In a message dated 12/13/99 8:03:31 PM Mountain Standard Time,
brentlords@... writes:
>In a communication to a member concerning the origin of the word salt, I
directed them to the Web page where it state the word came from the name of a
town in the Jordan called Es Salt, and that the site was older than Jericho!!!
-- OK, this is a good example of where you're misunderstanding how this works.
"Salt" is derived from PIE *sal.
We can tell this because of the forms the word assumes in IE daughter
languages:
Old Irish salann
Welsh halen
Latin sal
Old Norse salt
Old High German salz
Gothic salt (Proto-Gemanic *saldom)
Lithuanian solymas
Latvian sals
Old Church Slavonic solt
Armenian al
Old Indic/Sanskrit salia
Tocharian A sale
Tocharian B salyiye
-- all of which, when you run the sound changes backward, give us *sal. Eg.,
Welsh changes PIE (and proto-Celtic) initial *s to "h", and so forth.
If the word had been loaned into Welsh subsequent to the *s ==> h shift, it
wouldn't have started with "h", and so forth. Just as "bovine" shows up as a
loanword because it hasn't undergone the *gw ==> k shift characteristic of
the Germanic languages, but instead the *gw ==> b.
Furthermore, the example above includes most of the subsequent branches of
PIE, including ones separated by a great deal of time and space. (Tocharian
is attested for what's now western China, Irish from Ireland.)
Therefore we can say with a high degree of confidence that the PIE word for
"salt" was *sal.
That is to say, when the Indo-European languages were still one single
ur-tongue (at least 5000 years ago), they said *sal for "salt".
Where *sal came from, we cannot say at all. That information is
unrecoverable.