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)

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@Talskubilos:

I cannot say you are wrong, but I don't consider Afroasiatic a likely candidate for the next closest kin of Europic.

@MilyAMD:

No. You'd get */i/ ~ */e/ and */u/ ~ */o/ "ablaut" alternations that aren't observed in PIE, at least not in the same function as the familiar */e/ ~ */o/ ablaut. These alternations are a myth spread by the late Joseph Greenberg, nothing else. He tried to connect IE ablaut to vowel harmony systems found in languages of eastern Siberia, but this is impossible, especially considering that IE ablaut is not a vowel harmony system of any kind (you'd expect all morphemes to be in the same grade if it was, which is not the case).

--WeepingElf 13:22, 16 July 2012 (PDT)

@WeepingElf:

I think you've got some pre-conceived ideas about the subject. Perhaps if you knew more about Frasian, you'd change your opinion. Talskubilos 15:16, 16 July 2012 (PDT)