Baloo the Bear [was: IE -rl- > Indo-Iranian ?]

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 4489
Date: 2000-10-23

Of course *-rl- can be found in some branches. Slavic has deverbal adjectives ("past participles") in *-l- (< *-lo-), in which the suffix attaches to all kinds of verbal stems, also consonantal ones in *-r and *-l, e.g. *mIr-lU 'dead', dIr-lU 'having torn', mIl-lU 'having ground'. This doesn't mean that each particular form dates back to PIE (*mr-lo-, *dr-lo-, *ml(x)-lo-, etc.) even if the roots in question do and if derivation involving *-lo- is PIE as well.
 
*ker-l-/*kar-l- is Germanic but has no cognates with *-rl- elsewhere. I'm not saying that PIE *-rl- could not arise at morpheme boundaries, but I don't know any convincing examples, and the fact that the distribution of liquids in PIE was subject to phonotactic restrictions makes me wary of any postulated liquid clusters.
 
Sanskrit -ll- usually appears in expressive and dialectal words. It could derive from several Indo-Aryan clusters, even from -dr-, as in Vedic kSullaka 'small' < kSudra-. The term bhalla-/bhalluka- is obscure (bhalla- can also mean 'arrow'), and its form strongly suggests dialectal origin. Most geminates (except -tt-, -dd- and -nn-, which could be produced by common morphological processes) were clearly regarded as characterising 'uncultivated' or 'barbarous' speech and avoided with some consistency until the Epic Sanskrit literature (which had absorbed much substrate and colloquial Middle Indian influence) I'd hesitate to connect bhalla- directly with Germanic bear, let alone proposing a pre-Indo-Iranian *bHer-lo- without any corroborative data to bridge the gap between the two branches.
 
Piotr
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: João Simões Lopes Filho
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2000 9:09 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] IE -rl- > Indo-Iranian ?

I was thinking in BHALLA < *BHERLOS (?) "bear"
And Germanic KERLA-/KARLA- , churl, Karl, Charles, etc.