Re: Odp: boskO

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1322
Date: 2000-02-01

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Christos Galanis
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2000 5:52 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: boskO

Christos writes:
The very pronunciation of p and b must self evidently make us very
careful of ruling out their exchange [cf. also pallO-ballO,
pikros-bikros] and in fact, p in Gr. dialects is quite flexible,
p > ph, p > k, p > m, p > t, p > pt, as I'm sure you well know.
Greek is not -imho- a language susceptible to strict rules.  

And I still think that a Lat. pascere and an irrelevant Gr. boskO is
rather an extremely wild "coincidence". But that's only my opinion. 

And you do not really want me to comment on the Greek vowel quality, do
you?  :-)
Dear Christos,
 
The Greek reflexes of p are far less "flexible" than you suggest. The correspondences you cite are examples of regular assimilation (*p > m), of palatalisation (*p > pt), or of equally predictable changes such as Grassmann's Law in Greek (*ph > p, if that's what you mean). I'm not sure what you understand by "p > k,... p > t". If you refer to the existence of pairs like tettares : pisures, the changes underlying this correpondence are *kW > p and *kW > t (divergent treatment of labiovelars in different dialects, even in the same context). I know perfectly well that Greek developments are sometimes pretty complicated, but no historical linguist who knows his job would assert that Greek is a language in which anything goes, or even that it isn't "susceptible to strict rules".
 
Sporadic irregularities don't change the fact that Classical Greek b NORMALLY comes from PIE *gW (it might also go back to *b inasmuch as the latter is reconstructible). We need not discuss modern Greek dialects here, as boskO and related words occured in this form already in Classical Greek. When you propose an irregular change, a plausible reason should be offered for it -- something better than just saying that Greek is a capricious language with messy dialectal developments. If you practise etymology without the recommended formal rigour -- as an art in which consonants matter little and vowels less than little (who said that? Voltaire?) -- all you gain is heaps of spurious matches ("wild coincidences"?) which aren't much use to anybody, like theos : deus or thEr : German Tier, English deer.
 
As for bosk- : *paxsk-, the apparent similarity between them is to a large extent due to the final -sk-, which doesn't belong to the root but is a common IE suffix forming iterative or intensive present stems (as in baskO < *gWm-ske- = Skt gacchati). After detaching the shared suffix our equation shrinks to Gk bo- = PIE *pax-. Neither the consonant nor the vowel is quite what it should be. IMHO "an extremely wild coincidence" is an extremely hyperbolic term for such a vague biphonemic "correspondence".
 
Piotr