Re: The meaning of life: PIE. *gWiH3w-

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> On 2008-02-11 07:55, Rick McCallister wrote:
>
> > I'm just trying think how you could get from
> > *bHr.h1g^o- to *wrugos, briza and vrihi
>
> I was only interested in explaining <briza> -- conjecturally, since
> given our limited knowledge of Thracian one could propose quite a
> few speculative hypotheses, none of them verifiable (*bHr.zdH-ah2
> has been proposed as well). I don't think the Balto-Slavic/Germanic
> 'rye' word should be reconstructed with initial *wr- -- the Germanic
> evidence clearly points to *rugHi- ~ *rugHjo- (no *w anywhere), and
> the 'rice' word in Indo-Iranian is most likely a Dravidian loan, as
> generally assumed.

The Germanic words for "rice" clearly have no initial/w/ either.
Therefore they shouldn't be confused with all those pre-IA
*vrijhi-, Pashtu wriZE, Greek o'ryza, o'ryzon etc?

> In other words, I'm against lumping all these terms together by
> Procrustean means.

Trying to fit a Wanderwort of a cultural item into a PIE tree would
make Procrustes happy.


Torsten