From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
Message: 4912
Date: 2000-12-03
>... Especially if the same root *pet(h2)- could mean both 'fall down' and 'fly'.:-)
>Of course homonymy occurs in all human languages and certainly could occur in PIE, and what we have here is not even complete homonymy but a shared consonantal skeleton. Words looking like ablaut variants of each other need not be related, and this is especially true of concrete nouns; *h2awi-/*h2wei- and *h2ow-i-/*h2ow-ei- may have developed from quite different pre-IE forms (cf. Moder English fowl < OE fugol vs. foul < OE fu:l).No, I just meant that (near) homonymy cannot be excluded, so I
>
>Why do you mean by declaring that you're half-serious? Would you like to propose a genuine etymological connection between the sheep and bird words? "Woolly" = "feathery"?