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

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 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.

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!




/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson
mailto:bpj@netg.se
mailto:melroch@my-deja.com
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