Re: Stacking up on standard works

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@...> wrote:

>
> I don't know how you arrived at the "Proto-North Caucasian"
> reconstruction "*=unddzE 'to hide, to steal, to conceal'
> (= stands for a class-prefix)". Starostin just reconstructs an
> isolated Proto-Lezghian (East Caucasian) root *pinc.w- 'feather'
> (based on the *actually attested* Agul word pinc. 'feather' --
> further glossed as 'eyelash' without any explanation -- *only*),
> and doesn't even attempt to reconstruct a "North Caucasian"
> protoform. See both at
>
> http://tinyurl.com/bvsc9gv
>
> and at
>
> http://starling.rinet.ru/Texts/glossary.pdf (p. 160),
>
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski gpiotr@ wrote:
> >
> > See page 204, Francesco, and this:
> >
> > http://tinyurl.com/cu5j5v4
>
> Oh, I see. Therefore, according to Tavi Basque mintz-, p(h)intz- 'membrane (covering an egg or nut)' would be cognate with an etymologically "somewhat dubious" (as per Starostin's own admission) "PNC" root whose meaning would be 'hide, conceal, steal'? Do eggshells and nutshells "conceal/hide" something, really? Would that be a semantically plausible designation of an eggshell or nutshell?
>

I've corrected my former etymology. As the main meaning is 'membrane, film', I derive the Basque words from IE *mems- 'meat, flesh' > Latin membrum, membra:na, with e > i before a nasal like in Germanic (Gothic mimz 'meat').

> By the way, in the _Diccionario de la Lengua Española_ of the Real Academia Española the Spanish term binza 'membrane in an animal's body; onion skin' is derived from brinza < brenca 'fiber, filament', which is there regarded as a pre-Roman word borrowed from Celtic *bri:nica: < *brinos 'fiber, filament'. I don't know if such an etymology holds, but it's an alternative etymology anyway, which does not imply any borrowing from Basque mintz- etc.
>

Actually, this supposed Celtic root (anyway wrongly reconstructed) has contaminated the Basque word, giving the forms brintza, printz, frintz. But there can be no doubt dialectal Spanish binza, Aragonese binza, bienza are loanwords from Paleo-Basque, in account of its initial b-. By contrast, in parts of Navarre where Basque was replaced by Spanish some centuries ago we've got minza, mienza.