Talk:Europic

Europic and Afrasian

If the speakers of Europic were Neolithic farmers who came to Europe from the Near East, we should expect a close relationship between Europic and Afrasian (aka Afro-Asiatic), as implictly suggested by Vennemann, who proposed an "Atlantidic" (aka "Semitidic") substrate to explain some Germanic words of non-IE origin.

There's also the fact most Afrasian languages have a 3-vowel system like the one proposed for Europic, presumably as the result of a collapse like the one proposed by Orel and Stolbova (1995), which differs from the Great Vowel Collapse (GVC) in that vowels e, o developed into i, u or the corresponding glides j, w. If we assume a similar evolution between Europic and PIE, then we'll have Europic *e > PIE *ei ~ *oi ~ *i and Europic *o > PIE *eu ~ *ou ~ *u, where *e ~ *o is the IE Ablaut vowel, which developed from *a except in OEH and Indo-Iranian. As a consequence, the GVC never happened.

Also in this system, i, u were actually semivowels and hence they couldn't appear before resonants. In that case, the resonant shifted to the syllable onset, so there's also no need for the RCL.

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There are also (rare) cases of alternation of type *e ~ *i and *o ~ *u. I would imagine the Pre-PIE system of a type:

High	i	ə ~ 0	u
Low	e	a	o

With a height opposition and a schwa being allophone of the zero grade. Then they merge: [e] with [ə] to *e and [a] with [o] to *o. How much probable would that be? MilyAMD 13:03, 16 July 2012 (PDT)