Re: badgers

From: Tavi
Message: 68941
Date: 2012-03-12

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
Then why do you explain the semantic shift in the PIE word?