Re: [tied] Catching up again...

On Fri, 10 Nov 2000 09:09:36 GMT, "Glen Gordon"
<glengordon01@...> wrote:

>Isn't it interesting to note how wine starts at around 5500 BCE and we
>coincidentally have widespread terms for "wine" in IE and Kartvelian that
>seem to be Semitic in origin. We know that the IE term *weino- is not
>analysable within IE,

How so? An analysis *woi-no- from *wei- "to turn, to wind" is
perfectly defendable (in fact, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov do so, IIRC).

>it's not analysable in Kartvelian as far as I know.
>Hmm, I wonder what the solution could be...

Is it analysable in Semitic?

Speaking of wine, you may be interested in the Basque word for
"grape(s)", <mahats>, reconstructible to pre-Basque *<banas'>, and
looking very much like a loan from A.Eg. <w-n-s^> "grape".

>Miguel mentioned Kartvelian *das^tw- "bear" in connection with IE *xrtko-,
>cited IE "eight" and obsessed over the final Kartvelian labial which I don't
>find too alarming personally. We might just as well write the Kartvelian
>term with a superscript *W, it doesn't necessarily imply IE *w but rather it
>could indicate ANY IE (or other foreign language) phoneme with a labial
>quality. In the case of "eight", Miguel writes *ok'tH3-. For clarity's sake,
>it should be more properly written *ok^txW-. *H3 is known to have a
>labializing effect on neighbouring vowels so let's just call a dead horse a
>dead horse, 'kay? This way, the relationship between the re-written *ok^txW-
>and PK *os^txw- becomes far more readily observable. Perhaps the Satem
>change was already in effect when this happened?
>
>The final PK *-xw- is nothing more than the acknowledgement of the labial
>phoneme *xW in IE. When returning to our *das^tw-, the *-w- isn't anything
>important. This is again the representation of an IE labial phoneme, in this
>case *-o-.

Well, there is a subtle difference between PIE *xw == PK *xw and PIE
*o == PK w.

>Thus, *xrtk^o-/*xrk^to- -> *d-as^tw-. I'd imagine the accent must
>have been on the reduced initial syllable in order to properly give the PK
>reflex (cf. *wlkWos "wolf")... But the question is how do we explain PK
>*d-??

If anything, it (or rather *da) was the Proto-Kartvelians' way of
rendering IE syllabic *<r.>.

>Is it like the *m- prefix in *m-k.erd "heart" which is also viewed as
>an IE loan?

No. *m- is a common PK nominal prefix. AFAIK, *d(a)- isn't.


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