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Verfasser: Mark
Datum: Mittwoch, den 28. Februar 2001, um 8:41 Uhr
Betrifft: Fortsetzung!

Fortsetzung des Interviews:

What is your best guess about when Semitic and UA came into contact?
I can see either of two possible scenarios: (1) that UA was at its core Near Eastern but later was heavily influenced by non-Semitic ("native") tongues, or (2) that UA began as the result of a cre-ole or language mix in which Semitic was a signifi-cant to dominant component from the start. Four points lead me to that opinion. First, the Semitic elements appear prominently in all eight branches of UA. If a Semitic element had joined a non-Semitic UA base after the language family began dispersing, then we would expect that only some branches would show the Semitic influence while other branches would be free from the Near East influ-ence. Second, since pronouns are usually one of the more stable features of language, more resistant to change, the fact that Near Eastern pronouns are prominent in five of the six slots mentioned earlier also speaks for the Near Eastern component being part of the beginnings of UA. Because English third-person plural pronouns-they, their, them-are Scandinavian replacements of Old English hie, hiera, and him, 9 the ratio of five of six slots of modern English pronouns being from Old English parallels what we find in UA, where five of six slots come from the Semitic. Third, the fact that the sound changes or corre-spondences apply to most of the Semitic forms in all branches of UA suggests Semitic involvement from the beginnings of PUA. The few lexical (word) ex-ceptions to those rules may have come into UA later or may have been borrowed between branches. Many of such details remain to be worked out. Fourth, it appears that UA involves contributions from two different variants of Hebrew. Some Hebrew pho-nemes (basic sound units) show two sets of corre-spondences. That complicates the case for a presen-tation to linguists, but I can’t help that. The data suggest the merger of two different strains of Hebrew, each with its own set of rules. The contrast between the mutually unintelligible languages of the Nephites and Mulekites naturally comes to mind, but we do not know that what happened with UA had anything to do with that particular historical relationship. Nevertheless, the fact that both Hebrew extracts appear in all branches, and for some terms in all 30 UA languages, suggests not only an original Semitic element in PUA, but possibly two such ele-ments from the beginning of UA. For example, UA *kwasï ’boil, cook, ripen’ (Hebrew ba ?l ’boil, ripen’) and UA *kwasiy ’tail, penis, flesh’ (Hebrew basar ’flesh, penis’) show the change of Hebrew b > PUA *kw (the sign > means "became" or "changed to"), and they appear in all branches and nearly all the descendant UA languages. On the other hand, UA *poow ’road, path, way’ (Hebrew boo<’coming, way’) exemplifies Hebrew b > PUA *p and Hebrew <> PUA *w, and this shift also appears in all 30 UA lan-guages. Showing that same correspondence is UA *pïrok ’lightning’, which aligns with Hebrew baraq ’lightning’. The Semitic glottal stop similarly corre-sponds to both w (UA *poow ’road’ above) and < (glottal stop). I hesitate to put a time frame on UA, for a num-ber of reasons. One is that even though Uto-Aztecan-ists tend to throw around UA’s "presumed" glot-tochronological time-depth of 5,000 years, many questions have been raised about the accuracy of glottochronological dating. 10 Isolation versus intense contact can skew-i.e., either slow or speed up- rates of change tremendously. The Old English of only 1,200 years ago has lost 85 percent of its vocab-ulary, leaving only 15 percent of the original Old English vocabulary intact a mere 1,000 years later. 11 Much of that change occurred rapidly during the intense contact of the three centuries of Norman French rule in England. So if I am seeing UA con-taining 30 percent Semitic, that is twice as much as modern English has of Old English, even though the 2,600 years of a potential Lehi tie is more than twice as long as 1,200 years. In other words, UA may have retained Semitic four times better than modern English has retained Old English. So I do not see UA prehistory needing to be pushed back any further than 2,500 years necessarily. Furthermore, the rise of a sudden 50/50 mix of Semitic and some other lan-guage element(s) could easily make an actual time-depth of 2,500 years look like a glottochronological time-depth of 5,000 years. On the other hand, the Latin languages have preserved a much higher per-centage of vocabulary in a comparable length of time. So it is perhaps too early to put a definite date on the appearance of PUA. Nevertheless, my best guess, subject to change as more discoveries are made about the languages, is that originally UA was basically Semitic but then was heavily influenced by other languages. Another reason for that guess is that the time-depth of UA’s Semitic element could not be too great, because the UA plural suffix *-ima agrees with the Northwest Semitic genitive plural suffix *-iima, which is a later development even in Semitic, not occurring at all in Akkadian or East Semitic, and is most salient in Hebrew. A derivative even from other non-Eastern Semitic languages would more likely contain the nominative vowel -uu(ma) instead of -ii(ma), but UA shows *-ima, not *-uma. 12 I have tried to answer your question fairly, even though I may have allowed myself to be drawn into giving answers that still are uncomfortably tentative.

What Semitic language or languages appear to be involved? Your comparisons seem to depend pri-marily on Hebrew, but are other Semitic languages, such as Arabic mentioned earlier or Egyptian/ Coptic, involved or helpful in the comparison process?
Hebrew seems to be the Near Eastern language most represented in UA. But the longer I look, the more parallels I find to Arabic and Egyptian. But I also realize that our knowledge of Hebrew is partial. The Hebrew Old Testament is our primary source for ancient Hebrew, and while it seems like a big book, it yields only a limited sample of the ancient Hebrew language. We can be sure that many more words and variant uses of existing words were part of Israelite speech but did not happen to be used in the scripture. Besides, there were influences from other dialects and area vocabularies not represented in the ancient Hebrew writings per se. Furthermore, the various parts of the Old Testament reflect only the dialect of the writer of that part. Hence, much remains unknown about ancient Hebrew. So noting similarities to related languages, whose forms may not be in the written records we have, is reasonable, if done with care and restraint. Arabic seems to surface more regularly as a source for UA words than we might expect for a group, say the Nephites, who mention only Hebrew and Egyptian as languages known among them. For example, Arabic *ragul is the common Arabic word for ’man’, comparable to UA *tïholi ’man’ as found in several UA languages (and Kiowa taguul ’man’). (UA *t corresponds to Hebrew r in initial position, a nat-ural change since both are dental consonants.) 13 But no sign of this Arabic word appears in the Old Testa-ment, where words for ’man’ occur so frequently that if ragul existed in the authors’ dialects, it should have appeared in the Old Testament. Enough Arabic words show up in UA to make one wonder if Lehi’s group adopted some Arabic speakers during their decade in the Arabian peninsula, or if Lehi’s dialect was like Job’s, peppered with more Arabic-like fea-tures than other Hebrew dialects. The fact that the first five male names in Lehi’s family-Lehi, Laman, Lemuel, Sam, and Nephi-are or were all more prominent in Arabic or Arabic-speaking areas south of Jerusalem or east of the Red Sea, where many Israelites used to live, 14 makes me wonder if some of Lehi’s or Sarah’s ancestors were from there. The Book of Mormon mentions both Hebrew and Egyptian. An exciting dimension of this linguis-tic research is that, from UA and other language families offering similar data, I now consider it probable that we can eventually reconstruct, to a degree, the amount of Egyptian versus Hebrew used in Lehi’s language, if Lehi’s language is in fact the source of the apparent Semitic element in UA. Thus, the linguistic material may also tell us the kind (area and date) of Egyptian and Semitic and a basic vocabulary of each. Besides the handful of Egyptian possibilities discussed previously, 15 I have since noticed many other striking similarities between Egyptian and UA. A few are listed in the table below. (Keep in mind that Egyptian shows only consonants and semivowels, although we can sometimes supple-ment these with a later Coptic form, which descen-ded from Egyptian and does show vowels.) Most interesting to me is Egyptian .m ’salt’ and UA *homwa ’salt’. This is consistent with the sound correspondences of Semitic <> UA w and pharyn>geal .> ho/w/o/u in UA. 16 There are perhaps a dozen or fewer UA cognate sets (groups of related words) that show a reflex (word or form) in all 30 UA lan-guages; *homwa ’salt’ is one of them. Egyptian UA i<w ’old’ o ’old’ sd ’tail’ *sari ’tail, dog’ qdi/qty ’go round’ *koti/koli ’turn around, return’ (Coptic kote ’go round, turn self ’) t.w ’drunkard’ *tïku ’(be) drunk’ db’ask’ *?ina /*tïpiwa ’ask’ qni ’sheaf, bundle’ *kuni/kuna ’bag’ bit ’bee’ *pita ’wasp, bee’ km ’(be) black’ *koma ’dark color, black, brown, gray’ (Coptic kmom v., kame adj. ’[be] black’) dqrw ’fruit’ *taka/tuku ’fruit’ sbk ’crocodile god’ sipak-tli ’crocodile’ (Nahuatl)

Does the nature of the Semitic influence in UA tell us anything about the range of usage in the lives of the speakers? Are the Semitic influences concen-trated in a certain field, like trade relations, reli-gion, politics, or agriculture?
In judging genetic relationships, linguists usually give more weight to basic words that refer to body parts, nature nouns (sun, moon, land, water, stone, etc.), pronouns, and basic activities associated with family, food, and making a living. The Near Eastern lexicon definitely suggests more than trade relations because it exists in most dimensions of UA vocabu-lary: pronouns, persons (man, woman), body parts, clothing, nature nouns, weapons, plants, foods, verbs, adjectives, and so on. For example, Egyptian hm and UA *homwa ’salt’ discussed above could fea-sibly be a term spread through trade; however, Egyp-tian sm ’lung’ with the same second and third conso-nants as Egyptian hm<’salt’, is not an item typically associated with trade or borrowing and likewise matches UA *somwa ’lung’ with the same phonologi-cal correspondences in the same languages, exhibit-ing the same consonant cluster as ’salt’. Religious and mythological terms seem represented as well. How-ever, one aspect of UA vocabulary in which Near Eastern terms seem scarce is kinship. That could indicate a merging of two peoples, or at least heavy influence, since the kinship organization patterns of UA are rather typical of Native American groups generally. The prominence of Near Eastern pronouns in all branches may suggest that the Near Eastern people(s) were at least equal to, if not dominant over, whatever other components might have constituted early UA peoples. Whether relative social strata are apparent in a possible mixing pattern of early UA is a good question to keep in mind during future work. For example, a Semitic-using social and political elite could have mixed with "native" commoners. Of course, the answer to that question for UA may not be the same for other language families that might have been influenced by Semitic or that might have received a Semitic infusion, particularly if the social relationships were very different.

What proportion of the potential evidence for a language connection have you uncovered? Is there a prospect that the scale and scope of the evidence will be increased or strengthened by further research?
I regularly find more evidence, which leads me to suspect that I am looking only at the tip of the language iceberg, so to speak. How big the iceberg is I could not say at this stage of the investigation.

While a sizable Hebrew vocabulary seems to exist in UA, does this represent a relationship only between spoken languages? Or have you found any-thing possibly relating to written Semitic scripts?
The great majority of the evidence is necessarily oral, for that is what linguists have been able to re-cord of Amerindian tongues. Nevertheless, every once in a while something surfaces that makes me wonder if the spoken language did not adopt some features from a written language. For example, in Arabic writing, the same let-ter- aleph-is used for the consonant pronounced as a glottal stop as well as to mark a long aa vowel. The aleph originally and usually signifies a glottal stop, as in Arabic fa<r ’mouse’ (from Semitic r ), which shows up in UA *pa i/pu<wi ’mouse’. On the other hand, the Semitic root nwr ’give light, shine, flame, fire’ is the source of Hebrew ner ’lamp’,Arabic nuur ’light’, and Arabic naar ’fire’. Arabic naar shows an orthographic (unpronounced, non-language) aleph as a placeholder for the long aa vowel. We find in the Uto-Aztecan language family no less than 14 languages exhibiting a similar stem ay y ’fire’, 17 pronounced with a glottal stop. Where did the glottal stop come from? It is as if ancient readers who did not completely understand it imitated a written format and pronounced both of the written alephs with the same glottal-stop value. Another case involves Arabic writing that also contains an orthographic aleph at the end of a word that has the suffix -w for plural verb forms. Similarly, spoken classical Nahuatl-the language of the Aztecs-added a final glottal stop at the end of many plural verb forms. However, these possi-ble influences from written texts cause me a cou-ple of looming doubts. First, an instance or two may be coincidence, so we would not want to try to build a case on those alone. Second, neither Hebrew nor Egyptian shows that post-verbal aleph, but only Arabic, which is not one of the written languages attributed to Book of Mormon peoples. However, taken together and added to the fact that we see other surprising Arabic kinds of things in UA, these examples are interesting enough to make one wonder and watch for other such possibilities.

You alluded to other language families earlier. Do you think a Semitic element is as prominent in other American Indian languages or families as it appears to be in UA?
Definitely. The more I look, the more I find lan-guages and language families that show such simi-larities with Semitic, and sometimes they show the same correspondences and words as UA. The larger picture of the Americas is the iceberg, and I suspect that what I presently see is only the tip.

Are you the only one to notice these facts? 
In the past, a few others have noted similarities or proposed interhemispheric influences, some involving Semitic and others involving non-Semitic Old World languages. However, none of these has been generally accepted by the linguistic community. I have not found any of the Semitic proposals convincing either, except two. One includes the observations of three persons: A prominent linguist, Morris Swadesh, once alluded to a few Hebrew-like similarities in Zapotec (a language of southern Mexico). Pierre Agrinier, under Swadesh’s tutelage, produced a list of Near East-Zapotec similarities that is still unpublished. Robert F. Smith then fol-lowed up on Agrinier’s work with three brief studies of his own on Egyptian/Semitic and Zapotec com-parisons. 18 His work offers interesting leads. The other useful example is Arnold Leesburg’s work on lexical similarities between Hebrew and Quechua, the language of the Incas of Peru. 19 Leesburg’s lack of linguistic methodology means that linguists ignore it. Nevertheless, a number of his "word com-parisons" could feed a competent linguistic treat-ment, while others may have to be discarded. Observations on Semitic in Quechua have long interested me, and becoming aware of Leesburg’s work added to that interest and to previous observa-tions I had made. Other continents aside, I find John Sorenson’s, Mary Ritchie Key’s, and David Kelley’s proposed ties between the Pacific islands and the Americas to be interesting and meriting further investigation. 20 While Mormons tend to focus on Hagoth’s group(s) going out into the Pacific, to mix with Austronesians who came or were coming from the other direction, we must keep in mind that the Austronesian move-ment was mainly eastward and that the Samoan and Tongan islands were settled a half millennium before Lehi even left Jerusalem. That Polynesian eastward expansions sometimes reached American shores seems logistically very probable. How would those expert oceanic explorers find almost every inhabitable dot and speck of land in the huge Pacific expanse yet miss a land mass that extends from the North Pole to the South Pole? Further Oceania-American studies may identify larger vocabularies of various migrations from both directions. Sorenson’s and Key’s works note similarities in vocabulary without specifying direction. Kelley’s work, on the other hand, suggests a migration from the Americas to Polynesia, and, interestingly, the language family that he cites as the origin of that infusion into Polynesia is UA. Returning to the original question, I am not aware of any other linguist seriously working at the present time on a Semitic-Amerindian tie. We might ask why anyone would want to, in light of 100 per-cent rejection by the linguistic community generally of all such efforts undertaken thus far. But I consider it important work; it is an interest I can hardly let go of, in spite of its immensity and tedium, something like moving a mountain with a shovel. I feel like I’m racing against time to see which will be finished first-me or the research projects on my to-do list. My precursory surveys of language families through-out the Americas have me interested in perhaps a dozen of them, but three or more linguist lifetimes could be spent in one language family. So I must pri-oritize and hurry. I would also welcome help. 

What is needed to see that this area of study moves forward vigorously?
A few more enthusiastic linguists, interested in the problem enough to invest the years of prepara-tion needed to learn the discipline of historical lin-guistics, to immerse themselves in Near Eastern lan-guages and an Amerindian language family or two, and to establish themselves as published authorities in the language family of their choice. It is admit-tedly a heavy investment, especially without pro-spects of earning a living at it, though I do so: teach-ing English, Spanish, and ESL in a community col-lege, while working on the side at this fascinating lifetime hobby. The scale of the required investment, of course, explains why there is so little help in this matter. Nevertheless, I often think how wonderful it would be if two or three young linguists were to become interested, do the preparation, become acknowledged authorities in their languages of spe-cialization, and then all of us collaborate on the larger historical puzzle. The work of each would shed light on the larger picture and would help one another. Three or four can do a five-million-piece jigsaw puzzle much faster than one person can, and together we could collectively accomplish as much every 5 years as I have over the last 20. When will a credible case on this issue be ready to present to doubting linguists? Before publishing it for that audience, anyone should build an unassailably strong case, presented in standard linguistic fashion according to the compara-tive method. Even then it may meet with vigorous re-sistance. Yet even that could be a good sign, since it would take a strong case to make unbelieving linguists pay enough attention to cause a controversy, rather than to be ignored as usual. But to have the matter made public by one who has not demonstrated lin-guistic competence as a published scholar in any rele-vant language family would be counterproductive. The baby of the distant connection to Semitic would then easily be thrown out with the bathwater of inad-equate methodology. To avoid such premature dump-ing, I aim to finish my book, A Comparative Vocabu-lary of Uto-Aztecan Languages, eight years in process, with perhaps two more to go. It contains nearly five times as many cognate sets as the last comprehensive book published on UA (about 2,400 versus 514). I hope it will serve as a cornerstone of UA linguistics and will establish my position as a linguist and Uto-Aztecanist deserving to be heard, while laying a foun-dation for Semitic comparisons. I also feel the need to make professionally accepted linguistic contributions in two other lan-guage families, since the Near Eastern element in America will eventually involve several language families anyway, I am confident. Furthermore, we cannot put together the best case until the rate of discovering new Hebrew and Egyptian elements in Amerindian languages slows and the body of data stabilizes. As long as I continue discovering new evi-dence of this connection at the present rate, it must mean that I am nowhere near the end. The whole pattern cannot be characterized accurately until we have most of the data in hand. Perhaps in a decade, after finishing the UA book and making other substantial contributions, I would be ready to publish on this matter (involving multi-ple language families) for the linguistic community. The time might be reduced if a few competent and interested linguists, willing to devote the time, would collaborate.

Do your observations in language agree or conflict with your reading of the Book of Mormon?
I see no conflict whatever, and my observations agree very well with the Book of Mormon account. The languages mentioned in that scripture are (1) a Lehi dialect of Hebrew (with Arabic, Hebrew, and Egyptian names), (2) a Mulekite Hebrew dialect, (3) Egyptian, and (4) the unknown Jaredite language or languages. 21 And in Amerindian languages I find two strains of Hebrew, some Egyptian, some Arabic, and many languages of improbable or unknown Old World connections. Not all of the unknowns would be Jaredite, of course. What I just said is an oversimplification of the matter, since many languages are part of America’s prehistory aside from what is reported in the Book of Mormon. Undoubtedly, East Asian languages have entered the Americas, whether via the land bridge, coastal boating, transoceanic crossings, or all three. In addition, the Jaredite peoples were in the Americas some millennia before Lehi and Mulek arrived and were likely to be more widespread and more numerous than the later arrivals. Various Jaredite offshoots probably reached into North and South America, to places out of touch with the war-ring kingdoms, and thus were not involved in the conflicts recorded in Ether and are among the ances-tors of today’s Amerindians, perhaps primarily so in some language families. And perhaps others besides East Asians and Book of Mormon peoples entered pre-Columbian America as well. Nevertheless, I see enough evidence in enough language families that I am optimistic that we can eventually reconstruct some of these Book of Mormon languages to a sig-nificant degree. The Book of Mormon text says it has not room to tell us a hundredth part of historical happenings, which would include the language histories of its peoples. So American languages offer us a tremendous potential to refine and further define Book of Mormon languages, peoples, and relocation patterns as evidenced by language connections. The Book of Mormon contains few comments on language besides its mention of Hebrew and Egyptian. Lehi’s language may have been a different dialect than biblical Hebrew, so we should not jump to too many conclusions about Book of Mormon language(s). I think we are going to be surprised in many ways. For me the prospects in this area of study are exciting. !

da dieser Artikel aus dem Original kopiert wurde, sind ein paar Formatierungsschwierigkeiten aufgetreten, da auch Tabellen abgedruckt waren. Diese können im Original nachgesehen werden.

Zu den DNS Analysen auch ein Artikel:

"The Problematic Role of DNA Testing in Unraveling Human History", der im gleichen Heft des JBMS erschienen ist. Ein Link folgt, sobald das Heft im frei Verfügbaren Teil der FARMS Homepage erhältlich ist. Ein Abdruck hier erspare ich dem uninteressierten Leser dieser Zeilen. Wer der Artikel wirklich lesen will, kann mir ein email schicken, und ich schicke ihn dann als email zu.

Das war jetzt sehr viel Material! Es hätte noch mehr sein können, aber für den üblichen Leser dieser Zeilen dürfte dies ja von keinem ernsthaftem Interesse sein. Die Argumente der "Kritiker" sind allenfalls auf den ersten Blick überzeugend.

Mark.

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