Re: root *pVs- for cat

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...> wrote:

>
> At 4:52:35 AM on Tuesday, July 24, 2007, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> > <BMScott@> wrote:
>
> >> At 4:40:54 PM on Sunday, July 22, 2007, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> >>> The decision what was foreign and non-foreign was mine.
>
> >> Failure to point this out, especially when the decision
> >> is contentious, is ... sloppy, to put a better face on it
> >> than I think is actually justifiable.
>
> > Who else should decide it?
>
> Where did I say that you shouldn't make the decisions for
> yourself? The problem is that you presented your decisions
> as if they all went without saying, when in fact several of
> them were distinctly questionable -- not necessarily wrong,
> but certainly questionable. This is *not* something that I
> should have to check your source(s) to discover.

The fact that you question them does not make them questionable; in
particular because you steadfastly ignore that words in Germanic in p-
are not Germanic words and words in Latin with root vowel -a- are
(with exceptions) not Latin. I'll follow Wilde here and nor ascribe to
malice what can be explained by incompetence.

>
> [...]
>
> > From your tentative position which is not a position, how
> > would you explain the many words in p- in both p- and
> > q-Celtic? [...]
>
> The DIL has only about 20 pages of <p-> words,

'Only' 20 pages, in a language which abolished p-.

> most of which
> are readily identifiable as loanwords from Latin, Romance,
> or English, or derivatives thereof.

Some are, other matches are Procrustean. Why would Celts
de-diminutivize Latin papula?

> I know less about
> Welsh, but it's clear by inspection that a great many of the
> <p-> words in _Y Geiriadur Mawr_ are borrowings from the
> same sources.

That's right, and many of them appear in Middle Breton too. There goes
English as a donor language.

> Doubtless in both cases there is a residue once the
> identifiable loans and the instances of Welsh /p-/ < *kW-
> have been removed; it's a safe bet that no single
> explanation covers this residue.

I can see two possible sources:

1) Continental NWBlock words brought over by the Germanic invasion,
borrowed into Celtic in Britain.
2) Some unidentified pre-Celtic IE language in Britain, IE or not.

For the latter speaks that several of the inconvenient Celtic words in
p- have cognates in Middle Breton.


Torsten