Here are a couple of books that will amaze you, if you are able to really understand them and their secrets. If you are curious about ancient languages and ancient civilizations, the hidden and secret links that connect people of today to our remote and distant pasts, there are a couple of books you may want to check out.
Saul Levin, a renowned linguist and semiticist at the State University of New York, published two immensely important books roughly a couple of decades ago that really are amazing. The first is 1995’s Semitic and Indo-European: Volume I: The Principal Etymologies. With observations on Afro-Asiatic (v. 1), the second is 2002’s Semitic and Indo-European: Volume II: Comparative morphology, syntax and phonetics (Both in the Current Issues in Linguistic Theory series)
This fascinating book gives troves of evidence that Indo European languages, whether Germanic, Slavic, Romance, or Hellenic, have many words shared with Semitic languages, both ancient and contemporary, like Arabic, Canaanite (Phoenician and Hebrew) and Aramaic.That you can find such shared words in Gothic, or Greek, or Sanskrit, or contemporary English.
This alone isn’t that controversial. Linguists and Philologists have been long aware of shared loan words between these families, but they are mostly believed to be from historical times. For example many of the thousands of Arabic words in European languages are believed to date from the Crusades and latter Middle Ages, or European Colonial period.
The idea of more ancient Semitic influence on European languages has often been ignored or frowned upon by non-specialists and some specialists alike. Particularity by Indo-Europeanists, historically
Over the last two centuries there have been a few scholars who were interested in shared Semitic and Indo-European etymology and have admitted the possibility of limited Semitic influence in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, when Rome ruled Arabia Provincia and Arabia Nabatea and Judea, or from Rome’s Punic provinces. Or for the Greeks during their post-Alexander rule in West Asia. An example is the Greek deity Adonis (See the Hebrew Adoni) and the Roman Genius (see the Arabic Jinn/Jinni) and a few others.
Only a brave minority, however, were willing to consider, or were even aware of, far more ancient linguistic contacts and influences between Indo-European people and Semites from the Levant and Greater Arabia. This is what makes these two books so amazing. Professor Levin looks at the shared vocabulary between Indo-European and Semitic languages, exploring the topic in ways deeper than others before him.
He does not just look at vocabulary, but more importantly he also looks at shared morphology. There are morphological correspondences between Semitic and Indo-European which gives the greatest clues to the languages shared past. And his work not only examines verbal roots, but also numerals, nouns, pronouns, and prepositions.
Readers with a very good grasp of Arabic and Aramaic grammar will appreciate where this point leads; that there are frozen morphological or grammatical features in the Indo-European versions of these words that prove their Semitic origins.
Basically one morphological variant of a word ends up embedded in very ancient Indo-European languages, and comes down to us today through various sound changed (obvious examples are Thawr(u)->Taurus (Bull) and Qarn(u)->Corn/Horn). Another is Wayn(u)-> Wine/Vine). But since there are multiple variants of such a word in languages like Arabic, Akkadian Aramaic and Hebrew, all obeying set morphological rules, it’s easy to see which was the origin, and which language family borrowed one aspect or mood of the word, and developed it further inside its own language context, away from the language community from which it borrowed the word.
There are a small number of others doing similar work, though more narrowly focused on Arabic, like the Algerian scholar in exile Rachid Benaissa for example, and a few Moroccans. But no one in the English speaking world has published on this idea with the rigor Professor Levin has. Though Leo Weiner, almost a hundred years ago, visited the idea of massive Arabic influence on Gothic, German, and English in late antiquity and the dark ages. No one has touched that area since, however, and Levin goes far deeper in time, to Eurasian prehistory.
But this can take some readers to what can be a difficult place. Some people may find themselves very uncomfortable with Levin’s facts, and more so with the inescapable conclusion that his work points to. That the prehistoric development of Indo-Aryan/Indo-European must have been shaped by contacts with Semitic language speaking communities.
Both Semitists and Indo-Europeanists can have fairly rigid ideas about their languages’ prehistoric development. Levin’s books lay out facts that are squarely at odds with the received orthodoxy in both linguistic communities. I think that in the context of today’s communitarian and nationalist politics some of his facts can make some people uncomfortable or even provoke knee-jerk backlashes and rejection.
Look, the fact that most of these cognates are of Semitic origin doesn’t rule out the possibility that some shared words were ancient Semitic borrowings from Indo-European. Some have been attested in Hebrew and Aramaic by linguists from, for example, Anatolian and Hittite. But the majority of language influence went the other way, from Semitic speakers to Indo-European ones.
Now, a more interesting possibility that Professor Levin chooses not to deeply address is the idea of shared ancient mutual origin. The idea that at some time in very distant pre-history the ancestors of our Indo-European and Semitic languages shared a basic foundational origin. Which would lead us into the debates on an original shared mother for both languages being Nostratic. But in his second book’s epilogue: Echoes Of Prehistoric Life And Culture Levin does glance at the idea of reconstructing aspects of Prehistoric life and culture from these shared languages.
For example, after looking at an example in Greek Myth of an incident of Jason and the Argonauts, Levin says that the dual form of Thawrayn
“..recaptures a prehistoric stage in the development of animal husbandry, shared by some men of an EE and by some of a Semitic population. That remote experience with two bulls was drawn upon by a Greek and an Arab and understood by their audiences, at least to the extent that the context reminded them of it, as the epic of the Argonauts did in its way quite forcefully — describing the bulls as […] ‘snorting flame with the mouth’ ..”
The facts of shared cognates between Indo-European languages like Gothic and Greek and Semitic languages like Arabic and Akkadian (among many) are testimonies to intimate prehistoric contacts between the two language communities. I totally recommend reading both books if you study or are interested in the histories of either Indo-European or Semitic, and in particular I recommend reading them if you have an interest in the deeper pre-historical origins of European and Asiatic nations and peoples.
The first volume, though it’s pricey, is really worth the read. You can get it from Amazon below.The second volume improves on the first, and I recommend reading it next. The only criticism I’ve encountered is from a Moroccan professor I was speaking with who caught a couple of errors in some of his Arabic derivations. On the whole however the work has no parallel.