the hemp is much thicker and taller. This grows both of itself and also by their cultivation, and the Thracians even make garments of it which are very like linen; no one, unless he were an expert in hemp, could determine whether they were hempen or linen; whoever has never seen hemp before will think the garment linen. The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp and, crawling in under the mats, throw it on the red-hot stones, where it smoulders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor-bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor-bath. This serves them instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water."

(ἔστι δέ σφι κάνναβις φυομένη ἐν τῇ χώρῃ …)

Note that Herodotus does not say that κάνναβις is a Scythian word, nor even that it is an exclusively Scythian product; the Thracians have it too.


----------



## rayloom

Delvo said:


> The concept of how sound shifts work in the original post here and the suggestion of getting getting خنیف from قنب appears to pay no attention to detail. Vague similarity between words means nothing because sound shifts happen in specific directions at specific times. You suggest Arabic /q/ becoming /x/ in one word, but it needs to be part of a paradigm in which /q/ _normally_ becomes /x/. You suggest Arabic /b/ becoming /f/ in the same word, but it needs to be part of a paradigm in which /b/ _normally_ becomes /f/. And in both cases, since Arabic still has /q/ and /b/, it would need some way of narrowing down in what circumstances this process happened and in what circumstances it didn't.
> 
> Back to the original post, you've equated English /st/ with Arabic /k/ in words for "chest", but Arabic /s/ and Akkadian [š] with English /k/ in what you presented as words for "tongue" (even though it's actually the verb "lick" in the Germanic example and the Latin example isn't even related to it). So which way does this work: do you think it's Germanic /k/ and Semitic /s,š/, or Semitic /k/ and Germanic /st/? These two things are almost exact opposites, so it can't be both unless anything near /s/ and anything near /k/ are just randomly interchangible, which isn't how these things work. Exactly which sound converted to exactly which other sound in which language, and when?
> 
> Your representation of the words for "eye" in Semitic languages is inaccurate. They start with a consonant, /ʕ/ [ع,ע,ܥ], which gets ignored in some romanizations. I suppose someone with an approach as haphazard as yours might try to equate that with the Germanic /g/, but then you'd be reversing the sound order because the Semitic /ʕ/ comes before the /a/ and the Germanic /g/ comes after it, and you'd also lose any illusion of similarity based on "y" or "i" because that's separate from the /ʕ/ in the Semitic words but the English "y" and "g" are functionally the same thing; they were never two separate things in any form of the word at one time. And that's on top of the timing problem: English's shift from "g" to "y" happened recently, well within recorded history, and never happened in German at all, but the Semitic words for "eye" have had roughly the given form since Proto-Semitic, before writing began, millennia earlier. So even if the phonetic matches really worked, there's no time in history in which the transfer could possibly have happened. (You might even think you could salvage this by equating the /ʕ/ with the _*h₃_ in PIE _*h₃okʷ-_, but then it only gets worse; the connection would then need to be throughout IE, not just Germanic, and there's no "i" or "y" in sight that early and you'd now have two velars/gutterals to explain instead of one.)
> 
> Is this the kind of thinking you applied in all of the listed cases? If I tried to look into any of the others in your list to anywhere near that level of detail, would I find a similar mess there again, or are any of them better supported than this? I actually tried a few, but in the first few of your words that I looked up, the translator told me you weren't even using the right words for the meanings you offered anyway.
> 
> Then there's the issue of semantic "fields". Usually, if Language X imports words from Language Y, it's because the word indicates something from a "field" that Language X's culture wasn't previously exposed to, or which people speaking language Y took over in Language X's former territory. For example, English has French words for government-related concepts (the "field" of government) because England's government was once run by French people. But we all have the same type of body, so why would that semantic field be the one that has a bunch of words transfer from language to language?



The list has multiple problems. For example, one which was quite apparent:

Neck:
Proto-Semitic *hnka* (Aramaic _hunka_, Arabic _unuk_, ...)
Proto-Germanic *hnekk* (Old Norse _hnakkr_, English _neck_

In both Aramaic and Arabic, the word for neck is based on the root عنق, while حنك means palate. 
Loose transcription would give rise to such ambiguities and could lead to unreal similarities between words. 

Also PS head would have been raʾš which gives Arabic raʾs. Qullat is used to mean head in Classical Arabic but I couldn't find an Aramaic cognate meaning head from the same root. 
I also wonder where the diphthong in PS auzon came from! And the /z/ was probably an interdental since Arabic has it as أذن.


----------



## berndf

Delvo said:


> English's shift from "g" to "y" happened recently, well within recorded history, and never happened in German at all


Palatalisation of /g/=[ɣ] to [ʝ]~[j] and with final obstuent devoicing further to [ç] are regular features of Middle and Low German as well and also occurs, to a letter degree, in Sandinavian languages.

But also in Middle and Log German, those are later development as in English and have certainly no relevance for the genesis of PG.



Delvo said:


> For example, English has French words for government-related concepts (the "field" of government) because England's government was once run by French people. But we all have the same type of body, so why would that semantic field be the one that has a bunch of words transfer from language to language?


Well there are examples in English as well with names of body parts changing their meaning within the same Semantic field, like _neck_ (=_nape_) taking over the meaning of the list _hals_.


----------



## berndf

fdb said:


> Note that Herodotus does not say that κάνναβις is a Scythian word, nor even that it is an exclusively


But it still makes the import route via Scythian or Thracian the more obvious route than via Aramaic. Also with regard to the question how a Mesopotamian words ends up in Germaic independently from Greek and Latin, a Scythian route would be most obvious.

Your rejection of the idea due to lack of a positive reason:


fdb said:


> I don't see where Scythian fits in.


would rather apply to Aramaic as the immediate source of the loan. But for the argument, the precise path doesn't matter, only the timing.


----------



## fdb

berndf said:


> But for the argument, the precise path doesn't matter, only the timing.



I would definitely agree with that.


----------



## CyrusSH

rayloom said:


> xanīf refers to low quality linen. Nothing proves it came from qnb.



It doesn't come from _qunnab_ but from Germanic _xanapiz_, in Arabic/Persian _xanif_ also means "canvas, hempen cloth", with this meaning it probably relates to Persian _kenaf_ (a cord made of flax) too.


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## rayloom

CyrusSH said:


> It doesn't come from _qunnab_ but from Germanic _xanapiz_, in Arabic/Persian _xanif_ also means "canvas, hempen cloth", with this meaning it probably relates to Persian _kenaf_ (a cord made of flax) too.



So the sound shift didn't occur in Arabic.


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## CyrusSH

rayloom said:


> So the sound shift didn't occur in Arabic.



p>f happened in Arabic but I don't know about other ones, if they happened in the Semitic languages then, as I said in another post, it can be said that Germanic had no role and these are from a neighbor Centum language, like Hittite, of course just about Semitic words which could be loanwords, not those ones which were borrowed from Semitic languages.


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## rayloom

CyrusSH said:


> p>f happened in Arabic but I don't know about other ones, if they happened in the Semitic languages then, as I said in another post, it can be said that Germanic had no role and these are from a neighbor Centum language, like Hittite, of course just about Semitic words which could be loanwords, not those ones which were borrowed from Semitic languages.



PS /p/ shifted to /f/ in Arabic. But weren't referring to the q/k shift to x?


----------



## desi4life

berndf said:


> But it still makes the import route via Scythian or Thracian the more obvious route than via Aramaic. Also with regard to the question how a Mesopotamian words ends up in Germaic independently from Greek and Latin, a Scythian route would be most obvious.



How does the Aramaic route vs. Scythian route affect the Germanic form? Isn't it plausible that Greek _kánnabis _was borrowed early enough by Germanic tribes for it to be affected by Grimm's law and become Proto-Germanic *hanapiz?


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## CyrusSH

I just searched for "Grimm's Law and loanwords" in the web and just found a book by Vennemann which actually talk about Semitic loanwords in Germanic, are there other works? I want a list of words.


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## berndf

desi4life said:


> How does the Aramaic route vs. Scythian route affect the Germanic form?


Not at all. It was an unimportant side argument between fdb and us and we agreed to this:


berndf said:


> But for the argument, the precise path doesn't matter, only the timing.





fdb said:


> I would definitely agree with that.


----------



## CyrusSH

I think the Arabic word _xanif_ has solved the issue about Germanic _xanapiz_.

A Dictionary, Persian, Arabic, and English


----------



## fdb

rayloom said:


> There's a book about it called Germania Semitica by Theo Vennemann.



Vennemann's collected papers are available here, in case anyone is interested:Europa Vasconica - Europa Semitica


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> I think the Arabic word _xanif_ has solved the issue about Germanic _xanapiz_.
> 
> A Dictionary, Persian, Arabic, and English


There is no issue about _xanapiz_ except your clinging to even the thinnest straw to keep your outlandish theory about the genesis of PG in play. _xanif_ is a form of cloth made from flax and maybe extended to hemp as material. _xanapiz _has nothing to do with cloths at all but is the name of a plant.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> There is no issue about _xanapiz_ except your clinging to even the thinnest straw to keep your outlandish theory about the genesis of PG in play.



It is not my theory about the origin of proto-Germanic, most of scholars (except nationalist ones) believe that All branches of Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia, not in their current lands.



> _xanif_ is a form of cloth made from flax and maybe extended to hemp as material. _xanapiz _has nothing to do with cloths at all but is the name of a plant.



The first meaning of _xanif_ is flax/hemp and the second meaning is a cloth made from it.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> It is not my theory about the origin of proto-Germanic, most of scholars (except nationalist ones) believe that All branches of Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia, ...


That is simply not true.


CyrusSH said:


> ..., not in their current lands.


Not even the staunchest advocates of the Anatolian hypothesis would argue that PG developed in the _Urheimat_.


CyrusSH said:


> The first meaning of _xanif_ is flax/hemp and the second meaning is a cloth made from it.


What flax or hemp? They are completely different things.
The extension to _hemp _even mentioned in your dictionary entry is only via cloths (becaouse both are used to make clothing).


----------



## CyrusSH

What do you think about loanwords from Germanic in the Ancient Greek before 500 BC? like σάπων from Proto-Germanic *saipǭ (“soap”), from Proto-Indo-European *seyp-, *seyb- (“to pour, strain, trickle”), Arabic _sabun_ and Akkadian _sapu_?


----------



## origumi

berndf said:


> Not even the staunchest advocates of the Anatolian hypothesis would argue that PG developed in the _Urheimat_.


As a footnote, can you say what's the supposed Urheimat of German? Is it somewhere in Eastern Europe? Or Scandinavia?


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## berndf

origumi said:


> As a footnote, can you say what's the supposed Urheimat of German? Is it somewhere in Eastern Europe? Or Scandinavia?


...or anywhere in between. (Assuming you mean _Germanic_ and not _German_)


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> ...or anywhere in between.



Germany?


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## rayloom

CyrusSH said:


> The first meaning of _xanif_ is flax/hemp and the second meaning is a cloth made from it.



Not in the Classical Arabic dictionaries as the Lisān Al-Arab.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> Germany?


What today is Germany was not an integral territory. Large parts of modern Germany, the South and most parts of the centre, certainly had no Germanic settlement before about 300BC. Part of the North and the North-East might have been part of the area where PG originated.


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## CyrusSH

If sound shifts from proto-IE to proto-Germanic were not so accurate then it could be said proto-Germanic was appeared probably two thousands years after the extinction of proto-Indo-European language but the problem is that proto-Germanic can be directly from no language except proto-IE.


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## berndf

Nobody doubts that PG decends from PIE. What is your point?


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> Nobody doubts that PG decends from PIE. What is your point?



But you said PG didn't exist before 500 BC and we know PIE didn't exist after 2,500 BC, how is it possible?


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> But you said PG didn't exist before 500 BC and we know PIE didn't exist after 2,500 BC, how is it possible?


There was an intermediate development stage we don't know. We only know that there are three sound shifts involved, the first made produced a Centum language, Grimm's law and Verner's law. The sequence of the last two steps are still debated but the usual assumption is that Grimm's Law happened first.


----------



## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> There was an intermediate development stage we don't know. We only know that there are three sound shifts involved, the first made produced a Centum language, Grimm's law and Verner's law. The sequence of the last two steps are debated.



There couldn't be an intermediate development stage when it is said for this exact reason X in PIE is changed to Y in PG, there is even a chain shift.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> There couldn't be an intermediate development stage when it is said for this exact reason X in PIE is changed to Y in PG, there is even a chain shift.


You cannot reconstruct PIE from PG solely from knowing Grimm's and Verner's laws. This is only a tiny element if what happened.


----------



## Delvo

CyrusSH said:


> It is not my theory about the origin of proto-Germanic, most of scholars (except nationalist ones) believe that All branches of Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia, not in their current lands.


The theory you've been pushing hasn't been that PIE was spoken in Anatolia. The theory you've been pushing has been about some kind of relationship directly between Semitic languages and Germanic languages. Does the fact that you just tried to run away from it and pretend you've been talking about something completely different mean you're now recanting what you've been saying until now?



CyrusSH said:


> But you said PG didn't exist before 500 BC and we know PIE didn't exist after 2,500 BC, how is it possible?





CyrusSH said:


> There couldn't be an intermediate development stage when it is said for this exact reason X in PIE is changed to Y in PG, there is even a chain shift.


Of course there can be a stages. They're when some of the known changes from PIE to PG had already happened but others hadn't yet. There are so many of them that we really can't call it the same language the whole time.

The catches are that we don't know the order of some of the steps, how to explain some words that don't seem to fit the known steps, where the speakers lived at various times along the way, or which other branches of the IE family might still not have separated from it yet (making it not just Proto-Germanic but Proto-Some-Combination).


----------



## Treaty

CyrusSH said:


> There couldn't be an intermediate development stage when it is said for this exact reason X in PIE is changed to Y in PG, there is even a chain shift.


Sounds don't change overnight. It wasn't like that PG people decided to change PIE _d_ to _t_ on Oktoberfest to irritate the nearby Celts (would've been fun though). Even if that change had impossibly happened in two days, the day in between was literally the "intermediate stage".


CyrusSH said:


> What do you think about loanwords from Germanic in the Ancient Greek before 500 BC?


The oldest sources in L&S and Bailly dictionaries (sources of your link) are from 1st c. BC (Asclepiodotus and M. Rufus). There is a mention of Theocritus' (3rd BC) _scholia_, but I guess it is a later comment on his Idyllis, rather than by him in that book. As your link suggests the word is a loan from Latin to Greek, possibly as result of Roman expeditions into Gaul (considering 1st BC date). The "500 BC Attic" is a pronunciation guide for showing how it _could have been_ pronounced back then. It doesn't necessarily indicate the usage date (cf. there is an Attic pronunciation for Σκλάβος as well, but it hadn't been attested before 6th AD; anyway, Wikitionary is not the most reliable source). Semantically, Germanic *_saipo _(resin, amber) is not even close to Akkadian _sapu _(to bathe, to flood), especially as compared to PIE *_seib _(to pour). Arabic _ṣābūn _is a later Greek loan (or via Aramaic _ṣappōn_).


----------



## CyrusSH

Delvo said:


> The theory you've been pushing hasn't been that PIE was spoken in Anatolia. The theory you've been pushing has been about some kind of relationship directly between Semitic languages and Germanic languages. Does the fact that you just tried to run away from it and pretend you've been talking about something completely different mean you're now recanting what you've been saying until now?



I never believe in a relationship between Semitic and Germanic languages but I believe for a long time (more than 1,500 years) Semitic and Germanic peoples were neighbors, so there are a large number of loanwords in both languages, this similarity can be compared to the similarity between Modern Persian and Arabic languages.



> Of course there can be a stages. They're when some of the known changes from PIE to PG had already happened but others hadn't yet. There are so many of them that we really can't call it the same language the whole time.
> 
> The catches are that we don't know the order of some of the steps, how to explain some words that don't seem to fit the known steps, where the speakers lived at various times along the way, or which other branches of the IE family might still not have separated from it yet (making it not just Proto-Germanic but Proto-Some-Combination).



The most important thing is "those known changes from PIE to PG" which had happened, in another thread there is a discussion about "Grimm's law in the Iranian languages", I myself know that it is certainly not a general law and there are just some exceptions in the Iranian languages but why they exist? For example about Persian xeng (horse, German/Dutch _hengst_) from proto-IE *_kankest-_, both Grimm's law and Verner's law can be seen, should we consider it as a Persian word or a loanword from Germanic? If you consider it as a Persian word then I can say all Germanic words that I mentioned in my first post, could be actually Persian/Iranian.

Or about *s-mobile*: Indo-European s-mobile - Wikipedia



> This "movable" prefix s- appears at the beginning of some Indo-European roots, but is absent from other occurrences of the same root. For example, the stem *(s)táwros, perhaps 'bison', gives Latin taurus and Old English steor (Modern English steer), both meaning 'bull'. Both variants existed side by side in PIE, with Germanic preserving both forms as *steuraz and *þeuraz respectively, *but Italic, Celtic, Slavic and others all have words for 'bull' which reflect the root without the s*. Compare also: Gothic stiur, German Stier, *Avestan staora* (cattle); but Old Norse þjórr, Greek tauros, Latin taurus, Old Church Slavonic turъ, Lithuanian tauras, Welsh tarw, Old Irish tarb, Oscan turuf and Albanian taroç.



Is Avestan a Germanic language? Or is it a loanword from Germanic? Of course the important point is that in this case and several other ones, Germanic has preserved the original Indo-European word, unlike all other Indo-European languages and you say Germanic is 2,000 years younger than them!!


----------



## desi4life

CyrusSH said:


> I never believe in a relationship between Semitic and Germanic languages but I believe for a long time (more than 1,500 years) Semitic and Germanic peoples were neighbors, so there are a large number of loanwords in both languages, this similarity can be compared to the similarity between Modern Persian and Arabic languages.



How does your Semitic-Germanic theory fit with your Iranic-Germanic theory? Have you switched from one theory to the other?


----------



## CyrusSH

desi4life said:


> How does your Semitic-Germanic theory fit with your Iranic-Germanic theory? Have you switched from one theory to the other?



It is not my theory, scholars believe that all branches of Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia and Indo-Iranians couldn't be far from this region, the strong influence of Indo-Iranian culture on Mitanni culture show this fact but Indo-Iranians actually lived in the east of Germanic lands, so there were less cultural relations between them and Semitic people.


----------



## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> I never believe in a relationship between Semitic and Germanic languages but I believe for a long time (more than 1,500 years) Semitic and Germanic peoples were neighbors, so there are a large number of loanwords in both languages, this similarity can be compared to the similarity between Modern Persian and Arabic languages.


You may believe this but Indo-European linguistics will not support this idea. By collecting isolated "similarities" (which only work if you adopt a way to loose definition of "similarity") you will not find the confirmation you are hoping for. Furthermore, there is sufficient indication that the characteristic sound shifts happened much to late to be compatible with your theory. Any counterargument against this timing would only be plausible if one presupposed your theory was right.


CyrusSH said:


> It is not my theory, scholars believe that all branches of Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia


Repetition doesn't make this truer. The Anatolian hypothesis is an alternative hypothesis which is taken seriously but has only few followers. The Kurgan hypothesis is still the standard hypothesis. The main problem with the Anatolian hypothesis is precisely the argument you have been bringing forward all the time: It requires a very early breakup date of PIE, something like 6000-7000BC. Your argument was that, taking into account the known systematic shifts, PG was way to close to PIE to allow for a distance in time of at least 6000 years between the break up of PIE and the break up of PG. But you get this problem precisely with the Anatolian hypothesis. You are now trying to solve this problem by postulating a dramatically earlier formation date of PG than the standard hypothesis. But that does not solve your problem but only shift it: you are not left to explain how PG, which is known to have split up only 1800-2000 years ago, should have remained stable for 6000 years.


----------



## Ihsiin

CyrusSH said:


> It is not my theory, scholars believe that all branches of Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia and Indo-Iranians couldn't be far from this region, the strong influence of Indo-Iranian culture on Mitanni culture show this fact but Indo-Iranians actually lived in the east of Germanic lands, so there were less cultural relations between them and Semitic people.



A language doesn't speciate when all of its speakers are in the same place. It speciates when its speakers are in different places, sufficiently isolated from each other for divergent developments to take place.


----------



## Treaty

CyrusSH said:


> For example about Persian xeng (horse, German/Dutch _hengst_) from proto-IE *_kankest-_,


_xeng _is more used to connote "white" (or possibly "bright color") and so "white/grey horse", "white cloth" and "dawn". Even if it meant "horse", the proposed PIE root is _*ḱank _(Pokorny: 522). _ḱ_ usually changed to _x/h_ in Germanic and to _s_ in Iranian. In West Iranian, some of the _s_ further changed to _h/x. _So, basically, we would have been comparing Germanic *_xanxaz _(courser) with Iranian *_sen(g)_ (I put _g_ in brackets as it is possible to be a _ka_ suffix). Nothing to see here.


CyrusSH said:


> Or about *s-mobile*: Indo-European s-mobile - Wikipedia
> ... Germanic preserving both forms as *steuraz and *þeuraz respectively, *but Italic, Celtic, Slavic and others all have words for 'bull' which reflect the root without the s*. Compare also: Gothic stiur, German Stier, *Avestan staora* (cattle); but Old Norse þjórr, Greek tauros, Latin taurus, Old Church Slavonic turъ, Lithuanian tauras, Welsh tarw, Old Irish tarb, Oscan turuf and Albanian taroç.


If you look at the examples in the very same Wiki page, you see examples in which other languages retained that s- but Germanic didn't. Again, nothing to see here.


----------



## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> Repetition doesn't make this truer. The Anatolian hypothesis is an alternative hypothesis which is taken seriously but has only few followers. The Kurgan hypothesis is still the standard hypothesis. The main problem with the Anatolian hypothesis is precisely the argument you have been bringing forward all the time: It requires a very early breakup date of PIE, something like 6000-7000BC. Your argument was that, taking into account the known systematic shifts, PG was way to close to PIE to allow for a distance in time of at least 6000 years between the break up of PIE and the break up of PG. But you get this problem precisely with the Anatolian hypothesis. You are now trying to solve this problem by postulating a dramatically earlier formation date of PG than the standard hypothesis. But that does not solve your problem but only shift it: you are not left to explain how PG, which is known to have split up only 1800-2000 years ago, should have remained stable for 6000 years.



That is certainly an important issue but the reason could be an early migration of Germanic people to almost an isolated region in the north of Europe but about 2000-2500 years ago an inverse migration to the southern lands caused the break up of Germanic language, the strange thing can be that 2,000 years after the break up, another language appears as a direct descendant of proto-Germanic and you talk about sound changes from proto-Germanic to this language.


----------



## CyrusSH

Ihsiin said:


> A language doesn't speciate when all of its speakers are in the same place. It speciates when its speakers are in different places, sufficiently isolated from each other for divergent developments to take place.



Of course, in my previous post I also mentioned this thing.


----------



## Ihsiin

CyrusSH said:


> Of course, in my previous post I also mentioned this thing.



So what do you believe, that the different branches of IE developed in the same place (you mentioned Anatolia), or in different places?


----------



## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> That is certainly an important issue but the reason could be an early migration of Germanic people to almost an isolated region in the north of Europe but about 2000-2500 years ago an inverse migration to the southern lands caused the break up of Germanic language, the strange thing can be that 2,000 years after the break up, another language appears as a direct descendant of proto-Germanic and you talk about sound changes from proto-Germanic to this language.


Way to many couldbes and maybes to make a serious story. You need much more, really much more, substantive evidence to escape Occam's razor here.

The standard theory of NW expansion from the urheimat in the planes of North of the Black Sea remains the one that best corresponds to linguistic and archaeological facts and is at the some time the simplest with the fewest assumptions, especially without ad hoc assumptions.

Also note that also Vennemann does not doubt the standard theory in this respect. His assumption of a Afro-Asiatic superstratum is based on the idea of different waves of Afro-Asiatic settlements between 3000BC and 500BC along the Atlantic an North Sea cost.


----------



## CyrusSH

Ihsiin said:


> So what do you believe, that the different branches of IE developed in the same place (you mentioned Anatolia), or in different places?



Of course in different places but not too far from the original land (Anatolia), the earliest sound changes happened in the lands such southeastern Europe and western Asia.


----------



## CyrusSH

Treaty said:


> The oldest sources in L&S and Bailly dictionaries (sources of your link) are from 1st c. BC (Asclepiodotus and M. Rufus). There is a mention of Theocritus' (3rd BC) _scholia_, but I guess it is a later comment on his Idyllis, rather than by him in that book. As your link suggests the word is a loan from Latin to Greek, possibly as result of Roman expeditions into Gaul (considering 1st BC date). The "500 BC Attic" is a pronunciation guide for showing how it _could have been_ pronounced back then. It doesn't necessarily indicate the usage date (cf. there is an Attic pronunciation for Σκλάβος as well, but it hadn't been attested before 6th AD; anyway, Wikitionary is not the most reliable source). Semantically, Germanic *_saipo _(resin, amber) is not even close to Akkadian _sapu _(to bathe, to flood), especially as compared to PIE *_seib _(to pour). Arabic _ṣābūn _is a later Greek loan (or via Aramaic _ṣappōn_).



If we even consider 1st c. BC, not 3rd c. BC, according to berndf theory, proto-Germanic didn't still break up and was just spoken in an isolated region near Scandinavia, 3,000 km away from Greece, so it would be impossible that we find proto-Germanic loanwords in ancient Greek.


----------



## CyrusSH

Treaty said:


> Or about *s-mobile*: Indo-European s-mobile - Wikipedia
> ... Germanic preserving both forms as *steuraz and *þeuraz respectively, *but Italic, Celtic, Slavic and others all have words for 'bull' which reflect the root without the s*. Compare also: Gothic stiur, German Stier, *Avestan staora* (cattle); but Old Norse þjórr, Greek tauros, Latin taurus, Old Church Slavonic turъ, Lithuanian tauras, Welsh tarw, Old Irish tarb, Oscan turuf and Albanian taroç.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> If you look at the examples in the very same Wiki page, you see examples in which other languages retained that s- but Germanic didn't. Again, nothing to see here.
Click to expand...


I found something about that word here:

http://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust266/sust266_kroonen.pdf:

*Non-Indo-European root nouns in Germanic: evidence in support of the Agricultural Substrate Hypothesis*

Guus Kroonen
Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics Copenhagen University



> Possibly, a fronted pronunciation of the phone *a in the pre-Germanic language is corroborated by PGm. *þeura-‘bull’ as represented by ON þjórr, Du. dial.duur. This word has been reconstructed as PIE *tauro- on the basis of e.g. Lat. taurus, Gr. tauros, Lith. taũras, OCS tur, Alb. ter 20, but in view of the irregular formal relationship with OIr. tarb < * taruo-, Go. stiur, ON stjórr, OE stēor, OHG stior m. ‘bull’ < *steuro- and *þeura- itself, there is little point in projecting this word back into the Indo-European proto-language. This would, in fact, only result in an unfortunate increase of the corpus with problematic a-vocalism and movable s. It is far more plausible that the word ultimately shares its origin with Proto-Semitic *ṭawr, cf. Akk. šūru, Arab. twr and Hebr. ṭaur ‘steer’.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> If we even consider 1st c. BC, not 3rd c. BC, according to berndf theory, proto-Germanic didn't still break up and was just spoken in an isolated region near Scandinavia, 3,000 km away from Greece, so it would be impossible that we find proto-Germanic loanwords in ancient Greek.


Roman contact with Germanic tribes are known to have existed throughout the 1st century BC. The first known battle between Romans and Germanic tribes dates 113BC. Greek loans via Latin are possible.


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## Delvo

CyrusSH said:


> I never believe in a relationship between Semitic and Germanic languages but I believe for a long time (more than 1,500 years) Semitic and Germanic peoples were neighbors, so there are a large number of loanwords in both languages


Well, trading words is a relationship, but I see what you mean: it's not what linguists call a "genetic" relationship (single origin of both languages).



CyrusSH said:


> this similarity can be compared to the similarity between Modern Persian and Arabic languages.


Those aren't similar languages. They're unrelated languages which have imported some of each other's words.



CyrusSH said:


> in another thread there is a discussion about "Grimm's law in the Iranian languages"... For example about Persian xeng (...) from proto-IE *_kankest-_, both Grimm's law and Verner's law can be seen


No, those laws can't be seen in that word. First, on the "Grimm's Law" claim, as I already explained in that thread but you appear to have ignored, fricatization of plosives is very common and has occurred in many languages all over the world without any connection between one occurrence of it and another, and it's only one of three components of Grimm's Law and without the others you don't have Grimm's Law, and it usually doesn't happen in Indo-Iranian and you're just looking at exceptions to the usual not-happening whereas the _*real*_ Grimm's Law is that it happens practically universally in the language that Grimm's Law applies to, and even if Indo-Iranian had generally had the same kinds of sound shifts as Grimm's Law it (which it didn't) still wouldn't be Grimm's Law because that's about Proto-Germanic regardless of who else might have coincidentally done the same thing (even though nobody else actually did).

But the new "Verner's Law" claim you've just added is even more bizarre. Again, any sound law only applies to the language it applies to, in this case Proto-Germanic, but also, the phonemes in that word aren't even the right phonemes for Verner's Law. Verner's Law is about voiceless consonants becoming voiced, and you're talking about a word in which even you don't say that that happened! This is such otherworldly nonsense that it's a serious sign that you're just trolling.
It's like trying to use English "duck" as an example of Latin's /s/→/r/ conversion and calling it rendaku.



CyrusSH said:


> Or about *s-mobile*... Of course the important point is that in this case and several other ones, Germanic has preserved the original Indo-European word, unlike all other Indo-European languages


No, it preserved a single element of it in these few words, and doesn't in other such words, just like all of the rest of the IE languages sometimes do and sometimes don't with that particular feature, which indicates that both options were already present in PIE.

You have yet to make a single claim that isn't wildly false. I don't believe it's possible to be honestly wrong this consistently. Even someone who knew nothing at all would have been able to accidentally  just randomly guess something right by now. This has to be deliberate poking & prodding.


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## CyrusSH

Delvo said:


> No, those laws can't be seen in that word. First, on the "Grimm's Law" claim, as I already explained in that thread but you appear to have ignored, fricatization of plosives is very common and has occurred in many languages all over the world without any connection between one occurrence of it and another, and it's only one of three components of Grimm's Law and without the others you don't have Grimm's Law, and it usually doesn't happen in Indo-Iranian and you're just looking at exceptions to the usual not-happening whereas the _*real*_ Grimm's Law is that it happens practically universally in the language that Grimm's Law applies to, and even if Indo-Iranian had generally had the same kinds of sound shifts as Grimm's Law it (which it didn't) still wouldn't be Grimm's Law because that's about Proto-Germanic regardless of who else might have coincidentally done the same thing (even though nobody else actually did).



I just asked a question in that thread and as you see in my reply to Treaty, I agreed that this law doesn't exist in the Iranian languages, in fact I asked that question that it becomes clear that similar words between Semitic and Germanic languages can't be related to other Indo-European languages, including Iranian, of course I believe that there are loanwords from Germanic language in Iranian and vice-versa.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> Roman contact with Germanic tribes are known to have existed throughout the 1st century BC. The first known battle between Romans and Germanic tribes dates 113BC. Greek loans via Latin are possible.



Germanic tribes & 113BC? I think you should change your dates about proto-Germanic:



berndf said:


> About 500BC-200AD.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> Germanic tribes & 113BC? I think you should change your dates about proto-Germanic:


113BC is in that range (PG shifts completed=500BC - PG breakup=200AD). What is the problem?


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> 113BC is in that range (PG shifts completed=500BC - PG breakup=200AD). What is the problem?



When you say Germanic tribes, it is clear that it happened after the break up.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> When you say Germanic tribes, it is clear that it happened after the break up.


No.


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## Treaty

Adding to berndf's post, Germanic tribes of northern Europe were known to the Greek at least since 4th c.


CyrusSH said:


> I found something about that word here:


What of it? Citing this paper only shows how incoherent your thinking is. First, the discussion began with your earlier conclusion that there is something special about the relationship between Germanic and Iranian. This article is totally irrelevant to that point. Secondly, you subscribe to the Anatolian hypothesis and call the Kurgan proponents "nationalists". However, in a U-turn, you cite this paper which is based on the rejection of the core of Anatolian argument. And what is the point of this paper anyway? That a few words were borrowed into different IE languages (esp. European) from unknown languages present in their homelands *after *their separation, in different stages. While the *ultimate* origin of *a few* of them is probably Semitic, borrowing them didn't require direct contact with Semitic people, but possibly from intermediate sources.


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## eamp

Proto-Germanic is the latest common ancestor of all Germanic languages. Anything before it is not really Germanic, properly speaking. People sometimes call what lies between Germanic proper and PIE simply "(early) Germanic" also, but this can be misleading since it implies "Germanic" split off as one block from PIE and directly developed as one into actual later Germanic. We simply don't know whether that is the case, but in actuality it is very unlikely, real language evolution is much more complex than that.


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## CyrusSH

Treaty said:


> Adding to berndf's post, Germanic tribes of northern Europe were known to the Greek at least since 4th c.



So frome 4th c. BC they were known as different Germanic tribes, not as one people.



> What of it? Citing this paper only shows how incoherent your thinking is. First, the discussion began with your earlier conclusion that there is something special about the relationship between Germanic and Iranian. This article is totally irrelevant to that point. Secondly, you subscribe to the Anatolian hypothesis and call the Kurgan proponents "nationalists". However, in a U-turn, you cite this paper which is based on the rejection of the core of Anatolian argument. And what is the point of this paper anyway? That a few words were borrowed into different IE languages (esp. European) from unknown languages present in their homelands *after *their separation, in different stages. While the *ultimate* origin of *a few* of them is probably Semitic, borrowing them didn't require direct contact with Semitic people, but possibly from intermediate sources.



Where does it reject Anatolian hypothesis?


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> So frome 4th c. BC they were known as different Germanic tribes, not as one people.


Tribes and languages are different things. In the days of the Muhammad, Yatrib had six tribes, if I remember correctly. But they all spoke one language.

Proto-Germanic was a connected dialect continuum, like German or Dutch or English today.


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## CyrusSH

eamp said:


> Proto-Germanic is the latest common ancestor of all Germanic languages. Anything before it is not really Germanic, properly speaking. People sometimes call what lies between Germanic proper and PIE simply "(early) Germanic" also, but this can be misleading since it implies "Germanic" split off as one block from PIE and directly developed as one into actual later Germanic. We simply don't know whether that is the case, but in actuality it is very unlikely, real language evolution is much more complex than that.



Do you want to say Grimm's law, Verner's law, ... which describe sound shifts from PIE to PG are nonsense because PG was from an unknown language which differed from PIE?


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> Tribes and languages are different things. In the days of the Muhammad, Yatrib had six tribes, if I remember correctly. But they all spoke one language.
> 
> Proto-Germanic was a connected dialect continuum, like German or Dutch or English today.



It sounds good, so you believe Goths, Swedes, ... existed as different tribes even in the proto-Germanic times.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> It sounds good, so you believe Goths, Swedes, ... existed as different tribes even in the proto-Germanic times.


The tribal structures were very much in flux during that time, from the beginning of the South and East expansion in the 3rd century BC and the the beginning of the migration period in the 2nd century BC. Many of the tribes we know from the migration period tribes must have formed during this period as tribal federations for specific purposes, either to defend themselves or for migrations.


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## Treaty

CyrusSH said:


> Where does it reject Anatolian hypothesis?


On page 255, the first paragraph of _Summary and Outlook_. A tenet of the Anatolian hypothesis is that the PIE people were farmers and so they couldn't have been from steppe (because farming was not introduced there until much later) but from Anatolia (which had a longer history of farming). Therefore the PIE language should have already included some agricultural words and they, among other migrants, brought agriculture to neolithic Europe.

However, the Agricultural Substrate argument rejects this tenet on the ground that the agricultural terms are loanwords from the native languages of places to which IE people migrated after PIE division. Kroonen further implies a lower chance that PIE people were even in a meaningful contact with farmers (like Semitics) by arguing that some words usually reconstructed as PIE (like _taurus_) were actually borrowed separately in IE languages from those substrates, after the division of PIE.


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## CyrusSH

Treaty, are you sure that you read this book: *Non-Indo-European root nouns in Germanic: evidence in support of the Agricultural Substrate Hypothesis*?!!

There is absolutely no mention of ancient Kurgan hypothesis in this book and there is no such text on page 255, but this is the exact text from Page 241: To my mind, the most promising hypothesis regarding the Germanic substrate is the linkage with the introduction of agriculture in North-West Europe. The Neolithic Revolution gradually spread from the Fertile Crescent to Europe through Anatolia.


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## Treaty

FYI, it's a book chapter in _A linguistic map of prehistoric Northern Europe _(pp. 239-260). Below is from p. 255 (look at the original page numbers):


> The fact that “Neolithic” words, such as *gait- ‘goat’ and *arw t- ‘pea’ are overrepresented *contradicts *the idea that the Indo-Europeans were a deeply agricultural people (*contra Renfrew 1987*, 2001; Lehmann 2002).


If you were familiar with the Anatolian hypothesis you subscribe to, you would have known the hypothesis was proposed by Colin *Renfrew *(in his *1987* _Archaeology and language: the puzzle of Indo-European origins_). So, the author says point blank that his findings contradict a Renfrew's argument of agricultural IE people that is essential to Anatolian hypothesis.


CyrusSH said:


> To my mind, the most promising hypothesis regarding the *Germanic substrate* is the linkage with the introduction of agriculture in North-West Europe. The Neolithic Revolution gradually spread from the Fertile Crescent to Europe through Anatolia.


Yes, that supports what I said earlier. It means the Germanic* substrate* (not Germanic itself) had something to do with Anatolia. Please check the meaning of "substrate" in linguistics if you're not sure what it signifies.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> There is absolutely no mention of ancient Kurgan hypothesis in this book


That is so central to his argument that it goes without saying. It seems that you haven't completely understood the theory. In a nut shell he says: Agriculture was brought from Anatolia to Central and Northern Europe by the linear pottery culture and with it agricultural terminology of Semitic origin. When the Indo-Europen expansion, i.e. the ancestors or Celts and Germans, reached that region and they replaced the linear pottery culture and its language but the Indo-Europeans as a pre-agricultural culture had no agricultural terminology and retained words from the language of linear pottery culture.

In other words, his thesis is:

*Yes*, there is a Semitic substrate in Germanic.
*No*, it is not from direct contact with Semitic peoples.
*No*, it was not acquired in the Middle East or Anatolia.
*But* it was transmitted indirectly through the linear pottery culture in Central and Northern Europe.


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## CyrusSH

In the post #67, I gave a link from sciencedaily.com about the newest research of the origins and expansion of the Indo-European language family which decisively support Anatolian hypothesis. As you read: This analysis combines a model of the evolution of the lexicons of individual languages with an explicit spatial model of the dispersal of the speakers of those languages. Known events in the past (the date of attestation dead languages, as well as events which can be fixed from archaeology or the historical record) are used to calibrate the inferred family tree against time.


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## CyrusSH

berndf said:


> That is so central to his argument that it goes without saying. It seems that you haven't completely understood the theory. In a nut shell he says: Agriculture was brought from Anatolio to Central and Northern Europe by the linear pottery culture and with it agricultural terminology of Semitic origin. When the Indo-Europen expansion, i.e. the ancestors or Celts and Germans, reached that region and they replaced the linear pottery culture and its language but the Indo-Europeans as a pre-agricultural culture had no agricultural terminology and retained words from the language of linear pottery culture.
> 
> In other words, his thesis is:
> 
> *Yes*, there is a Semitic substrate in Germanic.
> *No*, it is not from direct contact with Semitic peoples.
> *No*, it was not acquired in the Middle East or Anatolia.
> *But* it was transmitted indirectly through the linear pottery culture in Central and Northern Europe.



Do you also believe that  there is a Semitic substrate in Germanic?


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> Do you also believe that  there is a Semitic substrate in Germanic?


Some early loans, maybe. Whether it is enough to qualify as a substrate? I don't know.


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## CyrusSH

According to Treaty's link about "substrate", it is possible just in contact with another language in a neighbor population.


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## Treaty

berndf said:


> Whether it is enough to qualify as a substrate?


Shouldn't a substrate be a direct borrowing? We don't know if those Semitic words were borrowed directly or via an intermediate (that is if the Semitic words were not themselves borrowing from a lost source whose borrowing in pre-IE Europe predated PS).


CyrusSH said:


> the newest research of the origins and expansion of the Indo-European language family


We are now in 2017. An article from 2012 is not the "newest research". As far as I know, Chang _et al_ (2015) in _Language_ 91(1) used a similar methodology but with more qualitative approach, and found more support for the steppe hypothesis dates. I have no idea about the rigor of either methodologies and so I'll wait to see what others may say.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> According to Treaty's link about "substrate", it is possible just in contact with another language in a neighbor population.


Yes. When the Indo-European corded pottery culture replaced the linear pottery culture they were evidently in direct contact with them.


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## berndf

Treaty said:


> Shouldn't a substrate be a direct borrowing? We don't know if those Semitic words were borrowed directly or via an intermediate (that is if the Semitic words were not themselves borrowing from a lost source whose borrowing in pre-IE Europe predated PS).


What this paper proposes is that these Semictic (alleged) words are the result of a substrate of the unknown language of the linear pottery culture.


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## Treaty

My issue was with the terming. If we are calling them _Semitic_ substrate, it must have been a direct contact with a Semitic language. Otherwise, if the Semitic words had already been borrowed and internalized into language X, then the term should be a _Xic _substrate in Germanic not a _Semitic _one.


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## berndf

Treaty said:


> My issue was with the terming. If we are calling them _Semitic_ substrate, it must have been a direct contact with a Semitic language. Otherwise, if the Semitic words had already been borrowed and internalized into language X, then the term should be a _Xic _substrate in Germanic not a _Semitic _one.


As you wish. But the result would be the same. It is all a bit flimsy anyway. I find this the most plausible of these theories, at least more plausible then Vennemann's superstratum theory.


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## CyrusSH

Treaty said:


> We are now in 2017. An article from 2012 is not the "newest research". As far as I know, Chang _et al_ (2015) in _Language_ 91(1) used a similar methodology but with more qualitative approach, and found more support for the steppe hypothesis dates. I have no idea about the rigor of either methodologies and so I'll wait to see what others may say.



According to this research that you consider it newer, Germanic existed in the 3rd millennium BC and is older than Indian, Iranian, Italic, Celtic, Baltic and Slavic languages.


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## berndf

CyrusSH said:


> According to this research that you consider it newer, Germanic existed in the 3rd millennium BC and is older than Indian, Iranian, Italic, Celtic, Baltic and Slavic languages.


This is the kind of terminological imprecision @eamp deplored here:


eamp said:


> Proto-Germanic is the latest common ancestor of all Germanic languages. Anything before it is not really Germanic, properly speaking. People sometimes call what lies between Germanic proper and PIE simply "(early) Germanic" also, but this can be misleading since it implies "Germanic" split off as one block from PIE and directly developed as one into actual later Germanic. We simply don't know whether that is the case, but in actuality it is very unlikely, real language evolution is much more complex than that.


The tree indicates where the Germanic branch split from the last other known branches, in this case Italic and Celtic. It does not say anything about when PG was actually spoken. It says that PG developed *anywhere* between 2300BC and 100BC.

If you look at the tree in a bit more detail, you will see that only the black vertical bars mean concrete points in time when a certain split occurred. The other nodes are simply arranged in a way that the chart is easy to reed. Otherwise it would mean, e.g., that Frisian an Dutch split only about 1500AD, which would of course be complete nonsense. And Old Saxon/Low German is missing in this tree. The way West Germanic is arranged there is a bit strange.

So, what this "Germanic" line actually says is only that the Germanic branch (not PG!!!) must have split from the other known branches at some time between the black bar at 3300BC and the black bar at 1900BC.


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## Treaty

It's worth mentioning that they conducted 15 analyses based on different constraints (one of them was similar to the 2012 paper). This figure illustrates only one of the analyses. As berndf observed, the black vertical lines show the time of split. In more precise wording, it indicates that the _clade_ (i.e. ancestor/proto-language) existed at that time or earlier with 98%+ certainty given the input constraints (I assume this percentage has some statistical significance). If the chance is less the black line is not drawn. My guess about another important issue is that the constraints are different because putting all constraints together would have reduced the sample size (both languages and vocabulary) beyond measurable. Removing most constraints (like the 2012 paper did) would also overlook the qualitative differences between languages and words.

Another very important issue is the goals of the paper. Two of them are more to convince and present to historical linguists that (how) phylogenetic methods can be used for the discipline. So, the findings should not be regarded as final yet.


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## CyrusSH

Honestly the chart seems to be absolute nonsense, Avestan is shown to be extinct by 500 BC and no Iranian language is related to it but all Eastern and Western Iranian languages (Ossetic, Pashto, ...) were from Old Persian!


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## berndf

It means that Avestan branched from Old Iranian before the split into Eastern and Western Iranian. Old Persian is not indicated as a separate entity.


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## Treaty

Like any computational modeling, phylogenetic results only reflect what their input data are. In those 15 analyses, they used different input data to compare together. The figure was never pretended to be accurate. They demonstrated that the *same sample list* as the 2012 pro-Anatolian paper will give very different results if different constraints are applied (the sample list didn't include MP, non-Pers. SW Ir. or Kurdish languages). The main constraint in this case, called "ancestry constraint", was to include known ancestral relationships in the inputs. For example, if we regard Old English as the ancestor of Modern English, then this parameter is included in the data. The 2012 paper didn't apply this constraint and considered OE and ME as only relatives. The difference between the results is around 20-25% that accounts for the earlier "pro-Anatolian" dates of the 2012 paper (1.5K years more for 6K y.o. PIE, or 800 years for 4K y.o. PIIr).


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