Quote Originally Posted by oudysseos View Post
Elmetiacos- re the punic-gaelic connexion: I'll defer to your superior knowledge,
A very dangerous thing to do!
but I did want to point out that the quote from Empires of the Word does not seem to be a rehash of some 18th century chestnut, but rather recent research from Orin David Gensler, A Typological Evaluation of Celtic/Hamito-Semitic Syntactic Parallels, PhD Dissertation, UC Berkley, 1993.
http://books.google.ie/books?id=f899...sult#PPA890,M1

There is also a very interesting article in Archaeology and Language IV, Blench and Spriggs ed., Celts and Others, Maritime Contacts and Linguistic Change, by John Waddell and Jane Conroy.
http://books.google.ie/books?id=NemX...over#PPA125,M1
The link to the dissertation doesn't work, alas. The problem with it is what I said; it relies on backdating grammatical quirks of Irish and Welsh to a period where we don't have them documented, assuming that Brythonic wasn't grammatically similar to Gaulish (although the signs are the languages were mutually intelligible) then supposing these quirks couldn't have come from any source but Afro-Asiatic languages and then supposing that there was never a native form of Afro-Asiatic spoken in the Islands (which Alex Kondratiev and me, some years ago speculated there might have been... that's something for another time)