Re: Genitive relationships (WAS: Construct States)

Raymond A. Brown wrote:

> >I've
> >noted before, months ago, that a linguist friend
> >of mine, Orin Gensler, wrote an enormous
> >dissertation on the typology of the Celtic and
> >Semitic languages... that there are a remarkable
> >number of grammatical constructions in common
> >between Celtic and Semitic besides this
> >way of forming the genitive (the only other one
> >I can think of at the moment is "the girl, blue-her-eyes,
> >I love" meaning: "I love the girl whose eyes are blue"
> >--I copied this shamelessly into Teonaht).
>
> Inter alia
> - only two genders - masc. & fem.
This wasn't something Orin noted.  Lots of languages besidesCeltic and Semitic
have only two genders.

> - adjectives follow the noun
Again, not noted; too many other languages are VSOwith adjectives following the
nouns..

> - verb is put first
Ditto.

> - definite article but no indefinite one
> - conjugated prepositions
This was noted.  Ray, see my post, just sent to the list, called"The CHS
Problem" (the Celto/Hamito-Semitic Problem).
I've copied out the 17 similarities.   More interesting is the fact that
the initial verb can be singular when the subject is plural.  Both
Celtic and Semitic do this, too (and probably other VSO
languages).   Also shared by both language groups:  the fact that
you can apply the definite article in the genitive juxtaposition but
only to the possessor, never the possessed:  "book the boy,"
never "the book boy," or even "the book the boy."

> And the consonant mutations of Biblical Hebrew are very reminiscent of the
> consonant mutations of the Gaelic langs (at least in their earlier forms).
>
> > Other
> >linguists have tried without success to explain
> >why these similarities should exist between two
> >languages that apparently had no contact that we know of.
>
> There was long contact between the Semitic world & Britain: the Phoenicians
> traded with the "Tin Isles" (i.e. the Cornish peninsular) for several
> centuries I believe.  A Semitic based trade jargon could have developed in
> this area.
>
So says John.  But I can't remember without rereading major portions of the
dissertationwhether Orin and others agree with this or not.  It seems
completely sensible.  I think
there is a split in traditional thinking about this phenomenon between the
"substratal"
theory and the "non-substratal," or "contact" theory.  Orin goes into a long
discussion
about the tenuous evidence amassed on either side.  If there was a substratum,
for
instance, say in Eurasia, then we have no evidence for it.   And contact?
well....

> Also, of course, these islands were inhabited long before Celts arrived
> here.  The builders of stone Henge & the megaliths belong to a western
> European civilization which predated the arrival of the Celts.  One theory
> ascribes a north African origin to this "Iberian" strain which would link
> them with the Berber peoples of north Africa.  Thus the connexion would be
> Hamito-semitic rather than directly Semitic and the apparently 'Semitic'
> features of insular Celtic would be due to the influence of an underlying
> "Iberian" stratum.
Yes.  Interesting.

> Personally, I find neither theory proven. And there are features shared by
> all the modern Celtic langs which AFAIK are not found in the Semtic langs,
> in particular the extensive use of the verbnoun which gives rise to a whole
> host of periphrastic verbal forms.
>
Yes, but Orin is addressing other specific similarities.  Obviously, over time,
twowidely separated languages will take their grammatical features in different
directions.A good place to start would be by reading this dissertation, which I
hope Orin hashad the good sense to get published.  He spent seventeen years on
it, for godsake
And it is a good, consolidated source for all the critical opinions expressed
on this
subject for the past hundred years.  In manuscript form, it is exactly 666
pages!

Sally
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html