From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2886
Date: 2000-07-27
----- Original Message -----From: Piotr GasiorowskiSent: Thursday, July 27, 2000 11:46 AMSubject: Re: [tied] Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!I twice wrote 1000 BP instead of 10000 BP. Sorry,Piotr----- Original Message -----From: Mark OdegardSent: Thursday, July 27, 2000 6:50 AMSubject: [tied] Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!
Whether the homeland was Pontic, Danubian or Anatolian, the IEs must have known the lion either directly or from tales told by neighbouring peoples. Until about 1000 BP the lion was one of the most widely distibuted species of mammal. Lions lived virtually all over the northern hemisphere, including N America (there's a whole collection of lion skeletons at Rancho la Brea). The activity of human hunters made the lion's range shrink throughout the Holocene, but in PIE (and even early historical) times lions still inhabited southern Europe (as far north as Romania and quite probably as far west as Italy), Asia Minor and the Pontic area -- and of course lions are rather conspicuous animals.However, 'lion' is also an ideal Wanderwort because of the mythological, totemic and emblematic significance of the animal. The Anglo-Saxons lived very far from the lion's range but borrowed the word leo from Latin and then borrowed lyoun again from Norman French. The early Slavs had no first-hand familiarity with lions but did have a word for them (*lIvU) -- certainly a loan, probably via Germanic, pace Gamkrelidze & Ivanov. The fact that phonetically similar words occur in Hebrew, Akkadian and Old Egyptian (but the Sumerian word was ug) militates agains an IE etymology for Greek/Latin leo:. To sum up, I suppose the IEs had a 'lion' word, but it's hardly possible to prove that it was something like *lew-on-. The EIEC reconstruction is implausible; it's probably based on the assumption that the Slavic word is genuinely old.Tigers originated in sub-Arctic Siberia and crossed the Himalayas into India probably about 1000 BP. They never reached Europe; the western limit of their range was the Elburz (between the Caspian Sea and the Iranian Plateau). Leopards used to live as far west as the British Isles, but that was long before the IEs: in post-Pleistocene times their range shrank like that of lions. They still occurred in the Pontic area, the Caucasus and Anatolia at the right time, and the IEs may have seen their furs at least. Notwithstanding which, G&I's reconstruction of 'leopard' and 'snow leopard' words merely betrays the author's agenda (an East Anatolian homeland).I still think a word for 'wildcat' must have existed. Secretive or not, wildcats were part of the Eurasian "megafauna" and all the local peoples must have been aware of their existence even if actual contact with them was very limited. Descriptive names for wildcats are likely to be formed by people for whom the domestic cat is the prototypical small feline.The northern lynx (Lynx lynx, closely related to the Canada lynx) still occurs in western Asia, eastern and central Europe (including Poland), Scandinavia and the Balkans, and since its range was considerably wider in the past it must be regarded as a bona fide IE beast. Its IE name is difficult to reconstruct in detail, but Greek lunks matches Germanic *luxsuz, Baltic *lu:Sis and Armenian lusanunkh (pl.) quite well, though far from perfectly. Slavic *rysI is certainly the same word with *l > *r (Iranian influence has been suspected, but *ru:si is not attested in any known Iranian language). What we have here is an etymon with some internal variation: *lu:k-i- ~ *lunk- ~ *luk-s-u-.Piotr
Let's keep it on cats for a while. The lion-word seems to be descended from a commoun source in the west (Indic has its own word). EIEC gives ?li(u). The u, with caron-below is equal to w. There is also a possible relationship mentioned to Hebrew liyash.The lion (Panthera leo) was endemic in southern Europe, Anatolia the Middle East, and on into India. EIEC says it was also found in the Balkans and western Ukraine.It's an interesting item for determining the homeland. With the standard model Pontic-Caspian Steppe, lions would have been at the southwestern fringe. The PIE speakers would have known of it. And once they were south of the Danube, the lion would have been very a well-known creature.I don't know if tigers ever made it to Northern Europe (snow leopards, Siberian tigers). I do know there is something like the North American lynx or bobcat native to the Alps and perhaps elsewhere.Only lions naturally form prides. Domestic cats and tigers will form colonies, but only when food is good, and apparently, only under pressure from man. Aside from lions, genuinely wild cats are rather secretive and are frequently nocturnal. The PIEs may not have actually had much contact with non-leonine felids and whatever name they had for the Felis sylvestris is likely to have been descriptive term rather than a real 'word'. In other words, this was not a common animal, nor an animal that regularly appeared on the menu.Compare this to bears. Bears are are one of our few natural predators, perhaps the only one; certainly it's about the only one of them regularly willing to take us on (big cats, so I've read, are confused by our bipedalism: we look bigger than we really are).Yes. A bit more evidence for a Pontic-Caspian homeland.Mark.