IE & Semitic roots. Was: Script on excavated terracotta seals from Harappa deciphered????

[Luis Gonzalez-Reimann]

Thanks to Jacob Baltuch and Dominique Thillaud for their comments.

Any opinion on where the concept of a grammatical verbal root appears first?

Also, a brief comment on the following by Jacob:

>Language is one thing. The writing system is another. I can write Hebrew
>with a Latin alphabet. That doesn't make it an IE language. Maybe it is
>good to keep the two issues separate. What the Semitic roots are or are
>not has nothing to do with how the language is written.

Languages can, of course, be written in any alphabet, but that may involve
the use of diacritics, or adapting certain letters (like Phoenician aleph to
Greek alpha) when the alphabet does not include all the necessary elements
(or when it has unnecessary ones).  In this sense, the writing system, as it
is used for a particular language, is closely tied to the language itself.


Luis Gonzalez-Reimann
University of California, Berkeley