Traces of Old Egyptian in Eurasian languages? | Hacker News Reader

Traces of Old Egyptian in Eurasian languages?

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55 pointssingularity200134 comments

Some of this is mistaking just how much we know of Egyptian phonology, which is actually very little. For some proper names, we have more context into how they may have actually sounded based on transscriptions into Greek and Latin. But for every other word, we flat out have no idea on vowel sounds, because they were not written. Because of this, a couple sounds known as semivowels are sometimes transcribed as if they were vowels. For instance, in mother, the second glyph of a chick (𓅱) is marked as a U, but would be more appropriately be W. Same with the reeds (𓇋), which are sometimes marked as I but are rather Y. (And, in this article, apparently also FE...)

I think it's also interesting that they are using mother and father, considering that those words have commonalities in sound across large swathes of human language. Unless the author is also ready to argue Egyptian influence on Chinese, evidence should extend to other words.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa

EDIT:

Every dictionary I can find lists father as it, which alone would need explanation for how the article arrives at feathav using the same signs. I'll just link the most comprehensive one:

https://www.scribd.com/doc/10929802/Dictionary-of-Middle-Egy...

When you search, the relevant entry is the "plants 12" result.

Specifically old Egyptian.

Demotic and Coptic Egyptian is much better understood with the latter being still in use today.

What most people think of Egypt is actually fairly recent history people tend to refer to events which usually happened during or around the Ptolemaic Kingdom period, by that time the Egyptians have already lost the ability to read or speak the language of the old kingdom and today we are closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the pyramids as far as time goes.

Heck even if we take the biblical exodus story as a historic event then the pyramids were already ancient by the time Moses was stuttering let my peeps go.

As for the article I don’t exactly understand it’s premise they open with Sanskrit and Persian having shared history with European languages but as both are indo-European languages why is this surprising? AFIAK this was known and acccoeted even in the 19th century.

Perhaps the old egyptain was never a coherent language. The pharaohs of the first dynasties are known to have united egypt, perhaps only then having created the opportunity for a united language to begin with, because it's reasonable to assume fragmented language beforehand. This means slow diffusion and many substrata of dialects and mutually almost incomprehensible variants as we still have (I don't know how bad it is in America but some German Dialects are incomprehensible). And Egypt isn't just the Nile that makes travel and exchange easy. E.g. nomads held key positions in trade and could hide a long time ignoring local struggles because they had domain knowledge in the desert, but also alienating themselves and their language. This increases the chance for a fragmented language continuum (a continuum of continua if you will, kinda fractal).

You think the pyramids are old? To the contrary, the north African Sahara is speculated to be as young as 5,400 years (although I remember reading something north of 100'000; indeed, it is not certain, probably fluctuating on and off for periods of time, too). I think that the pre-desert is the archetype of the reed fields, the paradise of the Egyptian mythology, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaru -- to top that off, could the tree of knowledge be symbolic for the rain forest that was in the Mediterranean basin before it flooded a handful of million years ago or afterwards as it swelled on and off further along?

The article is too conservative? The article makes a few points about the wider Danube valley being central to early PIE civilization and industry. Which resonates very well with me. There is no certain PIE homeland hypothesis but this fits with the Krugan hypothesis.

Egypt went though several desertification periods some of which caused the collapse of the old kingdom this isn’t exactly a new discovery.

When the pyramids were built the Sahara has already existed but it didn’t creep that far up north as it did today.

I think you are making the mistake of assuming that the phonetics would be one if not the most important feature. The article points out: "Here we investigate how deeply the roots go and how the system, its cosmology and language are intertwined with our own:".

The symbolism is important and the table presented in TFA is amazing at that.

> I think it's also interesting that they are using mother and father, considering that those words have commonalities in sound across large swathes of human language.

The t/d in * m?t- is more significant than that, whereas the p in pt is less significant across world wide languages.

I'm just missing a node to Proto-Afro-Asiatic.

> Unless the author is also ready to argue Egyptian influence on Chinese, evidence should extend to other words.

Please compare Punic [zayin] (Phoenician letter 工 = S - weapon) and Chinese [工] ("gon" etc., whence mandarin 工具 - tool). Obviously both are related to metal tools, perhaps a spade stuck in the ground symbolizing mining for ore, craft, and metal tools all in one sign, and in a different interpretation the outflow of molten metal from a primitive furnace. Once you have horses, trade is a matter of weeks or months. Metal working spread slowly, and with it the words. I don't know if asia discovered smelting independently, though, I'm just hypothesizing.

The difference is that "mother" is a much older idea and the m- in principle a reference to the sound of suckling.

[zayin]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet

[工]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B7%A5.

PS:

> EDIT: Every dictionary I can find lists father as it, which alone would need explanation

Well, it is rather close to pt (stone), which in turn is close to Pth as in the name of the god. So there is an element of veneration (stone old anyone?) that isn't present in good ol' papa (just as some languages use different personal pronouns in different registers of speech). This link is strong as pater is still used in a religious sense. or comparing as/at: turkic "ata" (father) and "at" (horse, perhaps also venerated), which is the metaphorical head (cf. capital, cattle, aleph as god and head of the alphabet, A being a top-side-down bull head symbol). I Norse as "As" is a god again (whence "asgard"). As is also a singular unit in Latin for either a single dot on a dice (whence poker ace; we also still speak of faces of a die), or prominently as the nomination of roman pennies, which incidentally have the head of a god on its observe side which is hence colloquially called heads. Oh and isn't head somewhat rhyming with "it"? Egyptian [hr] seems to exhibits the same dualism, even if the different etymologies aren't clear (xal is mentioned, but not ħər - chief, free, noble [2]). The language as a whole over time is highly self modifying, and the result is like gene code really really tightly compressed from a really small seed expanding with exponential growth. There's certainly more to this, computational methods are gaining ground with time but archeology is a game against the time. There's a baseline to human language in most of it's dimensions. So while I don't know if the concept of parenthood was fundamental to evolution (I mean I guess so, but in what time frame), but one thing is clear if modern apes reveal any clue, the first phoneme was a skreek: "Ah Ah Ahh" (or "it it it" or something) -- cf. <https://esolangs.org/wiki/Ook!

[hr]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%B8%A5r#Egyptian [2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Afro-Asi...

PPS: At that I find funny how Morse-code, as in mono-phonetic strictly rhythm based speech, is comparable to language, and how by extension of the concept, many concepts rely on ordering and a representation in numbers. So I'm curious how important maths skills were to the development of language. Basically, human speech uses a highly variable non linear numeral system to code messages. The idea of an assembly language as intermediate to spoken language reminds me of Chomsky's universal grammar. The foundations of logic must be "univalent" simply because the brain structure has to adhere to it, geometrically, combinatorially, categorically, etc. p. p. Basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_tenth_rule

There's an enormous difference between aesthetic features of writing and actual language relation. The original hypothesis that this inadvertently plagiarizes from is a 1912 William Flinders Petrie monogram. Wow... when I first started looking into this stuff 8 or 9 years ago, archive didn't have this/exist in this form:

https://archive.org/details/formationofalpha00petr

Petrie's tables are better... but they're still at best interesting and inconclusive.

(Also, although people cited /it/ above, Thesuarus Linguae Aegyptiae transliterates it /jtj/ (yty - long vowels rather than glottals); and claiming that's similar to pit is pretty ridiculous... If there's a genetic intra-Afroasiatic relation with that root (which I'm not sure there is...) it'd make a lot more sense to connect it with Ugaritic 'ad... Which I don't think it makes sense to do... And in support of that... not even the out-there Starling database makes that connection (http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&basen... // http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&basen... )).

I'm sorry, you keep throwing the word ridiculous around as if it was a jocular matter and I'm completely fine with that, but I don't welcome being mocked without a proper argument. Yes, jt>pit is a loose thread made without much information. But not because I am too lazy to meticulously collect evidence, but because it is downright impossible for me to study this at a day job level. Rather, I assumed this would be an obvious connection to already have been investigated and would hope for corrections or confirmation. And baring any evidence in my comment I would have thought it was obvious to be taken with a heap of salt for what it's worth.

So it was a bit dry, and you were amused anyway. That leaves me confused.

I can't think of any other concordances between Egyptian /j/ and /p/ in other languages. To be honest I've never seen the word jtj before today. There's a longstanding and known relation broadly with /p/ or /b/ and father and /m/ and mother. And as far as I'm aware there's no consensus on the meaning of that relation. But jtj isn't the root related to those; and Egyptian doesn't seem to have a strong example of /b/ (http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&basen... ).

I was suggesting that pit was an extension of it.

I think the j in jt is a remnant of jw (true), jw-?t, (biological father), but only because jw is the only egyptian j- lexeme I know so far, because I like to connect it to IO and Jo- and the jedi knights. For p- I'm not so sure, but something like grand-father or god-father would fit the theme, or less familiar for us distant from the Neolithicum, the stone-father (grey/old, hard/strong, inanimate/false vs true, crafty/fundamental).

To be fair, I cited it, not /it/, and only after noting the confusion in a previous post regarding layman confusion in transcription of I and U for Egyptian. And the chances that it was actually /jtj/, as opposed to that being the consonant root with unmarked vowels, is low.

I hope you're not indicating the table corresponding Egyptian hieroglyphs with modern words, because that is by far one of the worse sections. It's an embodiment of confirmation bias. Let's look at arm, which uses English as it's example. Ok, well obviously English didn't exist contemporarily with Egyptian, so let's go backwards. Proto-Germanic gives armaz, which isn't super surprising since anatomical terms are tend to be relatively stable. But PG began developing in Scandinavia around 750BC, still too early for old Egyptian. So let's go back to PIE, where we get the root h₂(e)r-, "to put together". So when we drive back to the contemporary language, we lose the connection to the meaning. And when we look at the development of that root into child languages, we get many related forms, with the arm branch only being one of them. We also get words like Latin armentum, relating to draft and herd animals. Or artus, relating to being close or dense. Or Greek ἁρμόζω, related to putting together. (Ancient Greek tends to be more conservative towards PIE.) We also get a lot of derivitives starting with R, because A derived from the PIE combination h₂e. So when the E was dropped in PIE forms, R tended to be the kept form. The final point being, that if there actually was such a strong symbolic influence that it managed to survive thousands of years to make it to modern English, you wouldn't expect all these other forms to have also developed using the same rules that led to arm. And that's where the bias comes in; ignoring all these other developments consistent with the exact same pattern that led to English arm.

raoulduke already addressed the comments regarding attempting to extend it without taking into account my prior note regarding transcription of Egyptian.

Morse code is an encoding, not a language. The same string of Morse code could, theoretically, represent two different meanings depending on which language was actually encoded. That's like trying to prescribe some sort of attributes to language by looking at ASCII. It's meaningless; they're artificial constructs with mathematical patterns because they were constructed with mathematical patterns...

> That's like trying to prescribe some sort of attributes to language by looking at ASCII

Which is a fruitful approach [1]. That said, I doubt everything else you wrote, too. I can't make sense of your comment.

> The final point being, that if there actually was such a strong symbolic influence that it managed to survive thousands of years to make it to modern English, you wouldn't expect all these other forms to have also developed using the same rules that led to arm.

I'm not quite sure which "same rules that led to arm" you are talking about, but If you mean sound laws, then it is quite obvious that "such a strong symbolic influence" might lead to a sound law in the first place. Not just "Arm" but a bunch of symbols.

You probably don't speak German so let give you another hint: An archaic German name for the eagle is "Arn" (now "Adler"). Coincidence? The symbolism is quite strong with this one, as the figure of the German parliament and incidentally the Egyptian hieroglyphs are heavy on ornithology, too. And it is notable that other PIE languages derive arm not from latin "bracchium" (from greek ...), hinting at a more complicated case and indeed, perhaps Egyptian influence (why not). However I'm sure you'd find the difference between h₃érō (>arn) and h₂er- (>arm) appreciable. I don't so much, because you would just have to go a few more steps back, perhaps, to find a common root.

There is an insurmountable amount of theories and you dare to arm chair a hazard guess that Egyptain as root would be out of the question base on hypothetical sound laws that are in no small part based on the assumption that Egyptian couldn't have played a role in it. That, my friend, is circular reasoning (and appeal to authority).

bʰer- ("to bear, carry") fits the usage of arms anyway, and I'm sure an eagle carrying away a bunny is an impressive sight, too -- but I'm rambling.

Still, there's more: Bird wings are like arms, aren't they? Ancient Greek pterón* -- there's er in it, that's good enough for me, pashto has wozzar; Persian has bal, Latin ala -- still close enough -- and Somali has baal ... not too distant to Vol as in French "voliere" (aviary), from Latin volo (I fly), from weǵʰ (to bring transport). Zazaki (according to wiktionary), literally has per* (wing) as metaphor for arm. Sanskrit has pakṣa, Punjabi has paṅkh, Urdu has pankh, too, but Punjabi has also par. Maori has parpau. This is most likely of pre-PIE origin, I think. There's also navajo atʼaʼ; Quechua: raphra, rapra, likra, Kannada: rekke, Malayalam: ചിറക് (ml) (ciṟak). I rest my case. Obviously I am just picking the translations that I deem a fit and obviously there are gaping holes in my argument. I'm writing an internet comment, after all, not a dissertation. So I can reasonably lean a bit out of the window and try to read from cracked pots. I Imagine a pre historic hominid flapping the arms and screeching "ar ar" to describe a bird, an eagle perhaps.

Anyhow *bʰer- would explain bracchium, somewhat, disregarding any sound laws which I didn't bother yet to learn because THAT seems implausible, to derive "laws" from hypothesis and being so fixed on them as if they had been actual law (Which, given nationalism and racism isn't all that far fetched, but still a far cry from a natural law).

Although, wiktionary doesn't have the translations to Egyptian for either of these words and I haven't installed a proper font to read the table from the article, so I'm kind missing the point?

> Greek ἁρμόζω, related to putting together

compile<collect<carry

[1] Zhang, Lecun "Byte-Level Recursive Convolutional Auto-Encoder for Text". https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01817

You are still making the same mistakes propagated by the article in the first place and warned against by myself regarding Egyptian transcription and modern "pronunciation". I suggest you maybe educate yourself better:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egy...

"The actual pronunciations reconstructed by such means are used only by a few specialists in the language. For all other purposes, the Egyptological pronunciation is used, but it often bears little resemblance to what is known of how Egyptian was pronounced."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Phonology

In this following quote, note the move from /tut/ to /tawat/, due to the transcribed U actually being W, because only consonants were written.

"For example, the name twt-ꜥnḫ-ı͗mn is conventionally pronounced /tuːtən.ˈkɑːmən/ in English, but, in his lifetime, it was likely to be pronounced something like [taˈwaːt ˈʕaːnxu ʔaˈmaːn]."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptologica...

The bottom line is that we don't even know whether the Egyptian word for "arm" had an /a/-like sound. The symbol is actually the Egyptian "ayin" (ꜥ), not "A". In the same way, the vulture is "alef" (ꜣ), not "A".

Also, this is all ignoring the tendency in the area to simplify writing systems through acrophony, in which the logographic symbol is converted to a phonetic one via its initial phonology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrophony

> I Imagine a pre historic hominid flapping the arms and screeching "ar ar" to describe a bird, an eagle perhaps.

This is actually an anti-argument for you. This aligns with the same type of argument for "mama"- and "papa"-like sounds throughout the world: That the sound originates from onomatopoeia or a similar link and not through linguistic influence or origin.

> ... disregarding any sound laws which I didn't bother yet to learn because THAT seems implausible, to derive "laws" from hypothesis and being so fixed on them as if they had been actual law...

You're misunderstanding the causality here. We call them laws precisely because they accurately explain the sound changes. Same as we describe physical laws because they explain the physics we witness. Not the other way around.

"[Grimm's law] establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and the stop consonants of certain other centum Indo-European languages (Grimm used mostly Latin and Greek for illustration)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law

My final statement on this is that, as far as I can tell, this entire thought process is nothing but the pigeon-hole principle as played out in linguistics. There are only so many productive sounds and many languages. Of course there will be some that look similar by sheer coincidence, especially when one takes such a flexible stance on phonetics and meaning when attributing links.

I don't understand what this article is. There appears to be no cogent hypothesis or evidence. In the end it seems to be suggesting not (any) linguistic influence on Eurasian languages but rather aesthetic influence of hieroglyphs. That's well established given that the alphabet evolved from a single source and that it's well-established that that source was at least partly* influenced by hieroglyphs; and the earliest evidence for it is at Serabit el-Khadem in Sinai interspersed with hieroglyphic inscriptions (including a bilingual inscription on a sphinx [Sinai 345]).

As I look back I do see a like half-paragraph ridiculous suggestion of apparently genetic connection between Egyptian and European. Before it was commonly known that Egyptian is an Afroasiatic language, there were attempts (usually with racial undertones) attempting to link the glorious and regal Egyptian with Eurasian languages. It's a worthless hypothesis.

It also looks like people may have been looking for and having trouble finding solid Egyptian lexicons: aaew.bbaw.de/tla/

(The one that really bothered me was the (obviously incoherent) "Hathor = hut+hor Hüter of Herds"... Hathor means "House/Estate/Temple of Horus"). The whole thing is just ridiculous.)

*There's at least secondary cuneiform influence by Wadi el-Hol (which I think was more likely 15th or 14th century).

> rather aesthetic influence of hieroglyphs

rather, the hieroglyphic influence on the aesthetics of the (written) language.

I don't understand (?).

There is no difference, really. I just tried to point out that aesthetics can have a influence on language, because you were basically saying the writing system wasn't linguistic, which is really painful to read.

It's also painfully correct. The Egyptian hieroglyph pr, also monosyllabic /h/, was adapted for /b/ in the Semitic creation of the alphabet. The scribe took the common Semitic word for house be(y)t and used it to supplant the original linguistic meaning attached to the grapheme. Thus the linguistic content was destroyed while the aesthetic content was essentially unchanged (and remains so today, most notably in Cyrillic, I think).

So you have pt (sky), pr (house) and bt (house), and you are suggesting that there can be no obvious link? pt~bt perhaps? I don't know what's up with the /h/. It doesn't really matter because drawn glyphs pass the test of time better than phonemes by virtue of being homoiconic. Certainly, written language is a linguistic matter, not just merely aesthetic.

If you look at the pt hieroglyph, the lower form might be a roof I think. Of course, my confusion of pt and pr in the previous post shows an aptitude to jump to conclusions. But when Peter<Petrus<??? has no certain etymology, leaps of faith are inevitable. And while I understand that research is always careful to be skeptical, so am I when you say the hypothesis couldn't be. I'm not necessarily defending the theory from the featured article, because a common ancestor can come through a variety of origins. Anyway, the Egyptians are famous anyway, so they are the first go to for a theory.

Also, your claim is evidently wrong. The Bet glyph looks very different to the pr glyph.

I was initially trying to formulate a thought about writing, because it can show patterns of language on a deeper level or at least from a different perspective. After all, verbal communication involves more than phonetics. There are definitely words that have been read incorrectly and proliferated -- e.g. reading gamma for ypsilon, omega for digamma; although I have no evidence at hand this shouldn't be hard to believe.

This was constructive for me, as I hadn't made the connection from pr to beta, before. Thank you.

Correct. There can be no obvious link. Particularly in that Old Kingdom /r/ would reflect a Semitic /'/, if memory serves. So /pr/ would be the equivalent of /p'/ which would mean "mouth."

I likely compounded your confusion by referring to the grapheme as pr; whereas it is in fact Gardiner's O4, the monosyllabic /h/ (http://msheflin.blogspot.com/search/label/Early%20Alphabet - take the chart beyond /b/ with a grain of salt; I haven't updated it in years). This isn't my theory... this is basically the only consensus view on Proto-Sinaitic. Please stop wading into a crazy complex and insular, highly esoteric academic subject and then getting mad at me when you misunderstand my comments and attempt to construct a new orthodoxy around them...

The only connection between pr and b(y)t is semantic. Once you move from pure ideograms to logograms or abjads that wholly breaks down.

I don't want to start a circular argument talking past each other. Wiktionary has for pr: "(Old Egyptian) IPA /paːruw/[1]". That's just one reconstruction but Its source is 20 years old so it could be outdated for all I know. Given your comments, I just see the glottal stop as another datapoint. Whether that also means "mouth" or not doesn't lead to confusion.

[1]: Hoch, James (1997) Middle Egyptian Grammar, Mississauga: Benben Publications, ISBN 0920168124, page 15

house, lord, protector are all synonymous in some sense. Hor is a proper noun, but that must derive from common words. Just as temples were actually serving common goods often enough.

I agree, the presentation is loose and wild. At least, I don't see it creating any specific context. And there is no motivation given for the proposed translation. But as words go, the translation speaks for itself. Hor meaning observer is Proto-Afro-Asiatic [1], that relates to Hüter (protector). Hr is also being connected to xal face, surface, upon; which is, at least today, a common metaphor. The hyroglyph is a head on-face. "Head of state, family", etc. has the same connotation. In the sense of the sky, which is the roof and surface of the world, hor has a divine aspect, the falcon being king of the sky, figuratively. And the roof is "on" the house protecting the inhabitants. xal meaning ruler is very productive (if I say so myself), and as it stands a ruler is nothing without an army, an order. Further, face and sky can be linked to vision and light respectively, as in over-see-r. While the falcon is know for good eyesight and vision is a very common metaphor for knowledge. So Hor is a spiritual guide.

J/K: Hor was probably into (H)ornithology, too. And Order (whence Horde). And Oration (which can be heared - eye and ear being close). And Orthography (which you can see). Half of these words are of uncertain origin.

For symbols it doesn't hurt to be ambiguous. So Hathor might just be the house of the house of the houses.

Obviously the article resonates well with me. I have a hunch that hwt-ke-ptah (house, soul, ptah) was the old school of architecture - hence Pythagoras. The word calculate is from a word for stone, which is pt (egy. stone), too. And in terms of counting, a kind of bank would be another civil service. But the service of a temple was likely variable. The identifaction of the god as well. Ptah - pater is just too inviting a link to make, so I think ptah is the deified founding father, the temple having been in Memphis, central to the unification of egypt.

Also, memphis was called "white walls", so much for the racism.

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Afro-Asi...

This is so bad that I don't even know where to begin. It's incoherent, completely ignores any accepted method of linguistic analysis, makes absolutely no explanation as to how conclusions are being made and it doesn't even attempt to support them in an way.

It's literally just gibberish.

Most languages have common utterances for mother/father and other family members. This is because these are easy, early sounds a baby can make. Some variation of da, ma, pa, na occurs fairly universally.

There’s a pretty good episode of Lexicon Valley on this topic (see cavebabies say ‘mama’)

http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley.html

> This is because these are easy, early sounds a baby can make

Indeed, but while plosives are impossible in the uterus, humming is possible ("hummmmmmmm...") though it's likely not audible, it might resonate at deeper frequencies. After all they cry right when they come out and must have trained well for such vigorous performance.

Otherwise, hums are surely linked to pleasant and primitive, familiar emotions. A simple ADSR envelope around a hum gives quite a lot of expressiveness, too ("ha?" "aha!" "haha" "ahhh" "a ha ha" only with m, i.e. "hm?").

Also the ma syllable is linked to the sound of suckling (hence breasts is mama in Latin). Also, we say mother-tongue probably for a reason: Mothers are much more involved in early child rising and hence in teaching language. I guess that is evident in bilingual families if not taken special care of?

This started off interesting and very smoothly transitioned to being fully incoherent to me.

Do the random italics and French-style quotes mean something that I just don’t understand, or was the whole thing actually just kind of insane.

I agree with every comments posted so far (not convincing examples, incoherent writing, lack indications about the languages used, lack of formal method) but the worst offender is probably the lack of references. Even if the post is bad in itself it could leads to interesting papers and authors but it didn’t. Only one authors is referenced in the text. This is not enough.

The etymology for most of those "cognates" seems quite strained when you consider that even reconstructions of Proto-Germanic roots can be controversial. Especially when you only have a single sound to match, it is very easy to come up with bullshit "correspondences" that are mere coincidence.

The information density of that map is pretty amazing

I can't see most of the glyphs neither on debian nor on android 6.

Columbia pop-linguist McWhorter suggests strong verbs in Germanic languages may have been a Semitic influence.

That seems quite a stretch, when proto-Indo-European ablaut explains the exact same phenomenon. Also, Germanic strong verbs tend to be relatively primitive vocabulary -- go, sleep, drink, sing... So it's also explainable that these forms could develop prior to more standardized forms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_strong_verb#Origin_an...

I'm haven't read this or anything like that yet, but I'm sure the claim is only partial, not absolute, in which case, why not? Jewish diaspora is old.

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