--- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: richardwordingham
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2002 10:31 AM
> Subject: [tied] Re: Milk and a Gaulish Love Poem
>
> > Actually, that isn't as crazy as it seems. Many peoples
transform milk before they consume it.
<Snip>
> > If milk-drinking spread from the cloudy North West, we might even
have an explanation of why the Proto-Slavs should borrow the Germanic
word!
>
> Milk-processing is certainly a very old industry. There are early
Neolithic ceramic strainers that may have been used in cheese
production (though such things are difficult to prove). I suspect
there were a number of terms for 'fresh milk', 'sour
milk', 'cream', 'whey', 'beestings', and what not. I somehow can't
believe the Slavs had no term for 'unprocessed milk' even if they
should have been intolerant to lactose, but lexical replacement is
sometimes simply capricious.
My line of though was that Slav **melz^o might have been some other
form of processed milk. A new use could have brought in a new name.
However, I wonder if the borrowing of Germanic *xlaibaz (whence
English 'loaf') to give the word Slav word for bread (e.g.
Russian 'khleb') is related to the derivation of Slav *melko from
Germanic? Or is leavened bread a recent invention?
> Piotr