Re: [tied] First iron swords on mass scale

On Fri, 13 Oct 2000, Piotr wrote:

> 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.

However copper -> iron is to be expected (e.g. Indo-Iranian ayas-),
and copper is yellowish-red, like gold.

The exact form of the B-S etymon is indeed problematic. We have
Slavic z^ele^so and Lith. gelezis, OPr. gelso (I suspect /gelzo/, in
view of the German orthography of Old Prussian). The Slavic and
Baltic terms are not quite compatible, apart from initial *g(w)el-.

> *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;

Sumerian <bar> shows up in several metal words: an.bar "iron"
(an="sky"), za.bar "bronze" (za="stone"(?), Akk. siparru), maybe
a.bar5 "lead" (a="water"(?)). "Silver" is <ku3 babbar>, with the
reduplicated form of the word <bar> "bright, white". Sumerian
adjectives follow the noun, except <ku3> ~ <kug> "pure", which
sometimes preceeds. It's possible, but hard to prove, that a change
in word order AdjN -> NAdj had occurred in Sumerian. Especially the
word <bar> (written UD) is found in initial position in writing, where
it is pronounced finally, as in the spelling UD.KIB.NUN (=
bar.$ennur.nun) for the town of Zimbar (Akk. Sippar) [the same
spelling also for the river Euphrates = Buranun, Akk. Purattu], or
UD.KA.BAR (bar.zu2.bar) for <zabar> "bronze".

>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.

But according to Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, there is a Hitt. harasu-
"bronze", from Semitic hura:s.u- "gold". Terminological confusions
are not to be excluded at a time when metallurgy was young.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...