Hallo conlangers!

On Wednesday 11 July 2012 00:46:19 Padraic Brown wrote:

> --- On Tue, 7/10/12, Jörg Rhiemeier <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> > The matter is somewhat controversial, and the flood may have
> > been more gradual than what Pitman & Ryan lay out in their
> > book, _Noah's Flood_.
> 
> Exactly. As I understand it, it could have even swung back and forth over
> the years.

Yes.

> >  (Also, I am not convinced of the idea that the Biblical
> >
> > and Mesopotamian flood myths are recollections of *this*
> > flood.)
> 
> I agree on this. The Sumerian and Hebrew myths don't seem to read like
> stories of a rising body of water so much as a whole lot of rain coming
> down.

Indeed.  Also, I doubt that many refugees from the Black Sea Flood
wound up in Mesopotamia.  There are many mountains in between.
 
> > But at any rate, there was a large area of land - very
> > fertile
> > land indeed, with a favourable climate - being flooded
> > within a
> > few years (or at least, a few decades) where now are the Bay
> > of
> > Odessa and the Sea of Azov.  The natural response would
> > be to
> > pack up everything in a boat and travel upriver as far and
> > as
> > fast as possible. 
> 
> Right. Or hoof it where a convenient boat was not to be had!

But those who did have one at hand had better chances to escape ;)
 
> > (The wheel was not yet invented, and the
> > horse not yet domesticated, so boats were the best option.)
> 
> In the World, Men of that region already had both at that time (and for
> quite a long while before), so those would be options. But even so, the
> catastrophic nature of the event *there* would have precluded escape for
> very many, by boat or any other means of travel. They would have just been
> swept away.
> 
> > > the one time "Hospitable Sea" did indeed flood, catastrophically and
> > > fairly recently, after which the Punt (ancestors of the Semites and
> > > Aryans) broke up and went in their various directions.
> > 
> > As Dustfinger has pointed out, chances that IE and Semitic
> > are related are slim. 
> 
> Oh I agree, but I didn't say they were linguistically related --
> 
> "Punt was a region of lush lowlands around the Hospitable Sea, away to the
> northeast of the great Inland Sea. Along with Atelante, Punt was one of
> the Archaic Empires of early human history. It was flooded and disappeared
> under the waters of the inflooding of the Inland Sea some 5000 years or so
> before the end of the previous age. After this time, the sea became called
> Black or Inhospitable. The survivors of this catastrophe are known to
> later history as the Aryans (lordly people) and the Shemans (shining
> people); they are well known for having created and propagated tales of
> their narrow escape and the harrowing ordeal that ensued."
> 
> -- Punt, you see, is (or rather *was*) a country. The Aryans and the
> Shemans were just two of the ethnic groups living there at the time. There
> were others, to be sure, but it's these two whose descendants have become
> so prominent in the region.

I see.  Pitman & Ryan entertain the notion that the Indo-
Europeans came from the north of the Black Sea basin, and
the Semites from the south.  No implication of relationship.
What regards the Indo-Europeans, it makes sense, what regards
the Semites, less so - what about the many languages in Africa
that are obviously related to Semitic?  Pitman & Ryan aren't
linguists and probably weren't aware of this problem.
 
> > I consider an IE-Uralic relationship much
> > more likely.  Also, if Semitic is related to IE, the
> > whole Afro-Asiatic family is - and that family almost certainly
> > radiated from somewhere in northeastern Africa.
> 
> I don't know much about the relationships of human languages much earlier
> than the 10000 BC range. I suspect that something akin to this A-A family
> getting its start in NE Africa would be a good analog.

Little is known about language relationships that old.  There
aren't many good A-A cognates and no generally accepted
reconstruction at hand.  But there are sufficient resemblances
in morphology to consider the languages related to each other.
But it is probably a historical accident that A-A is an accepted
family and Indo-Uralic is not.   IE and Uralic are IMHO as close
to each other as Semitic is to Cushitic.  I'd estimate Proto-
Indo-Uralic to have been spoken about 10,000 years ago, perhaps
in the southwestern corner of Siberia.

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