Re: The ur-/ar- language

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

>
>
> This resolves the puzzle of the *-k- suffix of Latin
> etc *ped-k- (in
> pecco: etc) and *man-k- (in mancus): they are pre-IE
> words with pre-IE suffixes loaned by Venetic and then
> loaned from Venetic by Latin,
> Germanic (before and after Grimm), Celtic etc.
>
> Thanx for sharing the article, I appreciate it.
> Regarding *-k-, it does show up in Basque and Trask
> elaborated on it on the old lists. He also
> compared/contrasted it to IE *-k-. See the archives
> because I've forgotten the details of what he said and
> don't want to misquote him.
> *-k- shows up in Iberian as well. See Anderson, and
> many others.
> *-k- shows up in Nostratic and isn't it one of the
> arguments for its existence?
> In IE, *-k- and *-sk- seem so ubiquitous as to be
> native. If I-Ir, Anatolian and Tokharian have it, then
> we can pretty say it's native to IE
> So, Torsten, you've lost me here.

But in Krahe's river name system all suffixes are of the form *-VC-,
with at least one vowel before the consonant, in the ur-/ar- system
they are of the form -C-, with no vowel. That sets the two sytems
apart. One unrelated thing which proves the non-IE nature of the
ur-ar- system is the occurrence of stems like *Cur- with no sign of
ablaut alternation. I would agree that Krahe's river name system is
IE, the similarity Kuhn finds between the two systems, that they have
many -a-'s in roots, is caused, I think, by a mechanism Kuhn wasn't
aware of: pre-PIE /a/ became PIE /e/o/zero/, the ablaut vowel (except
in a few languages, 'a-languages'). So Old European/Venetic was an
'a-language' (so Latin 'manus' is also from there, and the folk
etymology mistake, which Sean mentions too, between *man- "hand" and
*man- "diminished", would have taken place in that language too). The
property that unites the ur-/ar-language and Krahe's river system/Old
European/Venetic is a negative one: they don't ablaut.

>

Torsten