Re: [tied] Harold, the flying sheep (*bHeh1-bHeh1)

... Especially if the same root *pet(h2)- could mean both 'fall down' and 'fly'.

Of course homonymy occurs in all human languages and certainly could occur in PIE, and what we have here is not even complete homonymy but a shared consonantal skeleton. Words looking like ablaut variants of each other need not be related, and this is especially true of concrete nouns; *h2awi-/*h2wei- and *h2ow-i-/*h2ow-ei- may have developed from quite different pre-IE forms (cf. Moder English fowl < OE fugol vs. foul < OE fu:l).

Why do you mean by declaring that you're half-serious? Would you like to propose a genuine etymological connection between the sheep and bird words? "Woolly" = "feathery"?

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2000 3:56 PM

Subject: [tied] Harold, the flying sheep (How many laryngeals?)

I've been thinking (and I'm half serious), that if we have *h2ewi- "bird", and (without *h3) *h2owi- "sheep", the "sheep"-word would have a good chance of being an Ablaut-variant of the "bird"-word, which would mean that Harold, the flying sheep from the Monty Python sketch (see, e.g., <http://www.clal.ca/Flying_Sheep.html>) would have been successful in PIE times... ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv@...