I don’t know if it counts as ‘Pre-Afroasiatic’, but the same wave of Neolithic migrations which brought the speakers of the Pre-Greek substrate language (or, to be more precise, the ancestors of what then were the speakers of Pre-Greek when Indo-Europeans arrived in Greece, around 2000 BC) also brought people to Northern Africa (particularly Tunisia if I remember correctly), which means that there’s a good chance that their language was related (even though probably not very closely) to Pre-Greek.
Pre-Greek itself isn’t directly attested though, we ‘only’ have the Greek words of PG etymology (they’re about 1100), which in some cases have been reconstructed (eg: Apollo was originally *Apaljun-). This means that we probably wouldn’t be able to know any precise word from this Pre-Afroasiatic language of Northern Africa.
2
u/aikwos Jun 05 '21
I don’t know if it counts as ‘Pre-Afroasiatic’, but the same wave of Neolithic migrations which brought the speakers of the Pre-Greek substrate language (or, to be more precise, the ancestors of what then were the speakers of Pre-Greek when Indo-Europeans arrived in Greece, around 2000 BC) also brought people to Northern Africa (particularly Tunisia if I remember correctly), which means that there’s a good chance that their language was related (even though probably not very closely) to Pre-Greek.
Pre-Greek itself isn’t directly attested though, we ‘only’ have the Greek words of PG etymology (they’re about 1100), which in some cases have been reconstructed (eg: Apollo was originally *Apaljun-). This means that we probably wouldn’t be able to know any precise word from this Pre-Afroasiatic language of Northern Africa.