Re: [tied] What the Beaver Teaches Us about IE...

Dear Steve,

I'm as busy as a beaver these days, and while I'm doing my best to devote a little time to Cybalist every day, I'd be most grateful if you at least read my replies carefully to spare me explaining the same things twice.

Primo: For a reconstruction to have PIE status it is not required that it be represented in _all_ the branches of the family, since words are quite frequently lost and replaced. For example, the 'horse' word *ek^wos is not reflected in Slavic. I didn't say that the ancestors of the Greeks had never had the 'beaver' word. I merely said, in accordance with all known facts, that it is does not exist in _Greek_ (as opposed to _pre-Greek_) -- that is, there is no reflex of that word anywhere in the enormous corpus of Greek texts. We know the Greek word for 'beaver' (<kasto:r>), and since it has no cognates outside Greek, we conclude that it is a branch-specific innovation replacing the inherited word.

Secundo: If the "Proto-Greeks" had coined the 'beaver' word and then lost it, it would have had to happen in pre-literary times (and also early enough for the word to be borrowed into Old Indo-Aryan and Avestan), but let me inform you again that the word-family built around the meaning 'chew up, devour' reflects PIE *gWerh3-. The initial *gW- was still pronounced as a labiovelar in early historical times but became /b/ in Classical Greek. In pre-Classical times the (Proto-)Greeks had *gWigWro:sko:, not <bibro:sko:>. And if they invented the 'beaver' word in the form *bibr- or *bHibHr-, then it has nothing to do with the verb 'chew up' and your etymology falls anyway.

Tertio: If Germanic *bebru- is a loan from Latin, where does Classical <fiber> come from? The word <biber> is attested only in late Latin. Its derivation from <fiber> through irregular assimilation is thinkable (as a less likely alternative to its being a Germanic loan), but this leaves us again with <fiber> as the orginal form.

Quarto: It is illogical to propose that an original *bebr- was manipulated in Sanskrit (and I suppose Latin) 'to look more native', since there is nothing non-native-looking about such a consonant configuration in either language. You posit arbitrary irregularity where the assumption of regularity works better (see below).

Quinto: The correspondence set for 'beaver' is as follows:

Latin fiber 'beaver'

Slavic *bobrU, *bebrU, (only South Slavic) *bIbrU 'beaver'

Lith. babras, bebras, OPr. bebrus 'beaver'

Avestan bawra- 'beaver'

Old Indo-Aryan babHru- 'brown; mongoose'

Celtic *bibro-, *bibru-, *bebro- (only as an onomastic element)

Germanic *bebru- 'beaver'

The _only_ branch where the meaning has changed is (understandably) Indo-Aryan. The reconstruction that accounts for all these words is *bHe-bHr-u-. Thhere is some variation in the vocalism of the reduplication syllable (a common secondary variant being *bHi-bHr-u-), and the word has often shifted from the recessive u-declension to the "major" o-declension; the consonants, however, develop everywhere exactly as expected:

In Latin, PIE *bH > initial f-, medial -b-.

In Slavic, Baltic, Iranian and Celtic, PIE *bH > b in both positions; the further development of medial *-b- in Avestan is also regular.

In Germanic, PIE *bH > b (but an original *b would have given /p/).

In Indo-Aryan, PIE bH > bH, but if there are two aspirated stop in the same stem, the first one changes into an unaspirated one (Grassmann's Law), hence *bHebHru- > *bHabHru- > babHru.

I you want to defend your Greek etymology of 'beaver' to the bitter end, let someone else take my place. I've had enough of it.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: x99lynx@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Sunday, September 08, 2002 10:58 AM

Subject: [tied] What the Beaver Teaches Us about IE...

I wrote <<If our ancestors were smart enough to give these animals and their by-products names that truly distinguished them (instead of calling them something dumb, like brown) then the manifestations of the beaver would all point to chewing-up and teeth. Given that, the best candidate might be: Greek <bibro:sko:> means to eat up, chew up; in its passive forms, e.g., <bebro:oetai>, <bebro:menoi>, something that is eaten, gnawed or chewed up...<bruchetos> is chattering of teeth. <bruche:>, gnashing of teeth. <bebro:thois>, chew up... So, if the beaver's name did not exist in *PIE as such, but circulated later as a fur trade word from the Greek -- emphasizing that outward uniqueness of the beaver is its teeth -- in which both the fur and later the castors of the animal would have had great value, then perhaps we don't have to look for brown or splash!!! as the origin of the word.>> Piotr writes: <<It can't be. Greek is one of the few branches where it doesn't exist. They, of all people, have a different word for 'beaver'.>> Now, come on. You can't have it both ways. If the Greeks never had the beaver word, then the word can't be from PIE. If they had it and lost it (which MUST be your position), then I can also take the position that they lost it, but after they invented it. You don't get to assume a lost word in your PIE hypothesis, if I can't do the same in my hypothesis. The importance of the castoreum trade in the mediterranean could easily have overwhelmed the old fur word in Greek, so that <bibro-> lost usage in the marketplace and <kasto:r> took over. Somewhere on the web they say that today beaver castors are worth four times as much as beaver pelts. And that's how the Greeks could invent the word and then lose it. There's nothing new about this. It has happened often enough. One example. In Buck, he says that the word "maize" or a variant (maj, mais) is used in seven or eight different IE languages. But if you walked into a store in NYC and asked for "maize", nobody would know what you were talking about. That's because the word for maize in America is most definitely "corn", despite the fact that the word "maize" originated in America and travelled to all those other languages as a loan. <<And if anyone was really familiar with beavers and their habits, it was the people of northern Europe, where the beaver was (and still is) common, not the Greeks.>> Forgive me for saying this, but this is from old-school IE disinformation. When Pliny mentions the beaver, I think he says they live in Pontici, which may be Asia Minor and where there are beavers today. Beavers live in northern Mexico. And if the location of PIE depends on the beaver word, then that homeland could be in Mesopotamia - See: Legge, A. J. and P.A. Rowley-Conwy, "The Beaver (Castor fiber L.) in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin." Journal of Archaeological Science 13:469-476 (1986). There's even a Kastoria in Macedonia, I'm told, where nowadays they trap minks because all the beavers and their castors are gone. References to the beaver being absent from "the mediterranean zone" is to a narrow climate zone, not a location. The beaver lived in the south. What is true is that the beaver's fur would have been less important in the hot south where fur is less needed. But Herodotus is already saying that fur is being imported from the north as "trim" in his day. But of course the demand for castoreum changed everything. <<Plus, even if we stretch the imagination and assume thet the Greeks had the word a long time ago and then gave it away to other people, the non-Greek reflexes rule out a word with original *b, whether PIE or Greek.>> Why? Why are you talking about reflexes again? I think this whole Romanian thing has got you in the habit of acting as if words don't travel between languages at all unless by direct descent. (BTW, Imaging how a highly splintered, non-literate group of speakers could all preserve the same specific name of one specific kind of local rodent takes a lot more stretching. When English-speaking Europeans WITH writing AND picture books get to America, they end up calling the red deer an "elk", and the elk, a "moose." So forgive me for finding the long-term continuity of the meaning of the beaver name more implausible than anything I've said. And note that is not a phonological problem, it is a general "semantic" problem that field anthropologists have been pointing out for a long time.) <<Latin has <fiber> >> So? Do you know when the Latin went bh >f? What did they do, go to sleep one night speaking PIE and wake up the next morning with the full compendium of Latin sound changes? Maybe the Greek word got to them before they went f-ing. This is an objection to words from PIE and NOT an objection to loan words coming after unless you can say you know the date the Latin sound change happened versus when the Greek word came in. And even then there is enough evidence of after-the-fact conforming to the new sound system. <<(<biber> in post-Classical Latin is a loan from Germanic)>> Hey, maybe Germanic <biber> is a loan word from the Roman? Here's an alternative. <fiber> was a reference to the beaver's castors which must be removed from inside its groin and are attached by ligament-like membranes. <fibra> is the older Latin word meaning any "filament" in a plant or animal, generally identified for some practical purpose, e.g., wicker-making, and it comes to mean intestines. This would also tie beaver and castor nicely and avoid unseemly references to the "brown" animal. <<and Sanskrit has <babHru->, not *<babru->, etc.>> You know how many different ways "beaver" has been spelt in English alone? And you're telling me there is no leeway between <babHru-> and *<babru->? This is a borrowed word. They could have reanalyzed it and added the aspirate to make it sound more native. Buck mentions tooth/bite words like <jambha-> and <-bhid-> that could have inspired the addition. I saw somewhere that a word for parrot started with <bh->. So it's possible that borrowed words that came in without <bh> could have ended up with <bh>. And besides I understand that <babhru-> doesn't even mean beaver in Sanskrit. It means mongoose. A live mongoose is more like a sable or an otter than it is a beaver. It's a weasel-family looking, land-loving predator, but it has highly desirable (gray) fur. There are various kinds of water dwelling, vegetarian, brown furbearers in India -- plus the civet cat -- so the whole thing doesn't make sense, unless the word applied primarily to the pelt and a standard of merchandise quality and not the living animal. Another possibility is this: In North America, beaver pelts were early treated as currency -- and so the mongoose fur perhaps may have been the equivalent of a beaver fur in an international exchange. The words could have approximated each other in multiple languages like the dollar word originally did. <<There is really no escape from *bHebHru-....>> I think the closer you look at it, the more it looks like that curious looking word never existed. At least not in reference to what writers thousands of years later would call a beaver. Regards, Steve Long