From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 62029
Date: 2008-12-12
----- Original Message -----
From: "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...>
>
> That does not demolish much of anything. The fact remains that ustra
> is cleary an IE word which has always meant camel in IIr. Mallory
> and Adams (1997) try to explain this as a shift of meaning from bull
> to camel as IIr entered new territories. See p. 135 of the link below:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/62cclq
>
> This is unconvincing because bulls are fairly common in west and
> south asia so there was no need to give up the originial meaning of
> the term if indeed that was the original meaning. Secondly Marathi,
> Hindi unta, unt still which derive from ustra still mean camel.
>
> M. Kelkar
>
============
I very much doubt that anybody could confuse a bull and a camel.
The Indo-Iranian word for "bull" *ustra is indeed inherited from PIE.
The different forms of the words for "camel" in Indo-Iranian suggest
multiple LWs to preexisting substrates.
Out of *ont.o, we got :
- conservative forms like Hindi unta, unt borrowed from *ont/unt
- more evolved forms like us^tra < *utt-
(i suppose that -tt- > -st- is regular and ust > us^t as well)
Urartean ultu and Akkadian utru are interesting.
As can be expected, the word "camel" does not exist elsewhere in IE sphere
and has been borrowed when Indo-Iranians got in touch with southern regions
where this animal exists.
A.