Re: boar

From: Rick McCallister
Message: 68836
Date: 2012-03-08




From: Tavi <oalexandre@...>
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, March 8, 2012 9:32 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: boar

 
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
>
> > BTW, what is *bairaz supposed to be in PIE, and can it be analysed there?
>
> It's (West) Germanic only, so it isn't supposed to be anything in PIE, which had a different word for "boar" (preserved also in Germanic as *eburaz).
>
I'm afraid this isn't a native IE word but a Neolithic Wanderwort (Latin aper, Balto-Slavic *weper-) which I link to Arabic X\ifr-/X\ufr- 'pig, boar; piglet', whose /u/ ablaut would explain the labial glide in BS. This is very similar (possibly through some kind of phonosymbolic differentiation process) to Gafr-/Gupr- 'young of deer/goat', which I link to the 'goat' word found in Celtic *gabro-, Latin caper 'he-goat', Germanic *xafra- 'buck', Greek kápros 'boar' (the latter probably contaminated with 'boar').

***R Or, more likely, *gabhr- and *kapr- are two different roots that got confused  --i.e. *gabhr < ghwV- and related to the Latin root of feral, to English boar and to the Russian name Boris --there may metathesis involved ghwV-bh-r /ghwV-r-bh

The ultimate origin of these words seems to be an Eurasiatic root meaning 'hoofed animal', found in Altaic *kHjà:pHa 'a k. of young ungulate' (including boars) and Latin cabo: 'gelding (castrated equine)'.

> The genetic complexity of domestic pigs (with the contribution of at least three [sub]species of the wild boar) and the early archaeological attestation of pigs over much of Eurasia. In Europe domestic swine were already present, though not very common, in the earliest Neolithic cultures such as the LBK (in the 6th millennium BC).
>
Possibly this is where the 'boar' word was originated.

> That's later than the domestication of swine in China, but considerably earlier than the initial dispersal of the Austronesian languages beyond Taiwan (ca. 3500-3300 BC). Given all this, the assumption of multiregionality looks sounder than that of a single domestication event.
>
IE *pork´-o- 'young pig; piglet' is IMHO a Wanderwort of ultimate Austronesian origin.