Re: Celtic and Afro-Asiatic?

Hallo!

R A Brown wrote:

> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>
> >Hallo!
> >
> >Steg Belsky wrote:
> >
> >
> [snip]
>
> >>[17 "Celtic-Semitic" features, and comments on them]
> >>
> >>
> >
> >You say that some of these are to your knowledge not found
> >in Semitic languages; I must say that I haven't seen some of them
> >in Celtic.  Perhaps that's all just snake oil.
> >
> Yes, this topic had turned up from time to time on Conlang in the past.
> Indeed, I noticed superficial structural resemblances between Welsh &
> Hebrew long years before I even knew about Conlang. But the
> resemblances, tho interesting, are IME more superficial than real.
That's what I think, too.  The idea of an Afro-Asiatic substratum
in Insular Celtic was fashionable when the linguistic worldview
was Eurocentric and language typology in its infancy.  AFAIK,
the only scholar of importance to champion this hypothesis today
is Theo Vennemann, and his model of pre-IE Europe is laughable.
He sees "Vasconic" everywhere in continental western and central
Europe, "Semitidic" on the British Isles, and Finno-Ugric in
Scandinavia and eastern Europe.  More likely, pre-IE Europe was
speckled with languages just as the Caucasus still is; and
Uralic (of which Finno-Ugric is a part) has about the same time
depth as Indo-European, and the Finno-Ugric languages spreaded across
northeastern Europe at roughly the same time Indo-European spreaded
across central Europe.

> Certainly IMO many of the 17 points quoted in Jörg's mail on 14th Sep.
> are somewhat strained.
Yes.  See Thomas Wier's comments.

> >Perhaps it is
> >little more than VSO word order with its typological ramifications.
> >Calling anyone knowledgable about VSO languages other than Celtic
> >and Afro-Asiatic: do these languages show the same features?
> >
> >
> I believe so.
>
> >A problem with the assumption of an Afro-Asiatic substratum
> >in Insular Celtic is that there is no trace of Afro-Asiatic
> >anywhere in between (Iberian peninsula, France).
> >
> Yes, indeed - and there are, I believe, other difficulties. More to the
> point is whether these features existed in the earlier forms of
> 'Celtic'. I know too little about Old Irish. Were these features,
> supposedly inherited from a Afro-Asiatic substratum, present in Old
> Irish.
Yes, though Old Irish still had a neuter gender.  But VSO, initial
mutations etc. were already there.

>      My impression is that Gaulish & the Old British languages were
> far more akin to Latin than to anything Semitic.
Yes.  The peculiar linguistic type of the modern Celtic languages
is a strictly insular phenomenon, with little evidence of having
evolved before Roman times.

>      Indeed, some scholars
> have posited a Celto-Italic IE sub-family.
Yes, and I think it is likely, too.  Italic and Celtic are indeed
very similar, and I have seen a cladistic analysis based on various
isoglosses among the IE branches that also grouped the two together.

Thomas Wier wrote:

> Joerg wrote:
> > I have recently read an article by Theo Vennemann in which he
> > proposes that the peculiarities of the Insular Celtic languages
> > are due to a "Semitidic" (i.e., Afro-Asiatic) substratum, and
> > I don't really know what to think about it.
> >
> > Six years ago (March 7, 1999), Sally Caves posted the following list
> > of common features of Celtic and Semitic to this list:
>
> I think it is generally agreed that many of these similarities
> either fall out from typological generalizations common to all
> VSO languages, or from languages generally.
Yes.  Some are common among European languages, and thus not indicative
of any specific relationship between Celtic and Afro-Asiatic.

>       This does not mean
> there is no chance for an influence in either direction (more
> likely Semitic => Celtic, via Berber and extinct Celtic languages
> in Spain), but that such influence is likely to be only tentative.
>
> > 1) Conjugated prepositions (prep. + pronominal object in a single word.
> > 2) Word order: VSO, N-Modifier, Prepositions
>
> Both of these are common to VSO languages in general.  E.g., Nahuatl, a
> VSO language clearly not influenced by a "Semitidic" substratum, has
> prepositions that agree in person and number with their arguments.
I'd say that "conjugated prepositions" are simply an outcrop of a
general tendency towards running words together, as are initial
mutations.

> [2] also clearly is the result of general patterns of headedness.
Yes.

> > 3) Relative clause linker: invariant particle, not relative pronoun.
>
> You mean, like English "that"? What about Italian "che"? What about
> all those isolating languages of East Asia, most of which I seem
> to recall use a form unrelated to the question word for their
> relative clauses?
Yes.  Indicative of nothing.

> > 4) Relative clause technique (oblique): copying, not gapping,
> >     i.e., "the bed, I slept in it," meaning "the bed that I slept in."
>
> Many unrelated languages have this.  See Comrie's book on language
> universals.
Yes.  Resumptive pronouns are very common among the world's languages.

> > 5) Special form of the verb peculiar to relative clauses.
>
> Um, countless languages have this.  E.g., Meskwaki has the conjunct
> order, which does the same thing.  (Although there it's a little
> more complicated:  by a strange kind of grammaticalization of that
> fact, all traditional tales are in the conjunct order for the most
> part, since there is at least the implication that someone said that...)
So #5 goes out of the window as well.

> > 6) Polypersonal verb (subject and object both marked).
>
> Since when do most Semitic languages have polypersonal verbs, or
> Celtic languages for that matter?!?  To be sure, Akkadian and other
> Semitic languages have object *clitics* that may be attached to the
> verb.  But these are not agreement markers in the normal sense.
You are of course right.  All there is in Semitic and Celtic are
clitic object pronouns, but those don't make a polypersonal verb,
no more than they do in French.  Again, not indicative of anything.

> > 7) Infixing/suffixing alternation: Object marker is infixed to
> >    the verb if there is a preverb, suffixed otherwise.
>
> Lots of languages have such alternations.  Tagalog is only the most
> famous example.  Tagalog is also IIRC VSO.
Yes.  It is.

> > 8) Definite article in genitive embeddings may occur
> >   only on on the embedded noun: "house the-man" ="the man's
> >   house."
>
> Note that in English this is also the case:  we may not (unlike
> Greek or German) say *"the the man's house"; by a pragmatic implicature
> that has been grammaticalized, possessors are definite and therefore
> what they possess is too.
Yes, this is very widespread, I think.

> > 9) Nonconcord of verb with full-NP subject: verb can fail
> >     to agree with the subject, depending on word order.
>
> But this happens in ancient Greek and modern English!
Yes.

> > 10) Verbal Noun (Vn: object in genitive), not Infinitive
> >       (object in same case as with finite verb).
>
> Um, Georgian is exactly the same way.  In his book on polysynthesis,
> Baker claims that all truly polysynthetic languages are characterized
> by this.  He's wrong in the absolute, but there does seem to be this
> tendency with polysynthetic languages.
This may well be the case.

> > 11) Predicative particle: in copular or nominal sentences,
> >       the predicate is marked with a particle homophonous
> >       to a "local" preposition: "He (is) in a farmer"="he is a farmer."
> > 12) Prepositional periphrastic: BE + Prep + VN, e.g.,
> >       "He is at singing"  [TEONAHT'S  "she is with singing"]
>
> You mean, just like Old English, Middle English, and many modern
> English dialects?  (I suppose Vennemann could counter that that's
> because of the Celtic and Semitic substrate in Britain, but then
> that begs the question.)
Vennemann indeed says that.  But then I know such constructions
from my L1, East Westphalian High German: _Er ist am Singen_.
Hardly a Semitic substratum in there!  (There is indeed a substratum
involved here, but that substratum is East Westphalian Low German:
_He is am Singen_.)

> > 13) DO periphrastic: DO + VN, e.g. "He does singing."
>
> Lots and lots of languages have light verb constructions like this,
> e.g., Hindi.
Yes.  Commonplace.

> > 14) Notional adverbial clause expressed as "and" + finite
> >       clause
> > 15) Nonfinite forms usable instead of finite main-clause verb
>
> You mean, just like ancient Greek, or Meskwaki?
OK.  Forget about #15.

> > 16) Word-initial change, expressing a variety of syntactic
> >        functions
>
> Actually, Meskwaki (like most Algonquian languages) has a kind of
> ablaut just like this, called "initial change".  It's frequently
> used in relative clause constructions, but in a number of other
> unrelated things as well.  (Interestingly, Meskwaki also tends
> to VSO order, though I don't see a clear connection between those
> facts.)
I seem to remember that some languages of West Africa also have it.

> I don't know much about the Semitic initial change, but how is
> it like Celtic lenition?
Most Semitic languages indeed have nothing like that, and I know
of none that has.

> > 17) Idiomatic use of kin terms in genitive constructions, e.g.
> >       "son of sending" = messenger; "son of land" = "wolf"
>
> Of all of the above, the only ones that stand out to me as odd are
> (11), (14) and (17).  But in each there's no obvious reason why
> they have to have arisen by contact.
You say it.  We can forget about almost all of them because they
are at least one of

(1) typological implications of VSO word order;
(2) way to widespread to be indicative of anything;
(3) not really attested in Insular Celtic;
(4) not really attested in Afro-Asiatic.

What remains is just too skimpy to establish any kind of substratal
relationship.

> [...]
>
> Anyways, I hope this post will show that Vennemann's arguments are
> probably ultimately misleading, and certainly do not constitute
> proof.  Given an ounce of skepticism, it's really remarkable that
> this story has held on as long as it has.
Yes.  Vennemann seems to be the last champion of an idea that was
fashionable once, when few linguists had studied languages spoken
anywhere beyond Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
With such a narrow circle of vision, things like VSO word order
indeed seemed remarkable.  But Vennemann's ideas about the
linguistic landscape of Europe before the spread of Indo-European
strike me as nonsense, as I have already laid out above.

Before anyone of you understands it wrongly, I wasn't believing
in Vennemann's hypothesis at any point.  I just wanted to hear
your opinions on it, and indeed my suspicion against it seems
warranted.

> Joerg later wrote:
> > A problem with the assumption of an Afro-Asiatic substratum
> > in Insular Celtic is that there is no trace of Afro-Asiatic
> > anywhere in between (Iberian peninsula, France).  Instead we
> > have Basque along the way, which has nothing to do with AA,
> > neither genealogically nor typologically.  But that doesn't
> > mean that an Afro-Asiatic language in Britain is impossible.
>
> Actually, it's not inconceivable.  The Phoenicians had trade
> interests in Britain, as Britain was one of the better sources
> of tin in the ancient world.  So they could have founded emporia
> along the same lines as those the Greeks founded throughout the
> Mediterranean world.  But AFAIK there's no archaeological evidence
> for such an emporion, and so any link is little more than a
> remote possibility.
And hardly capable of influencing the Insular Celtic to such a
degree.

While it is indeed possible that the typological divergence of the
Insular Celtic languages from the "common IE" type is due to some
kind of substratum, there is really no reason to assume that it has
anything to do with Semitic or Afro-Asiatic in general.

Greetings,

Jörg.

Reply