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Comment by msrenee | Hacker News Reader

So that's a guy claiming he and another person figured out that the derivation of some Proto-Germanic words came from a semitic language. No published paper, just conjecture. He claims that there are a number of loanwords in Proto-Germanic that came from semitic. The word "loanword" is a link to what you would expect to lead to some evidence for it. Instead, it leads to a website listing a number of different loanwords from various languages. The closest thing on that list is Yiddish and it clearly states they mostly entered the language in the 20th century.

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Plenty of publications by Venneman (mentioned on the linked site). The man was a linguistics professor for 30 years. Was he right? Probably not, but definitely not just "a guy" and "another person".

All I'm seeing on this subject by him is the book mentioned elsewhere in this thread where the summary claims close and sustained contact with the Carthaginians. The only supporting evidence I'm finding for that assertion is that he's devised new etymologies that connect Proto-Germanic to semitic roots.

All he does is mention that they've made these connections linguistically. He doesn't cite any peer-reviewed papers on the subject. Just the book. If you click the linked text throughout that article, you'll get a few Wikipedia pages, Encyclopedia Britannica Online, and a few other web pages that don't back up his claims.

I'm having trouble taking the theory seriously when he can't seem to pull up any real evidence besides wishful thinking.

You can google "Theo Venneman publications". It's not that hard.

I did. I found a bunch of papers by him, none of them relevant. Another user's comment makes it seem like there are papers of his cited in his book. By the time I saw that though, I'd gotten tired of trying to find evidence that the author of the article should have at least given basic information on how to find.

If he wants to make these claims, he needs to cite the evidence.

At issue is that there is now new evidence. It should be obvious that conclusions reached in its absence do not incorporate any evaluation of the new evidence.

The conclusion might be strengthened, unaffected, weaker, or even reversed. That is the point. There is no value in new evidence other than that it might make a difference. What is difficult about this?

There's no old evidence. You can go looking for connections, but don't try to tell me there was a reason to defend the theory to start with.

There is plenty of old evidence. We call them runestones. The glyphs on them have disputed origin. Nobody seems to imagine they were made up from whole cloth. But they don't resemble any other alphabet closely enough to nail down how they did develop.

Older examples would generally be expected to more closely resemble whatever they came from. Is this unfamiliar reasoning?

There is no evidence for the idea that they descended directly from a semitic alphabet brought up from Carthage to northern Europe. There is no evidence for trade between Carthage and early people's in that area. You realize this and so attempted to change the subject onto something you think you have an argument for.

I've wasted enough time on this. You obviously have no intention of adding any sort of evidence for this argument. Thank you for giving me a reason to read more deeply about the origins of modern alphabets, but I'll continue that reading on my own.

If you read back in the thread you will see that you have tried to change the subject at every point, and I have each time steered it back to the actual topic.

I do not know why you insist on arguing against something no one has suggested, or what so terrifies you about the simple idea I wrote that you are motivated to vicious accusations of "edenism", but I no longer care. You have revealed all we need to know.

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