Tropylium wrote:
That's only a problem for loaning between PIE proper and PS proper. But they both had ancestors that were likely spoken somewhere else.
Which would seem to make things worse - probability suggests the foremother of PIE was still in north eurasia, while the foremother of PS pretty clearly seems to have been in Africa. Moreover, we don't know that apparent similarities at PIE/PS level actually reflect similarities at foremother level, given that both families would have been experiencing their own linguistic changes. In fact, the further back you push any connexion, the more likely it is that PIE/PS similarities are TOO conveniently close to reflect actual descent...
Which is not to suggest that we're dealing with Nostratic inheritance though — it may also be a loan from pre-PIE into pre-PS, or vice versa.
Or from a third party. What's the reason for assuming direct loaning, rather than loaning from a third family? The third family approach makes it much easier to get the parent languages in the right place, since we know both families
were in positions that experience large-scale demic migration from the same sort of area.
Or, of course, the handful of not-that-surprising resemblances could just be coincidence.
Salmoneus wrote:To get them even vaguely close, you'd have to assume that PIE came to Ukraine through a mass migration of Georgian women, and Georgia and the Levant still aren't exactly next to one another.
I've always assumed that, at a deep enough time level, pre-PIE probably came counterclockwise around the Caspian Sea, from an ancestor spoken in NE Levant. An Anatolian route seems to be ruled out, and the Caucasus is just too difficult to go through at a time depth when it will have been already populated.
Oh, now that
is an interesting idea.
So far as I'm aware, though, it's a very improbable one, since I don't think there's any trace - genetic or archeological - of that sort of Iranian influence on the steppe, so the language would have to be transmitted by some very small elite; and Iran was, like the Caucasus, a populous and expansive area, so it's less likely that there would have been a migration from the levant through Iran. Nor is there any archeological or genetic influence from the Levant (which before Semitic and the Caucasian expansion would have had a population cousin to that in Europe at the time) onto the steppe.
I suppose my reaction would be: that's a clever way to get people from the Levant to the Steppe. But on the one hand, it has to assume a string of improbable things; and, on the other, it doesn't seem to have any motivation, other than perhaps religious (I know a lot of people want the Indo-Europeans to be from the Holy Land one way or another). What shred of evidence is there for seeing PIE as the language of Levantine exiles? A couple of chance resemblances with Proto-Semitic? But those only look like loanwords if we assume the languages were once neighbours, so using that as evidence of them being neighbours seems like begging the question.
For very long-ago routing, it will be a problem that Semitic is a part of Afrasian and only comes into the Levant well after agriculture etc. were in progress; but, if IE did come from the Levant long ago enough, there would likely have been now-extinct relatives left behind along the way, which could have retained a common word for 'horn'. So the loaning event could be relatively recent, while the divergence of the IE and Semitic words might still be older.
This is also clever. But this also seems undermotivated. Why invent such a complex procedure to explain two vaguely similar phonemes in one lexical item? This is a literal violation of Ockham's Razor, supposing the existence of languages lying around the middle east, for which there is no other archeological, genetic or linguistic evidence, just so that they can lend a word or two to a later-arriving Semitic.
Here's an alternative solution: PIE k'er, "head", from which "horn" is derived, and Afroasiatic qar, "horn" (seen in Egyptian and Omotic as well as in Semitic), are simply two words in unrelated languages that simply happen to look somewhat alike if you squint.