Re: THEORY: A possible Proto-World phonology

At 17:15 28.6.2000 -0700, Vima Kadphises wrote:

>.  "Laryngealism" in Semitic seems to be an Arabic innovation (which then
>spread to Aramaic and some dialects of Hebrew); the vogue these days is to
>reconstruct these consonants as ejectives, as they appear in Ethiopic and
>(to the best of anyone's knowledge) in Akkadian and NorthWest Semitic.
And in Egyptian, which is outside Semitic but still inside Afroasiatic.

>     The problem is that most Semitists reconstruct Proto-Semitic along
> the lines of Arabic.  To listen to some of us, you would think that
> Arabic *is* Proto-Semitic.
I heard recently that some "minor" languages of Ethiopia may be the closest
to PS.  Is this widely held?  IMO it's under suspicion to be a fallacious
parallel to the probably correct view that some (all) Cushitic lgs are
closer to the ancestor of the "Afro"(*) branch of Afroasiatic -- which
means only that (Middle) Egyptian and the lgs of the Maghreb are more
distant from the ancestor, which seems a non-controversial assumption.

(*As I said yesterday I adhere to the view that the whole family originated
in the Nile area, Semitic entering Asia from Ethiopia through Arabia.  The
sea-level in the Red Sea was lower in the Stone Age.  I find it harder to
believe that PS speakers passed through Egypt without leaving a trace
before Egyptian established itself there, or that the family originated in
the Near East and entered Africa through Egypt.  AFAIK the recorded history
of Mesopotamia and the archaeology of the Eastern Med seabord speak against
that.



/BP
--
  B.Philip Jonsson  mailto:melroch@mail.com
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