Re: Odp: salt licks

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 455
Date: 1999-12-07

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Odegard
To: cybalist@egroups.com ; Gerry Reinhart-Waller
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 1999 12:58 AM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: salt licks

Gerry Reinhart-Waller writes

> Just reading your post on the Wieliczka Salt Mine.  Do you think salt
> attracted man & horse the way bees are attracted to nectar?  If indeed
> that is the case, then salt could have a direct influence language
> formation.

I've about exhausted my knowledge of how animals are attracted to salt. But
yes, certain animals, particularly those whose habitat is salt-poor will
visit natural or man-provided salt licks. Deer, who are about as vegan as an
animal can get, will turn carnivorous if salt-deprived. Cattle, so I gather,
can 'smell' salt, as well as water.

If your diet is mostly meat, you'll get all the salt you need. Once you go
for a healthy balanced diet, one heavy on the veggies, you may need some
small added salt supplementation if your food is not from a grocery store.

The Central Asia of the Indo-Iranians is rich in natural salt deposits (salt
pans in dried up lakes, along fossil rivers, etc). They would have not had
any real need to supplement their livestock's salt, nor their own since
their main diet staple was meat. If you don't really need salt, you might
lose your word for it.

Mark.
Mark:
 
The Aryans lost the PIE SALT word, which of course doesn't mean that they didn't know salt or had no word for it. The Sanskrit word for 'salt' was lavaNa- (N = postalveolar nasal), and other Indo-Iranian languages had words for it too. They did not live on a salt-free diet. Unexpected attestation gaps do happen by sheer chance and need not be very important. Balto-Slavic languages lack reflexes of the PIE word for 'father', which doesn't mean that the Proto-Balto-Slavs did not have fathers or didn't really need them.
 
Piotr