Linguistic wandering along continental axes

Abstract

Does the theory of continental axes proposed by Jared Diamond explain the fate of the languages spoken in antiquity in the western end of the East-West continental axis? Probably two linguistic axes crossed at some time in western Europe: the East-West axis extending from Pacific to Atlantic and the South-North axis extending from North Africa to Northern Europe. Whereas on the one hand, the oldest documented languages of Europe were verb-final, preferring to place the verb at the end of the sentence like the majority of the languages of Central and Eastern Asia, on the other, it can be presumed that a new trend originating in North Africa and firstly documented by Neo-Egyptian (2^nd mill. BC), introduced verb-initial sentences in Europe. So, the current Indo-European languages spoken in Europe share with the current verb-initial languages of North Africa and Near East, that is Berber and Arabic, a full set of linguistic tools: prepositions, relative sentences, conjunctions, definite articles and the distinction between masculine and feminine, on one side, and between singular, dual and plural on the other. As a result of a presumed expansion of typological innovations from North-Africa new analytical syntactic constructions may have found their way to Europe beside the original synthetic constructions.