From: Rick McCallister
Message: 52671
Date: 2008-02-11
> On 2008-02-11 09:54, tgpedersen wrote:____________________________________________________________________________________
>
> > 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?
>
> We know when and how this word found its way into
> English etc., and how
> to account for its shape, including the loss of the
> original initial.
> What I'm arguing against is, in the first place, the
> reconstruction of
> an IE *wrugHjo- for 'rye', as proposed by Pokorny.
> The _only_ reason why
> he posits an initial *w is the existence of Thrac.
> briza. He doesn't
> offer any comments on the absence of *w- in
> Germanic. A wanderwort like
> *wrij^Hi- might of course explain the form (but not
> the meaning!) of the
> Thracian word quite nicely, but it wouldn't work so
> well for
> Balto-Slavic and Germanic (to get *rugHi- one would
> have to admit an
> irregular treatment of both the initial cluster and
> the vowel, and if
> the word got into Europe via the Iranian languages,
> why do we have a
> reflex of *gH, not *g^H, in Balto-Slavic?). There's
> also a semantic
> problem: why 'rice' --> 'rye'? Rye is not a recent
> import into Eastern
> and Central Europe. It's been widely cultivated here
> at least since the
> Bronze Age as one of the main crops and THE bread
> cereal (not to mention
> vodka :)). Why borrow a word for it from peoples who
> did not cultivate
> rye at all? I find it safer to assume, until proven
> otherwise, that
> *rugHi-/*rugHjo- is a separate term.
>
> Piotr
>
>