New Afro-Asiatic Branch in The Balkans.

[Abti]

Through an interesting linguistic hypothesis, 'proto-Indo-European' (proto-/IE) received Afro-Asiatic (AA) influence via a branch labeled "Old Balkanic," which had similar features as Egyptian, Semitic, and Berber -- a new dead AA segment.

Instead of proposing Semitic direct contact, Bjørn G. R. (2023) proposed an intermediate early Neolithic contact culture horizon that enriched IE regarding subsistence formations and numerical systems:





Insular Celtic had contact with AA speakers in the terminal Bronze Age. Or we're looking at an archaic sub-stratum that differentially influenced Celts (Matasović, 2012, p. 155):



One of the convenient interpretations is that the pre-Celtic language of the region before it got absorbed was either heavily AA imprinted or part of the AA genetic phylogeny.

[Grace O'Malley]

The idea of an Afro-Asiatic influence on Celtic languages is controversial and many linguists don't agree.

One of the issues is geographic distance between speakers of Celtic and Afro-Asiatic languages and no historical contact. Where was this supposed contact? No evidence exists.

There is also no real linguistic evidence. Linguists have said that any similarities identified are speculative and could be coincidental or chance resemblances rather than anything concrete.

Critics have said there is a bit of cherry picking going on or flawed subjective judgements. In short the connections attributed to these languages suffer from methodological weaknesses which make any conclusions suspect.

There is a paper written by Graham R Isaac which is available online and he considered the theory not just unproved but just wrong.

It is not remarkable that structural similarities between the Insular Celtic and some Afro-Asiatic1 languages continue to exert a fascination on many people. Research into any language may be enlightening with regard to the understanding of all languages, and languages that show similar features are particularly likely to provide useful information. It is remarkable that the structural similarities between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic languages continue to be interpreted as diagnostic of some sort of special relationship between them; some sort of affinity or mutual affiliation that goes beyond the fact that they are two groups of human languages. This paper investigates again the fallacious nature of the arguments for the Afro-Asiatic/Insular Celtic contact theory (henceforth AA/IC contact theory).

Anyway a PDF of this paper is available. It's quite involved reading and as a non-linguist it's heavy going.

Raymond Hickey has said the Afro-Asiatic theory "has never found much favour with scholars of the Celtic languages" in his book The Handbook of Language Contact.

So just saying a lot of this is very speculative and really not supported by the majority of linguists.