On 2008-02-06 01:09, fournet.arnaud wrote:
> According to Meillet,
> Lituanian is a loanword of western PIE origin.
> Cf. Dictionnaire etym du LAtin
Even if Meillet wrote it (did he?) I can't agree. How can aviz^a` -- a
satem form -- be a loan from "western PIE"? Is Slavic *ovIsU a loan too?
Are the related words in Greek and Iranian "western" loans as well?
> It's not at all an illusion.
> In a Central PIE language :
> the word with -j- is the cognate.
> the word with -H- is a loanword.
Which is just a way of admitting that there's no evidence of a
complementary geographical distribution of the two "variants" (they
don't even mean the same, one of them being a term for 'oats' and the
other for 'barley' or more generally 'grain'). Worst of all, your
allegedly "western" word is found in several "non-western" branches,
while it's only "western" attestation is Lat. ave:na. The whole thing
flies in the face of the comparative evidence.
Piotr