Re: [tied] First iron swords on mass scale

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

From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Friday, October 13, 2000 1:25 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] First iron swords on mass scale

Miguel wrote:

>Baltic and Slavic have related terms: Lithuanian gel(e)z^is, OPrussian gelso,
>Slavic z^elEzo < B-Sl *gele(:)Zo-. I'm not sure how to analyse them (*gWelh-eg-??).

C.D. Buck suggests a connection with the root *g^hel- "yellow; gold"
(Slavic *zol-to > zla:to ~ zoloto "gold").  Maybe a borrowing from a
centum word akin to Greek khalkos "copper".

 

In fact, the *gHel- connection is what most Slavicists assume, but I'm sceptical. Iron is neither yellow nor gold-like. Besides, *zol-to- is a reflex of satem *g'Hol-to-, while the Balto-Slavic 'iron' word would require a non-palatal velar. It's true that the word for 'yellow' in Slavic (*z^ltU-) must go back to *gilto- < *gHlto- with a non-palatal stop (such exceptions to satem development do occur in Slavic, and may be due to early non-satemic influence, cf. Germanic *gulTa- 'gold' < pre-Grimm *gHlto-, which looks like an ideal source for the potential Slavic loan), but even if we assume external influence the equation gold = iron remains weak.

 

>Latin ferrum is sometimes connected with the verb root *dHers- 'dare, be bold,
>violate' (English dare, durst, Sanskrit dharSa-).

Sometimes it's connected to Semitic Akk. parzillu, Arabic farzil
"iron", which seems dubious.  The Semitic word may itself be of
Sumerian origin (although no Sum. *bar.sil(u) is attested).  Note that
if we turn *bar.sil(u) around we get *sil(u).bar, just like reversing
Sum./Akk. anna.ku "tin" gives us ku.anna (Hitt. kuwanna "copper").

*bar-silu ~ *silu-bar is one of those connections that "make you think". It would make sense if the word was a compound in the source language, which I'm afraid will be impossible to demonstrate; otherwise such language games are too fanciful to be taken seriously. Even simple metathesis (let alone syllable reversals or segmental permutations) should be posited with utmost caution. Hittite kuwanna- is usually regarded as a colour term < *keu-(e)n- 'blue-green', from the colour of copper ores; the semantic equation tin = copper is also suspect.

 

Piotr