Re: Odp: joatsimeo-Loan Words

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 574
Date: 1999-12-15

 
----- Original Message -----
From: JoatSimeon@...
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 1999 5:52 AM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: joatsimeo-Loan Words

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.
[Unless, of course, 'salt' is morphologically related to other IE words, in which case it could be further etymologised by internal reconstruction. We discussed this word on Cybalist (5-6 Dec). -- P.]
 
Brent:
 
Words borrowed already in PIE times belong to the protolanguage as legitimately as the 'native' lexical stock. In theory they should be detectable if they look phonologically odd and do not fit the normal derivational patterns. The SALT word (with its unusually placed *a vowel) has often been given as an example of such deviation, but I wouldn't exclude the possibility of its being related to other words in PIE.
 
Piotr