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 happened between Europic and PIE, then we'll have Europic *e > PIE *ei ~ *oi ~ *i and Europic *o > PIE *eu ~ *ou ~ *u, where *e ~ *o ~ Ø is the IE Ablaut vowel, which developed from *a except in OEH and and Indo-Iranian. Thus Jörg's GVC never happened.

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