The theory is not widely accepted by contemporary linguists, but historically, it had a number of advocates and supporting arguments, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries.
[5] The arguments presented for a relationship between Indo-European and Semitic in the 19th century were commonly rejected by Indo-Europeanists, including W.D.
[6][citation needed] The culmination of this first phase in Indo-Semitic studies was Hermann Möller's comparative dictionary of Indo-European and Semitic, first published in Danish in 1909.
[7] A succinct history of the Indo-Semitic hypothesis is provided by Alan S. Kaye in a review of Allan Bomhard's Toward Proto-Nostratic:[8] A proposed relationship between Indo-European and Semitic goes back some 125 years to R. von Raumer [note: Lepsius, though, is earlier than that]; but it was G.I.
Scholars waited for a systematic study of IE-Semitic vocabulary until 1873, when F. Delitzsch published his Studien über indogermanisch-semitische Wurzelverwandtschaft; this was followed in 1881 by J. McCurdy's Aryo-Semitic Speech.
Work by 20th century linguists who have investigated the problem more thoroughly with Afro-Asiatic and/or Semitic data include H. Möller, A. Cuny (in a series of publications from 1912 through 1946, all used by Bomhard), L. Brunner, C. Hodge, S. Levin, A. Dolgopol′skij, V.M.
In 1950, Joseph Greenberg showed that the Hamitic grouping needed to be split up, with only some of the languages it concerned groupable with Semitic.