From: Patrick Ryan
Message: 57236
Date: 2008-04-13
----- Original Message -----
From: "fournet.arnaud" <fournet.arnaud@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2008 5:04 AM
Subject: Re: Horse Sense (was: [tied] Re: Hachmann versus Kossack?)
<snip>
> Chinese for quick, rapid is *kwai4 < *khwos
> It has a very strange look-alike with H1ekwos.
> I think it may well be a LW from IE into Chinese.
> Apparently Chinese heard kw.
>
> But in *kuH2on "dog" they heard two syllables : quan2 < kuhon.
>
> Arnaud
> ============
***
There is a steady association of the segment *k^(h)e- and 'fast' in PIE.
It should also be noted that Pokorny's listing has palatalized *k^, an
important detail to analyzing the relationships.
I propose that early PIE words for 'deer', like our 'hind', contained the
segment *k^(h)e- so that *k^em-, 'hornless', should be regarded as a
generalization of 'hind' rather than 'hind' being derived from 'hornless'.
In my opinion, this presupposes a PIE **k^(h)em-, 'doe'.
What application does this have to the present discussion?
I believe that *ek^(-)wo-s is compounded of of the initial segments *e- (cf.
*ai-ra:, 'kind of grass'), '*grass' + *k^(h)e-, 'deer', so that the compound
should have the core meaning of 'grass-deer'.
If this is true, then it indicates importantly, that PIE's discovered horses
long after they had become familiar with deer.
A corollary is that the PIE-speaking ethnos could not have been situated on
the grassy plains of Eurasia originally because deer are predominantly
forest-dwellers.
This would also be of interest to the mythic importance of the deer to later
plains-dwellers, where they found horses rather than deer. Old habits die
hard.
Patrick
***