Re: [tied] Re: Euxine Event.

----- Original Message -----

From: João Simões Lopes Filho

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2000 5:01 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Euxine Event.

I don't remember 'camel', but G&I do reconstruct a PIE term for 'elephant'/'ivory'. Their "linguistic palaeontology" is flawed in many ways. PIE may have had a word for 'lion' (several thousand years ago lions still lived as far north as Romania and as far west as Italy), but the words that are actually attested seem to be borrowings -- ultimately from non-IE languages, in all likelihood. Latin leo must be a loan from Greek, since PIE **lewo:n would have given an entirely different Latin reflex. Germanic and Celtic languages copied their 'lion' terms (OE le:o, OHG lewo, Welsh llew etc.) from Latin or Greek. Slavic *lIvU is certainly a loan mediated by Germanic; hypothetical **lewo:n would have developed into **lovy/**loven-.

 

Piotr

 

 

Joao wrote:

And the Gamkrelidze theories about IE names for "lion", "leopard", "camel" and "monkey"? I don't agree with these ideas because have many zoogeographical problems. There's no monkey nor camel/elephant in Anatolia. The analysis of Latin leo:, Greek leont- and Slavic levu is interesting, but I've ever think Latin leo < Greek leon. A word for "leopard" is geographically plausible, but there's so many languages to compare.