From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller
Message: 582
Date: 1999-12-15
> 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.
>
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