--- In cybalist@..., "JACQUES" <xiang@...> wrote:
> > Why "cognate"? Claiming it to be a loan word would fit much
nicer. Besides, crossing the Bering Strait bridge (in Ice Age
weather, brrr!) would be much nicer with dogs pulling stuff. And if
dogs were brought into the New World, when did they decide to call it
something else?
>
> I've no idea what anyone called dogs in the Pleistocene; I'm
convinced that a fairly large number of 'dog' words were in
circulation at the time. I said "cognate" because I was discussing
mass comparison, which is reputed to detect "deep" genetic
relationships, not mere diffusion patterns. When they say that the
Proto-World word for 'dog' was *kwan, they mean that attested words
like Greek kuo:n represent inheritance from Proto-World, not, say, an
ancient Wanderwort. I don't exclude family-to-family borrowing (even
between IE and Sinitic) if any reasonable evidence can be offered.
>
> Piotr
>
> Le mot pour "chien" a effectivement été proposé comme un des
Wanderwörter qui se retrouvent en IE et en chinois, mais je n'y crois
pas du point de vue phonétique : nous avons des raisons très fortes
(basées sur les rimes dans les bronzes chinois) pour reconstruire ce
mot en particulier *kwir avec un -r. Il correspond au tib. khyi <
*kwi et au Bir. khweh < Vx Bir. khwijh (j'gnore si ce mot en
particulier est attesté ds les inscriptions). La correspondance C. -
r :: Tib. -j vient probablement d'un phonème distinct de r dans la
langue ancestrale. dans tous les cas, le mot n'a pas grand-chose à
voir avec l'IE (la même chose peut être dite à propos du mot
pour "boeuf"). Les seuls comparaisons en IE et ST qui soient
convainquantes sont : qqs mots culturels tels que "riz" oryza,
vri_hi, "soie" sEr, shjolk, et des emprunts du tocharien et de
l'iranien en tibétain et en chinois.
>
> Guillaume
Bomhard has these roots for "dog"
HSED 917: *ger- "dog, cub"
HSED 1425: *kan- "dog"
HSED 1434: *ka[ya]r- "dog"
HSED 1498: *kun- "dog"
HSED 1511: *küHen- "dog"
HSED 1521: *kV(w|y)Vl- "dog, wolf"
from
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/dlnr.html
In general Austronesian has much vacillation d/l/n/r (see eg. all the
variations on 'lima' "five" in the various Austronesian languages).
http://www.zompist.com/anes.htm#malayo
So do many pre-IE Mediterranean languages. In other words,
proving /r/ instead of /n/ in Old Chinese does not prove the root is
not borrowed from some language in the vicinity of the present island
of Borneo.
Most of Bomhardt's "vacillating" d/l/n/r-roots occur again as the
common Austronesian -> IE/AA loanwords I surmised in
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/austric.html
Perhaps that very d/l/n/r vacillation could be used as a diagnostic
for these loans? Cf also the r/n neuters and the IE "name" word.
Torsten