Re: Portuguese, Spanish bode "buck"

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Tavi" <oalexandre@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@> wrote:
> >
> > > > You surely weren't expecting useful discussion from Tavi,
> > > > were you? He doesn't want to do linguistics: he wants to
> > > > make grand, sweeping claims about prehistory, which he then
> > > > 'supports' with pre-scientific pseudo-linguistics.
> > >
> > > No more than Gimbutas, Mallory, Anthony & Co. with their warfare
> Kurgan
> > > PIE-speakers who were supposed to have conquered most of Europe with
> the
> > > aid of horse-driven chariots. See for example the introduction of
> this
> > > recent (2012) article by Guus Kroonen:
> > >
> http://www.academia.edu/2604857/An_Akkadian_loanword_in_Pre-Greek_on_the\
> \
> > > _etymology_of_Greek_and_garlic
> >
> > The evidence upon which an /a/-prefix in Pre-Greek is erected is not
> particularly convincing. The Greek words for 'lightning' with a- may
> simply have been folk-etymologically influenced by _aste:r_ 'star'.
> Elsewhere in Europe, both OHG _aruz_ 'ore' and Latin _raudus_ look like
> forms of IE 'red', _raudus_ probably from Illyrian or Japygian with the
> simple /o/-grade (PIE *h1roudHo-) found in OE _re:ad_, etc. Pre-Gmc.
> *arud- looks like zero-grade (PIE *h1rudH-) in a language which treated
> initial preconsonantal laryngeals as Macedonian did, with _abrouwes_
> 'eyebrows' (Hes. -ou- for -u(:)-; -t- ms. error for -w-) against Grk.
> _ophru:s_ (PIE *h3bHruh{x}-). Likewise OHG _amsala_ 'ousel, blackbird'
> against Lat. _merula_ suggests an IE root *h{x}mes- with the same
> laryngeal treatment in the Pre-Gmc. IE lg. The alleged connection
> between Gallo-Latin _alauda_ and OE _la:werce_ (etc.) is, as they say,
> "del tutto campata nell'aria".
> >
> In my opinion, this a- and other prothetic vowels (mostly found in
> Greek) amount to an old prefix containing a "laryngeal". I've
> indentified some of these prefixes in other languages families and
> especially in names of plants and animals.
>
> Also the IE 'red' word you quoted comes from a 'copper' Wanderwort
> (Sumerian urudu) which underwent a semantic shift from 'copper/red
> metal'to 'red'. Actually, most color names are *derived* from concrete
> nouns and not the other way around.

Sumerian _urud_ 'copper' (the -u is the Akkadian nominative suffix from glossaries) is in my opinion borrowed from Balkano-Danubian *wrod- 'red', cognate with PIE *h1r(e)udH-. We are not talking about a specialized color like mauve or taupe. All of us have cut ourselves and seen blood, and we label it red.

"Balkano-Danubian" is what I used to call "West Pontic" until I found that other mid-rangers had already used "Pontic" in a different sense. The borrowings of *wrod- into IE lgs. mostly mean 'rose', but I suspect BD-speakers in the Balkan area also used it for 'native copper, mountain copper, orichalcum'. The oronym Rhodope/Rodopi has resisted plausible etymology since the range is hardly 'rose-faced'; more likely it is practically equivalent to 'Erzgebirge'.

To the northwest, *wrod- in the sense 'red pigment, red dye' appears to have yielded some obscure OE and OHG glossary words (discussed in papers by O.B. Schlutter which I do not have handy) and survives in the first element of HG _ritzerot_ 'intensely red', which is to be understood as 'red pigment-red, as red as red pigment'. (The usual explanation labels this along with _gritzegrau_ and _blitzeblau_ as expressive formations. In my opinion _ritzerot_ is an etymological compound and provided the model for the others, which are analogical rather than expressive.)

> > It seems to me that Schrijver, Kroonen, and their ilk should be
> putting more effort into identifying and characterizing Indo-European
> substrate languages before shoehorning everything without an obvious
> etymology in attested languages into a Pre-IE substrate.
> >
> Contrarily to Beekes, which (rather naïvely) considers Pre-Greek to
> be a *single* language, I think they're several substrates, both IE and
> non-IE. One of these is Georgiev's "Pelasgian", roughly equivalent to
> your "West Pontic". Unfortunately, one can't expect these an other
> ortodox IE-ists to made significant advances unless there's a change of
> paradigm in IE studies.

Georgiev's Pelasgian is a hypothetical satem language, which is not at the same time-depth as my "West Pontic" (now "Balkano-Danubian"), a sister language to Old PIE. Pelasgian was effectively dismantled in a series of papers by D.A. Hester. My view is that the Pre-Greek substrate proper was Balkano-Danubian Chalcolithic, but some relics of an earlier East Mediterranean Neolithic substrate are recoverable.

The main problem I have with Beekes is his insistence (following Furne'e, his former student) that Pre-Greek had a few-phoneme system. This is a result of F.'s faulty methodology, by which regional variations in PG words are treated haphazardly instead of being used to develop PG dialectology. If F.'s method were applied to English, the words _bludgeon_ and _truncheon_ would be regarded as continuing one and the same Pre-English word.

What actually happens with a few-phoneme substrate is illustrated by Hawai'ian place-names. The phonemes remain few when the names are adapted into English. Pre-Greek place-names look nothing like that. But insistence on few phonemes has led Beekes to reject the Eteo-Cretan inscriptions as something other than Pre-Greek, unnecessarily complicating matters and throwing away good information.

DGK