On Sun, 12 Nov 2000 03:52:11 GMT, "Glen Gordon"
<
glengordon01@...> wrote:
>Secondly, upon close inspection... Did you mention a term like Egyptian
>/w-n-s^/?? This means "jackal" no?
Different <w-n-s^>. The one I meant was <w-n-s^> (also <w-n-s^-j>),
which is given in Hannig's dictionary as meaning "Rosine" (raisin),
<w-n-s^-t> "(a kind of) wine". (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov gloss <wns^> as
"grape; fruit")
I don't think the Egyptian word can be connected to either *woino- or
*wainu-. Egyptian vocalisation is always problematic, but I would
suspect a form *wainas^- to have been spelt <w-j-n-s^>, and if the
Basque form is anything to go by, it suggests a vocalisation
/wanas^-/. And one would also have to explain the /s^/: hardly from
PIE *-s (where we have *woinom rather than *woinos), hardly from
anything Semitic, and if the word was not borrowed but native Egyptian
(or was borrowed into Old Egyptian), /s^/ must in any case come from
/x/ before a front vowel (*wanaxi- ?, cf. PKartv. *wenaq- "grape").
>The correct term for wine would be /yrp/
>(Coptic /erp/) and grape is /y3r.t/, I would imagine.
Hannig gives it as /j3rr.t/.
>>Playing the devil's advocate, this option is not crazy at all: did or
>>did not the words "potato", "chocolate", "tomato", "maize", etc.
>>spread AGAINST the flow of colonizers coming OUT of Europe into the
>>Americas INTO Europe?
>
>Yes this is true but it doesn't work with *weino-. First of all, *weino-is
>not a complete word, in case you didn't notice. That dash at the end means
>that it requires a suffix to complete it's meaning and make it a whole word.
>We might think of there being *weinos, *weinom, etc. but never **weino...
>unless maybe we're drunk and we're talking to the wine itself in the
>vocative case :) "Oh wine, why hast thou forsaken me... BARRRRRRFFFFF...."
>
>The Semitic version *wainu (Hebrew yayin) has no IE suffix attached to it
>like a nominative *-s or anything, nor do we find this imaginary suffix in
>Kartvelian. Ergo, it can't credibly be from IE. Plus, Semitic is a couple
>thousand years older than IE. This being so, we have a word *wainu
>reconstructable for this language that dates much earlier than IE's *weino-.
There are several things wrong with your argumentation here:
1) borrowed words are adapted to the morphology of the borrowing
language. And if the speakers of the borrowing language perceive
something to be, say, a nominative suffix in the donor language, they
will strip the affix and replace it with their own (if any).
2) In Indo-European, the word is either thematic masculine (Grk.
oinos) or thematic neuter (Lat. vi:num). In either case, one expects
the word to be found most often as object (of the verb *poh3-/*piph3-
"to drink", for instance) and thus as *woinom. The Semitic word is
*wainu (West Semitic *yaynu) in the construct state, but the free form
was probably *wainum (if Akkadian mimation in the singular is
original).
3) "Semitic is a couple thousand years older then IE" makes no sense.
Even if we add "Proto-" twice, that doesn't affect possible borrowings
between PS and pre-PIE, unless you can demonstrate specific phonetic
incompatibilities (e.g. PIE cannot have borrowed from
Proto-West-Semitic, assuming we could date the *w- > *y- transition).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...