Re: Let dogs have their day too

--- In cybalist@..., "Roger Mills" <romilly@...> wrote:

> Piotr (IIRC) in reply to ......?:
> >
> > Intercontinental megalocomparison makes even less sense.

Proponents

> of Proto-World reconstruct *kwan 'dog' (if I remember aright).

Mumbo-

> jumbo aside, the real basis for this

impressionistic "reconstruction"

> (mass comparison is not a reconstructive procedure, in fact) is PIE
> *k^won- plus a number of accidentally similar forms from arbitrarily
> chosen families and languages. Of course, anything that is _not_
> similar is ignored. Thus, for example, Proto-Oceanic *nkaun (an up-

to-

> date reconstruction ought to be *gaun) is offered as a cognate
> despite the fact (known to Austronesianists, but not to lay visitors
> to Proto-World websites or readers of popular articles) that the

very

> existence of a common Oceanic term for 'dog' is somewhat problematic
> and that *gaun is at best a POc innovation that replaced a Proto-
> Austronesian word (*wasu) lost in Oceanic.
>
> I believe Robert Blust, in one of his many useful "Addenda" lists,

has

> proposed something like *ka( )uR 'to bark' (where my empty medial

would have

> been one of the "laryngeals", but not *q, which remained as *? in

POC). I'd

> need to find the reference, but my memory is that the his form was

based on

> OC and some Moluccan languages, thus was not reconstructible at the

AN or

> even MP level. POC sometimes replaces original finals, though it

would be

> unexplained; the "*nk- / *g-" are just variant versions of the same

proto-

> phoneme-- apparently, as so often happens in POC, the initial became
> prenasalized somewhere along the way.

> Roger Mills

Moluccan is nice. That would place the 'dog' word in the area from
where the eastward migration is thought to have started from, not too
far from Sabah, which has Western (human) genetic links. Also
the 'cheghe' "five" word, instead of standard 'lima'.

Torsten