Amedeo

This does not seem to be the opinion of modern linguistics, which does not classify Coptic as a Semitic language.

==============Reply:

I wrote briefly.... I meant the most ancient Egyptian language, not Coptic. Indeed, neither is spoken today.

I listed as Semitic: Ancient Egyptian; ancient Ethiopic [that's Amhaic, etc.]; Arabic; Hebrew; and what you list as many languages of the ancient Middle East, which I specified: Akkadian, Babylonian, Canaanite. (The latter included Ugaritic and Eblaite.)

So, your only objection is that ancient Egyptian was not a Semitic language.
My point was that, those who advocate that Semtic is derived from Hebrew were thinking of the language of the Arabs and the Canaanites. Actualy the peoples who speak Semitic are greater in number, as they include Ethiopians, Egyptians, not to mention Akkadians and Babylonians.

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=118143


Egyptian language
Encyclopædia Britannica Article

Page 1 of 5

extinct language of the Nile valley that constitutes a branch of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) language family, along with the Semitic, Cushitic, Chadic, and Berber language groups. On the basis of texts in the language, scholars generally divide the history of Egyptian language into five periods: Old Egyptian (from before 3000 to c. 2200 BC), Middle Egyptian (c. 2200–c. 1600 BC), Late Egyptian…

spin

Neither Ugaritic nor Eblaite are Canaanite, though Phoenician and Hebrew are.

Egyptians here is still wrong.

What was the point of citing this? It just shows that Egyptian wasn't Semitic as well.


spin

spin

This is certainly not the normal understanding of the term "Canaan", which usually embraces the southern Levant.

No, we can't. This "so" has no basis whatsoever. The term "Arab" has a clear reference even in ancient times. And it certainly wasn't Arabs who possessed Sumerian realms.

Ummm, what's "Araboid"? Is it a word of your invention? It's neither in the Webster's nor Oxford dictionaries. No-one seems to use it on the web, except for the various apparent racist organizations.

If anyone is interested in where Amedeo is going check out this thread and you'll be sorry you did.


spin

Amedeo

These languages you are referring to are the Afro-Asiatic languages: Semitic. Egyptian/Coptic, ertc. [5 groups] Well, if Semitic and Egyptian do not form a linguistic family, I wonder why they don't includes Indo-European, which has a shared morphology with Semitic languages AS WELL AS SOME SHARED WORDS -- a lexical sharing, as it has been discovered during the past 20 years or so. Anyway, if you remove "Egyptian" from my list of Semitic languages, no harm is done; there is no refutation of the thesis that Hebrew is NOT the mother-language of the other Semitic languages.


Wait a moment. You assume that Abraham was a mythological character. That may be so, but I am examining a Biblical or rabbinical position: There used to be ONE language in the world. Then, when some people started building a tower that -- according to the imaginative mind of the Bible narrator -- would reach the sky.... where God is, God obstructed the contruction by throwing confusion among the working speakers. Now, I am saying: The Bible echoes a commingling of diverse [existing] languages -- such as Semitic and Indo-European. We do not know which language the Semites before Abraham spoke, but this man called Abraham led his people out of the area where the tower was being built. For all intents and purposes, Abraham spoke Semitic. NOW, the rabbinical theory that all Semitic speaking peoples derive their language from Hebrew [the Semitic language of Abraham and the Israelites, would require that Cananites, Arabs, Akkadians, etc. are descendants of Abraham, from whom they got their Semitic language. BUT HERE MY POINT WAS: There is no evidence that these semitic-speaking peoples are descendants of a man from the time of the Tower of Babel episode.... or, from that matter, a little earlier, from one of the sons of Noah. IF THE ARABOID PEOPLES AND THEIR SEMITIC LANGUAGE WERE DERIVED FROM ONE JEW, THEN THE JEWISH POPULATION [from another son of Abraham or of a son of Noah] WOULD BE AS EXTENSIVE AS THE ARABOID POPULATION. --... OR SOMETHING TO THAT EFFECT. That is not the case. Therfore, therefore, the thesis of descandance from Hebew is false.

MY OWN THESIS, IN WHAT I WROTE, WAS THAT, ON THE CONTRARY, THE HEBREWS/ISRAELITES/JEWS RECEIVED THEIR HEBREW LANGUAGE, THEIR ELOHIM DEITY, AND SOME OF THEIR GENES FROM INVADING ARABOID POPULATIONS.


I hope that it makes sense now.... or I will have to re-write the whole thing, so innumerable are the points that I bring together on one page. [My compact style plays havoc with readers.]

.............................
I am sure there were intermarriages of the invading Arabs with the conquered people of the pasture-lands. The Hebrews we know of [from the Bible literature],appear as the Chindren as Shem. The REAL pre-history of the Shemites is NOT written or even hinted at in the Bible. The Bible presents its own genealogy of the Semites from Adam... and the Hebrews are NOT present as hybrids of Caucasoid and Araboid people.... except for the fact that one of their gods is caucasoid, and part of their language is Indo-European. Mine is the first thesis about the twofold origin of the Hebrews. Their twofold character is biological, theological'religious, and linguistic.

There are some indications in Egyptian archeology that there was the presence of the Habiri in Egypt. Anyway, the Hebrews did move from a polytheism [the Elohim] to a monotheism [El], and they often identified [and identify] El and Yaveh as being the one and the same god. The narrator of Moses speaks of "the Lord God" [Elohim Yawveh]. This translation is misleading; it should be 'the divine Yaveh." You see, these are the traditional translations into English:
Elohim ["the gods"] or El ["god"] = God
Yaveh = Lord.
So, "the lord god" and 'the Lord is God" are linguistic expressions about ONE deity and hide the duality of the deity.

The fact of our non-communications or mis-understandings is due to the following:

The Jews and the Christians take the Bible as a true account: as a cultural and anthropological history of mankind and of particularly the Jewish people; as an account of how the world was formed; and of what the beings of the world are. But then you [as well as I] find that there are erroneous facts (non-facts), mis-interpretations, imaginative explanations of things that happen, an impossible genealogy of mankind... It's a mythological book like the Iliad and other books of antiquity; we don't know if any of the mentioned people were real; we can tell than various mentioned events could never have happened, and so forth. But I think of the Bible as a thelogical "historic novel" -- it contains facts and allusions to or echoes of facts, AND EVERYTHING IT PRESENTS (INCLUDING ITS LINGUISTIC REALITY) TELLS, BEARS WITNESS TO, MANIFESTS THE NATURE OF AN ETHNIC GROUP: HOW IT LIVED, WHAT IS BELIEVED IN, WHAT IT THOUGHT, HOW IT SPOKE, ETC. SO, THE BIBLE IS A DOCUMENT OF ETHNIC HISTORY. The facts which are expressed in myths are points of connection with historical reality. So, for instance, the STATED, NARRATED, episode of the Tower of Bable is a mythic account of what some people were really doing -- building a castle or fortress. The builders were not trying to get to the heavens. There was no god that threw their speech into confusion....but the people who started speaking in tongues, in different languages, were real people who mingled, people of different races and religions. By studying the Iliad, an archeologist discovered ancient Troy. He got at the facts which had been wrapped in myths. The Iliad is a "historical novel" -- a great document for an archeologist and for an ethnologist, besides being very great as literature.
As a book of truth, as a scientific account or history, the Iliad is as worthless as the Bible.

Chris Weimer

1. Hebrew can't be the "mother" of all Semitic languages because Phonecian came first. Argument over.

Amedeo

I hope you read my post # 12, where I spoke of different etymology methods and of concrete difficulties which an etymologist faces. [I know about the field more than you can imagine and, elsewhere, I have demonstrated the invalidity of the phonological method of the Proto-Indo-Europeanists. Down comes crumbling the temple with all the Philistinians...]

The Second link I gave, which you discussed, is etymologically worthless. For instance, the author points to the homonymity of Helios and El. He does not realize that unless the two words are cognate, they cannot be construed as a shared word. We know what helios means [sun], but he does not state waht El means. If it does not mesn "sun", then the two words are forein to each other. As far as I can gather, El or allah does not mean "sun". So, Arabic does not contain that Greek word, or vice-versa.

As I stated, I wish I could have "Hebrew is Greek," for I am sure that he found cognates in the two language. Anyway, the claim implied by the title of the book is extravagant, to say the least. Even if 90% of the Hebrew etyms and Greek etyms are cognates, there is on fact that the author did not know: The four-volume etymological work of Semerano (published during the last decade of the 20th century) shows that a good number of Indo-European word [I don't know what percentage] is derived from Akkadian. Semerano's basic position is that what is Indo-European in the European languages and others CONSISTS of words which are derived principally from Sumerian and Akkadian.

Now, Akkadian is a Semitic language, but its real vocabulary included Sumerican words (for the Akkadians conquered part of Sumer). By exploring the Sumerican culture, we can surmise that a certain terminology found in Akkadian is Sumerian in orgin. I mean the terminology of agriculture, farms, city establishments, the new [feudal] political order, the writing of language, mathematics, record-keeping, etc. etc. It's possible that half of the Akkadian words are slighly modified Sumerian words. Yet, it may be true that half of the Indo-European words consist of Semitic.

So, when one looks at Hebrew and finds a large number of cognates with Greek, the question is whether the [Homeric] Greeks, whose language is Indo-European, include some number of Semitic/Akkadian words. The Semitic words in Greek may account for strong similarities with Hebrew.

Amedeo

In the above paragraph, I mentioned Semitic languages which I had not mentioned specifically before. It was unnecessary for me to do that. So, here I used "Canaanite" as a geographical genus rather than a linguistic species. So, I said that Ugaritic and Eblite are included in the language of Canaan, namely "Canaanite." As a genus, I had used it elsewhere to include Hebrew, while it was unnecessary for me to mention Phoenician. Neither then nor now, the task at hand was not that of classifying languages, but simply of listing a large number of Semitic languages. On the other hand, presently you use "Canaanite" as a GROUP or CLASS, not as a linguistic species, since you include two Semitic languages in it, And the name of the group is not geographical, because Canaan was wider than the territory in which Phoenician and Hebrew were spoken.

Celsus

Sometimes it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool...

Why do words have to be found for one to hypothesise its existence? If that's the case, since we have never "found" the phonetic rules of Old English, does that mean they didn't make a noise when they spoke? Or that they actually made noises like cows? Linguistics is primarily about reconstruction of words, meanings, and sounds. It's also not just about inventing plausible connections, much as amateur linguists like Willow and his Danites like to believe. You need to draw parallel cases of phonological change to demonstrate the case of a reconstructed word, and even then these will often be disputed. Secondly, you need to demonstrate a route by which the language/loan-word travelled. PIE is no different, and, incidentally, you clearly don't have a clue how well attested PIE actually is, or how it is far more careful etymologically than you describe. For instance: "cook" and "cookie". Cognates?
Good. Until then, see the first line I posted?
Difficult to you maybe, but linguists have already sorted this out, if you'll just check the relevant references. Less than 40% of Old English survives in modern English today. Here are some words of Norman-French origin: country, jewel, picture, support, prince, beef, duke, fruit, baron, judge, boil, courage, honour, virtue, music, arrive, attorney, court, pity, sentence, question, language, chancellor, bailiff, literature, fool, horrible, official, mirror, army, gentle, lieutenant, captain, male, female, face, etc. How difficult is it to trace those etymologies?

See if you know where the following words came from: whiskey, ukelele, yoghurt, mayonnaise, algebra, sherry, measure, anorak, ski, waltz, kangaroo, etc. Etymology, contrary to what you or Willowtree may think, is a far more complex affair than even you grant, since you seem to think PIE is just a figment of the imagination.
What about Omri and his line? What about the Judean dynasty? All of these predate Biblical Hebrew considerably. Ugaritic, which is similar to Hebrew, and is in fact linguistically a precursor (though not a direct precursor necessarily) by some 1000 years, was a language of kings. Scribal languages of the past are just that: languages of scribes. We have precious little idea what normal folk spoke like. And it looks like you have no idea who or what "Canaanites" might have been, according to the epigraphic evidence. Certainly nobody ever called themselves "Canaanites".
So this is wrong.
*Cough*. Arabian advance? Which Arabians, pray tell? The Shasu?
Huh? None of the above makes any sense at all. Nor is it backed up by any evidence, so far as I can tell. Are you saying the Philistines are Hebrews? Or that Yawheh was the god of someone else? Huh? Do you have any source to back this up?
Again, huh? None of this makes any sense at all. The Philistines didn't arrive in the Levant until long after "Abraham" would have been bits of dried calcium. Do you even know where the Philistines ended up on the Levant? It's certainly not the "Upper Levant", but the pentapolis in the south. It is unlikely that they ever penetrated the highlands, let alone Gezer. Time for you to back up some assertions, is my guess.

Joel

spin

Non mi rompere le palle.

I've had a look of some of the short works Semerano has written and the are not impressive. They are not at a systemic level but at individual word level.

Have you noticed how many scholars in the last ten years (or last 100) have rushed to support the position? I'll tell you: none.

What value has the word "real" in the sentence?

Just as a parenthesis, English is a Germanic language, but its vocabulary includes Romance words, as you must know; still its core vocabulary is vastly of Anglo-Saxon (Germanic) origin. Languages, even those that receive heavy influences from elsewhere tend to preserve a core of "native" language.

Yet it's not.

Hittite, the language of Hatti once located in central Turkey, was an proto-Indo-European language, which appeared not long after 2000 BCE with a highly complex morphology which looks nothing like any Semitic morphology. The formation of Akkadian was taking place in the centuries prior to this, when it was gaining that Sumerian superstatum. Akkadian was still a nice Semitic language demonstating its Semitic morphology. It's nothing like Hittite, though Hittite has been shown to be allied to Indo-European, but in a form prior to that which was reconstructed as the "mother" form. Therefore we have a form of the family clearly prior to Hittite. Chronologically the theory you are supporting has little to offer.

The problem is: one doesn't find anything of the sort. You are emptyhanded.

Based one bad data you can create interesting dilemmas.


spin

spin

The normal understanding of "Canaanite" is still with regard to the southern Levant. Syria is right out.

"Class" is an extremely strange word in this context and "group", well there already exists a use of the term "Canaanite" for a group of languages, Phoenician, Hebrew, Edomite, Moabite and Ammonite. I hope that clears the issue up.


spin