Richard:
>This is roughly the problem I was thinking of. Problems arise when the
>none of the attested formations is obviously ancestral.
>An example is the word for 'red'. The stem is *h1reudH- (unless
>Greek misleads us about the laryngeal), but what was _the_ word?
It seems to me that *?reudH- derives from Mid IE *ereude, a
neolithic loan that originally meant "copper". I imagine that
whatever _the_ word was for "red", its basic meaning was
"coppery". But then again, in English, as it was no doubt with
IE, there is a great deal of freedom in how one says the simplest
things. Does one say "coppery", "copperish", "copper-like",
"copper-esque" or "copper-coloured"? Is any of these _the_ word?
- gLeN
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