--- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 8:18 PM
> Subject: [tied] Re: OE *picga
>
>
> > And then there's Latin verres "boar". Three internally
unrelatable IE words of the type b/p/v-r-(g-) meaning something
with "pig" (and four with that one). In other cases that type of
situation automatically leads to the assumption "loan word". Not
here; although there are genetic links, there has been no contact,
although it would hardly be urprising if there were, also bearing in
mind that the connection between word and designated object is a very
fickle one (a basic tenet of linguistics), at least in this case.
Special pleading, anyone?
>
> To begin with, they don't all mean the same:
Which I never claimed.
*pork^os means 'piglet' (and has a plausible derivation within IE,
discussed a moment ago), whereas *h1epros means 'adult uncastrated
male pig'. There is no typological reason why such terms should have
been derived formally from a common base:
And I never claimed there was. The assumption that these similar
words are loaned is not a necessary, but a possible one. I made the
observation that if the subject matter had been the language of some
North American Indians of no particular interest to others than its
morose and marginalised speakers we would routinely investigate the
possibility that they were loaned. Not so for IE, apparently. _That_
puzzled me (or maybe not).
they are semantically as different as 'bull' and 'calf' or 'stag'
and 'fawn'.
A huge gap.
Balto-Slavic has a variant of *h1epros with *w- for *h1- (*vepr-);
otherwise there is nothing irregular about these words and no special
explanations are required for them.
Other than the well-known IE alternation h1-/w- there is nothing
irregular about them? And it is a good thing that no special
explanations are required to relate them within IE, because there
aren't any.
Lat. verre:s is a different thing altogether: it reflects older *wers-
and has unpiggish IE cognates meaning 'male, stud' etc. *baira- is
not reconstructible beyond West Germanic, and is extremely unlikely
to have anything to do with any of the above, especially as it
coexists with a normal reflex of *h1epros (e.g. OE ba:r and eofor).
Let me see: eofor is IE, ba:r is not, they coexist in the same
language, and therefore none of them were borrowed from elsewhere?
Why? Would they attack each other otherwise?
And note that the spotted, "besprenkelt" meaning is just one the
branches that the almighty Austronesian/AfroAsiatic/IE *p/bH-r/l-
word has sprouted
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Opr.html
namely "split, half" > "smash" > "pulverize, bespatter" > "variegated"
which means you can't contain *h1/w-epros to IE either, nor *pork^os.
(As we know from cybalist, pulverised horse is a well-known IE
condiment. Perhaps I shouldn't brag about it, but actually I received
several offers to buy some on the street in the USofA. Now isn't that
something!)
Please note the Malayan "lump". All the sub-meanings/branches are
there already. The rivers turned into straits: the perfect school of
long distance sailing. The other bank was where your land once was,
the strait was the river of life and death, which still ran beneath
the waves, in the underworld, where we would all return one day. The
land was split in two, cleft, smashed.
> Piotr
Considering that Manansal's/my list contains less than 100 roots of
coincidence, isn't it surprising how much mileage I can get out of
it? Every time a central idea in IE comes up I can find a match for
it on the list? Unless one wants to consider the alternative: there
was contact?
Torsten