Re: PIE *a -- a preliminary checklist

Regardless of the origin of the Baltic, Slavic and German forms, it
would be the most economical interpretation to see finnic kalja and
olut as two borowis, the former being the older one on account of the
initial consonantal reflex. Of course you could see kalja as a direct
loan from the substarate (maybe a fricative there if not a laryngeal)
and olut as a younger one from for example Germanic. But with this
sort of extra assumptions we would only complicate things, wouldn't
we.

And as I have mentioned elsewhere Balto-Slavic seems to have
preserved the laryngeals rather late, so any speculative sequence
involving migrations and substrates could be fitted in with this
basic etymological approach.

Jouppe

PS. The melting iceflake of substrate etymologies in Finnic is
continuously shrinking as indo-european originals are gaining
acceptance.

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "jouppe" <jouppe@> wrote:
> >
> > > BTW, interestingly, he has
> > > http://koti.welho.com/jschalin/lexicon.htm
> > > both Fi. kalja "weak beer" and Fi. olut "beer" corresponding to
the
> > > PIE "ale" word. Now the latter is an areal word, covering
Germanic,
> > > Baltic, Baltic Finnic and Slavic, it seems it must have
belonged to
> > > some erased culture of the area. So did the older loan survive
two
> > > invasions?
>
> > The two words are semantically distinguishable, even
today. 'kalja'
> > is an artesanal home made (weak) beer. 'olut' is a beer made from
raw
> > materials and by techniques learned from iron age foreigners.
> >
> True, but that was not my point. If 'olut' is an areal substrate
word
> then it was picked up by the Finns when they arrived in their
present
> territory, which means they picked up 'kalja' somewhere else. The
> reason I think Germanic *aluþ- (and the corresponding roots in
Baltic
> and Slavic) is probably a loan from the substrate, but PIE language
of
> the area, from *leu- "dissolve" (that sense would also take care of
> the semantic gap to the proposed cognate, Latin alu:men, Germ.
Alun),
> with an a- prefix as in Schrijver's substrate 'bird language'
(Germn.
> Amsel, Ameise, Du. merle, mier).
> However, as to the the PIE-ness of *leu itself, see
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/44457
>
>
> Torsten
>