Re: [tied] lat. barbatus

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 14594
Date: 2002-08-27

If these "relatives" show anything, it's only the general human tendency to represent indistinct and/or incomprehensible foreign speech as "bar-bar", "bal-bal", "bla-bla" or the like. Personally, I would not reconstruct Nostratic or Proto-World *bar-bar 'foreigner' on such a basis, though I see no reason why _some_ languages spoken tens of millennia ago should not have followed the same tendency :).
 
Piotr
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Philobiblos 315
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2002 1:14 PM
Subject: [tied] lat. barbatus

Frisk, (Griechisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1973) relates all of the info below, and also relates Sumerian "barbar" =foreigner and Semitic-Babylonian "barbaru" =the stranger.