Re: CHAT: Pre-Celtic substrate (was: CHAT: RE: R: Italian Particles)

BP:
> At 13:23 27.4.2000 +0100, Raymond Brown wrote:
>
> >These considerations must make us cautious in adopting a simple
> >Berber-Iberian substrate theory, as though that solved all problems.
> >Western Europe & the Iberian peninsular are big enough to have housed more
> >than one pre-IE population.  And who did live in Ireland & Britain before
> >the various Celtic-speaking peoples moved here?
>
> Serious scholars seem to agree that it is Berber that may have a
> Basque-like substrate, not the other way around!
It does seem more plausible that Afro-Asiatic spread from NE Africa/Middle
East onto an "Atlantic" substrate, giving Berber, but "Basque-like" may be
a bit rash, since the original home turf of Basque seems to have been
Aquitaine, while Iberia contained Iberian and Tartessian, which,
going by the little we know of them, are isolates.

> It occurs to me that
> maybe there once was a Vasco-Karvelian family spread across Asia Minor and
> around the southern Med which was then overlaid by Afroasiatic spreading
> out of Ethiopia -- Semitic through Arabia and Hamitic along the Nile -- ,
> with Indo-European pressing into Asia Minor from the East and into Spain
> from the North.  It does not seem entirely implausible.
The idea of a family with that distribution mightn't be implausible, but
why Basque and why Kartvelian? First, why Basque rather than Iberian or
Tartessian? Second, why Kartvelian rather than N or NE Caucasian, since
(a) a 'Vasco-Caucasian' connection has traditionally been the most popular/
least foolish of theories of Basque connections (though Trask's _History
of Basque_ rubbishes every such theory, mainly on the grounds of their
utter ignorance of the reconstructible history of Basque), and (b) as
longrange speculations go, an IE-Kartvelian connection is relatively less
baseless. About the only theory of Basque connections that I know of that
does work from reconstructed Pre-Basque in one posted by Miguel Carrasquer
Vidal to the Nostratic list which suggested that Basque could be Nostratic
[since pre-Basque lost most initial consonants, the problem is actually that
finding potential cognates for Basque words is too easy].

> As for the Phoenicians: what if some kind of Pidgin Punic was in common use
> as Lingua Franca along the whole Atlantic coast of Europe?  Not entirely
> implausible either.  If it came to be widely used between different local
> peoples who did not understand each other's native languages it may have
> influenced these languages, not to mention the possibility of a later
> Celtic relexification of such a Pidgin Punic, so that the inhabitants of
> the British isles were Celticized gradually, via extensive use of this
> relexified pidgin.  IMO a plausible theory that can neither be proven or
> disproved, alas!
I find the idea that a Pidgin Punic might have existed more credible than
that it should have had such extensive use and influence. Surely most people
weren't involved in long-distance trade. [See also my reply to Ray.]

--And.