From: Tavi
Message: 70208
Date: 2012-10-16
>But there's also a Pre-Celtic substrate (Italoid?) in Asturias which must be taken into account. For example, the toponymic root *pand-/*pant- found there and elsewhere has nothing to do with Latin pantus as wrongly believed by some so-called linguists, but it's from a Vasco-Caucasian root borrowed by Celtic as *bando-/*bendo-, hence Basque mendi 'mountain'. As Celtic voiceless stops were realized as aspirated, a foreign voiceless would correspond to a Celtic voiced.
> To explain the presumed route of *ambivogos through the Pyrenees, one possibility is that Asturian ponies were exported under this name as pack-animals. A heavy ancient Celtic presence in Asturias is undeniable and to me it is reasonable that this was the P-Celtic homeland.
>
> The Asturian pony was known to Pliny (8:166) as <celdo:>, which has a variant <thieldo:>,IMHO related to Germanic *talta-z (English <tilt>), thus referring to 'ambling horse', i.e. a horse breed naturally capable of *ambling*, a gait of horses faster than a walk but slower than a canter or gallop.
>
> apparently related to Basque <zaldi> 'horse' and Berber <aserdun> 'mule'.Also Iberian <saldu>, presumably 'horse'. The etymology is from IE *g(W)ald- 'foal, young of an ass' (Sanskrit gardabhá- 'ass', English colt), with palatalization of the initial velar.
>
> I do not know whether this word is native to the area or borrowed from Phoenician (as I suspect the 'silver' word is),Sure, the Wanderwort 'silver' has a Semitic etymology as a compound of the roots *s^rp- 'to burn, to refine, to melt' (Akkadian s^arpu 'refined') and *brr- 'metal' (Amharic b@... 'coin, silver'), but it can hardly be from Phoenician because this language had a different word for 'silver'.
>