From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: Quackery? Re: Greek words of Semitic Origin
Organization: LLNL
Distribution: sci,world
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 10:12:17 GMT

In article <1992Oct12.032658.23804@athena.cs.uga.edu> mcovingt@aisun3.ai.uga.edu (Michael Covington) writes:
>In article <1992Oct11.103516.621@vms.huji.ac.il> backon@vms.huji.ac.il writes:
>
$ $ [someone writes:]
$ $ There are many thousands of words appearing in Mozeson's THE WORD: THE
$ $ DICTIONARY THAT REVEALS THE HEBREW SOURCE OF ENGLISH, ISBN 0-933503-44-X.
$ $ Shapolsky Publishers, 136 West 22nd Street, New York NY 10011

	Does this fellow discuss Indo-European linguistics at all?

$ >[and then Michael A. Covington writes:]
$ > Yes, but since the non-Hebrew origin of English is very well established,
$ > does he conclusively refute it?  Or is this the work of a crank?
$ > (If he merely points out lots of similar words, all he is doing is
$ > finding coincidences.)

$ Coincidences ?? THOUSANDS of them ??

>  It's been done.  The idea is to accept any similarity of sound,
>  rather than settling on any regular sound rules.  If you do that,
>  you can prove any language is "related" to any other.

	One thing that would be a good test:

	In the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ article on the languages of
the world (in the Macropaedia -- the long set), there is a table
listing words from various IE languages, as well as a couple of noun
and verb paradigms. The words are of relatively basic things, that
linguistic experience teaches are not usually borrowed. Example:
pronouns, simple numerals (1-10), names of body parts and familiar
domestic animals like the cow and the dog, etc.

	It would be interesting to find the Hebrew equivalents of each
and see how they stack up. I confess I know little about Hebrew, but
comparing the numerals reveals _no_ resemblance to IE.  This suggests
that the common ancestor was so far back in the past that its speakers
had numerals up to only 2 or 3, which is common among "primitive"
people with not much to keep a detailed count of.

$ Mozeson is in comparative linguistics. The theory of monogenesis of languages
$ was recently reviewed in Scientific American and in The Sciences (of the NY
$ Academy of Sciences).

>  Yes, but monogenesis is not "Hebrew origin of English."  It's monogenesis
>  from a hypothetical ancestor that predates Proto-Semitic, Proto-Into-
>  European, Proto-Sino-Tibetan, etc. 

	I've read both those articles and the one in _The Atlantic_.
None of them support "English from Hebrew" or anything similar.

	Hebrew is a member of the Semitic family, which also includes
Arabic, Aramaic, and Akkadian. The Semitic family is, in turn, a
subfamily of Afro-Asiatic, which also includes Ancient Egyptian,
Berber, Chadic, and Cushitic.

	IE has been proposed to be a member of a big family by some
linguists, one called Nostratic. Though not universally accepted, I've
yet to see any demonstration that it does not exist. I have a file-ful
of references on that subject for anyone interested.

	In its "classical" definition, it includes IE, Kartvelian,
Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Altaic, and Dravidian, with Chukchi-Kamchatkan
and Eskimo-Aleut added later. Some linguists have argued that
(Nostratic - AA) is a grouping comparable to AA, but that is another
question.

	Not surprisingly, Nostratic looks nothing like Hebrew :-)

	Some linguists have worked out other big families, like
Sino-Caucasian, which contains Sino-Tibetan, North Caucasian (NE
Caucasian + Abkhazo-Adyghian), Yeniseian, Basque, and Na-Dene.

	And there are even some linguistic daredevils who claim to
have reconstructed a couple of words of what would be the ancestor of
all humanity's existing languages, which they call "Proto-World". This
subject, however, has been such a magnet for crackpottery that most
reputable linguists have tried to avoid it.

$ Anyone with a good background in Hebrew who scans the list of
$ proto-Indo-European roots in the back of the American Heritage Dictionary can
$ easily come up with many Hebrew roots.

	Like what?

	And let us not forget morphology. How do the noun and verb
paradigms compare? IE and Hebrew don't look anything alike. I'm not
too sure on this, but Hebrew isn't big on noun cases. And Hebrew verbs
have both a prefix and a suffix conjugation. Furthermore, the second
person pronoun has masculine and feminine forms in Hebrew, but _never_
in any IE language, as far as I know.

>Yes, but do you also come up with putative regular sound changes, or do
>you just come up with random similarities?  Sounds in languages don't
>change randomly.

	One can even deduce some of the simpler laws by examining that
_EB_ table I mentioned or some of the IE etymologies in the _AHD_.

	Example:

	English that ~ Latin is-tud ~ Greek to ~ Sanskrit tat ~
Russian to ~ etc.

	English three ~ Latin tres ~ Greek treis ~ Sanskrit trayas ~
Russian tri ~ etc.

	-> English "th" ~ others' "t".

	From this and other example, one can see that initial sounds
usually hold up pretty well, but sounds later in the word are more
vulnerable to change.

>On basic comparative linguistics see any of the standard textbooks.
>The nature of (phonological) language change is very well understood and
>is not haphazard.

	I may add that Nostratic is proposed precisely on that basis,
and not on the subjective eyeballing that Greenberg does in _Language
of the Americas_. I bring that up to forestall criticism of my
mentioning Nostratic on those grounds.