From: Sergejus Tarasovas
Message: 2369
Date: 2000-05-06
Piotr wrote:Zoologists now claim that domestic dogs have been around for more than 100 000 years; but it's possible, I think, that their new Neolithic function led to renaming them as 'herders' or 'shepherds' and the older term sank into oblivion. As a less likely alternative, you could imagine that before *peku- came to mean '(small) livestock' it was applied to dogs. I would't bet on this, I'm just thinking aloud -- but the Slavic word for 'dog' is *pIs-U- (Polish pies, on which see below), and the fact that the *s doesn't undergo the RUKI rule shows that the Pre-Slavic reconstruction (if the word is that old) must be *pik- or possibly *p@...- (a reduced vowel may yield Slavic *I).
May be. But1. The so called third palatalization acted much later than RUKI rule (with its cognates in Baltic and Indo-Iranian).( Cf. such amazing examples from beech bark inscriptions like вьхъ 'all' etc. They show that in North Krivichian dialect of Old Russian this palatalization hadn't been completed yet by the X-XI cc).2. So we can suppose the following development:*pis-o-/-u->*piS-o-/-u->*pьxъ>*pьs'ь>various derivates in Slavic languages with 'hardened' (depalatalized) s and consecutive involving of the word in -o-stem paradigms (qiute normal developement). By the way, why the -u- stem is reconstructed?Sergei