The lexicon of an Old European Afro-Asiatic language: evidence from early 
loanwords in Proto-Indo-European

Bjorn, Rasmus

doi:10.13109/hisp.2022.135.1.3

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

The lexicon of an Old European Afro-Asiatic language: evidence from early loanwords in Proto-Indo-European

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons243991

Bjorn, Rasmus
Archaeolinguistic Research Group, Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Max Planck Society;

External Resource

No external resources are shared

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Bjorn, R. (2021). The lexicon of an Old European Afro-Asiatic language: evidence from early loanwords in Proto-Indo-European. Historische Sprachforschung, 135(1): 135.1.3, pp. 3-42. doi:10.13109/hisp.2022.135.1.3.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000F-ED83-2

Abstract

The study examines the archaeolinguistic implications of Semitoid loanwords in Proto-Indo-European. Contact linguistics offer a unique opportunity to calibrate speech communities in relation to each other, but the Steppe hypothesis of Indo-European does not contain a concise explanation of the immutable similarities in primarily Neolithic vocabulary shared with Southwest Asian speech communities. The study introduces a baseline of 21 pivotal items with the distribution and age in both Indo-European and Semitic that should be accounted for. It is concluded that a parsimonious archaeolinguistic scenario is available on the “persistent frontier” between the early European farmers and the nascent Steppe pastoralists on the eastern perimeter of the Carpathians. Subject to further scrutiny, a sub-family here called Old Balkanic on the Afro-Asiatic language tree is posited as the source of the Semitoid words in Proto-Indo-European.