From: Tavi
Message: 68929
Date: 2012-03-12
>Rick, I don't know the reasons why you're so militant against the Vasco-Caucasian hypothesis (and yet you're a subscriber of my own list), but certainly Spanish tejón and other similar Romance words come from Late Latin taxo: (accusative taxo:nem), itself a Celtic loanword, probably Gaulish. Although unknown to Ruhlen & Bengtson, Basque azkoin 'badger' is also a Celtic loanword *taskone.
> For those of you tired of arguing over the same old thing, here's something new to argue about: badgers.
> My 2 cents: Isn't there a Gaelic term taigh (vek sim.) for "badger" that also comes from *tek'-?
> French, of course, has blaireau and Spanish has tejón --which I'm sure one of our friends will shortly link both to Vasco-Tasmanian or whatever.
>
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> I think Joshua Katz's badger article (1998, "Hittite tas^ku- and the
> Indo-European Word for 'Badger'", _Historische Sprachforschung_ 111,
> 61ââ¬â82, based on his UCLA conference paper) is still the last word on the
> subject. At any rate, Katz's analysis militates against the
> traditionally postulated connection between PGmc. *þaxsu- etc. and
> *tetk^- 'build'. Not the builder of setts, but rather the owner of
> smelly glands.
>
These two hypothesis are quoted by Delamarre in his "Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue gauloise". Of course, the traditional one is a mere "lookalike" and thus rejectable. I think Katz's proposal is very interesting, although it actually points to a different animal, the skunk or polecat. But as in the case of other carnivores such as 'weasel', 'marten', etc., this kind of semantic shifts are rather common.