Re: Judean-Sanskrit/Bantu/Austronesian?

At 13:25 on 24.1.1999, Kenji Schwarz wrote:

> I forgot to mention another potential conJudean language:  the
> Judeo-Sinitic language of the Kaifeng Jews!  Sure, the ones we know about
> _now_ spoke an apparently unexceptional local language and wrote only in
> Chinese, and disappeared as a community by the early Qing dynasty, say
> 1700, IIRC -- but what about the ones we haven't discovered yet?  Say, the
> peculiar Hebraeo-Hakka language of inland Fujian province?  Eh?  What
> about them?
>
> <stifling cackling>
>
> Kenji Schwarz
Or imagine that some Jews had found the way to Sweden *before* the kings
became "good" Xians, and then were expelled to the Finnish backwoods,
becoming neighbors of pagan Finns and Saami and essentially out of reach of
both Swedish and Russian state power?  I once made up a conScandinavian
lang driving the "peripheral" (in relation to the "central"
Copenhagen-Stockholm-Bergen area) dialect traits of diphthongization and
iotacism to their extremes.

Or what about those Jews quitting Spain in 1492 but getting adrift on the
Atlantic and landing on the North-East American coast well before any Xian
Europeans.  They would have had ample time to prepare the natives
ideologically and technically for the arrival of those worshippers of a
false Messiah, no?  (or let them reach Australia or NZ or
Micro-/Mela-/Polynesia...)

Or what if the Khazars hadn't disappeared into the mists of history, but
become a major Central Asian power, attracting converts from the various
peoples out there.

Or what if it had been a Jew and not the Xian Patricius who had been sold
as a slave to an Ireland still outside the limelight of a Europe whose
Xianization was still in the balance...

I once played around with what the world would have been like if the
Persians rather than the Byzantians had won the battle of Niniveh, if it
had been the Balkans rather than Iran that had fallen to the Arabs (unless
a victorious and undivided Great Kingdom had mopped them all up in a great
battle at Ctesiphon, then celebrated the event by consecrating the Hagia
Sophia at Constantinople as a fire-temple...)

B-P>


    B.Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
    ----------------------------------------------------

        Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                            (Tacitus)