From the Search for an Original Afrasian Homeland to the Problems of Semantic Reconstruction: A Response to Commenters

Abstract

The article is the author’s appreciative response to three colleagues who commented critically on the lead article (“Lexical Reconstruction for the Reconstruction of Prehistory: Proto-Afrasian Terms Related to Weaponry, Warfare and Other Armed Conflicts”). It focuses on problems of genetic classification, glottochronology, and ancestral home of the Afrasian (Afroasiatic) language macrofamily (response to A.M. Kozintsev); phonetic and semantic criteria of lexical comparison in the reconstruction of proto-language cultural terms, their representativeness in different branches of the language family and the distinction of the original vocabulary from the borrowed. It also touches upon the comparative quality of Afrasian and Indo-European reconstruction considering the large numbers of scholars working in the general area of Indo-Europeans studies versus a few active specialists in the field of comparative historical Afrasian studies (responses to G.S. Starostin and A.V. Dybo).