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

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.