Re: badgers

W dniu 2012-03-12 22:38, Tavi pisze:

> I said (although apparently my post didn't appear on the list) that
> there's no PIE word for 'badger' (much less for 'skunk'). But there's a
> PIE word for 'bear' I've linked to other similar words meaning 'marten',
> 'otter' or 'badger'. This means a semantic shift must have happened, due
> to the migration of PIE speakers to a Boreal environment where the
> Eurasian Brown Bear
> <http://admin.scirecordbook.org/images/species/E17.jpg> (Ursus arctos
> arctos) li ves.

This picture is completely anachronistic: it shows the range of the
brown bear *today*. But in early historical times (and a fortiori in PIE
and pre-PIE times) brown bears lived in all of Europe, northern Africa
and almost all of Asia (with the exception of the Arabian Penninsula and
regions that had their own bear species -- the Indian subcontinent and
SE Asia). It's quite impossible to locate the PIE speakers in *any*
place where they would have been unfamiliar with bears.

Piotr