Re: [tied] Re: Ford -furta- fare

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 5724
Date: 2001-01-23

There are stranger coincidences than those, but coincidences nevertheless. People find it hard to believe that Lat. deus and Gk. theos, or Latin dies and English day are unrelated. Or that Theodore and Theodoric have nothing in common, etymologically speaking. Examples could be multiplied ad infinitum to show that mere surface resemblance does not guarantee cognacy.
 
Slavic *bred- (< earlier *bHredH-) has its own small family of derivatives (based on *bred-/*brod-/*brId-noN-), the central idea being 'wading'; *prtu- is a derivative of *per-, and so belongs to the semantic domain of 'through, across'. Where 'wade' and 'across' overlap in the semantic space, we have the meaning of 'ford' -- an accidental intersection of accidentally similar roots.
 
Piotr
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Sergejus Tarasovas
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2001 2:45 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Ford -furta- fare

--- In cybalist@egroups.com, "Torsten Pedersen" <tgpedersen@......>
wrote:
>
> All very interesting, but nobody answered my original question
> which was (should have been): These two word mean the same, but
> according to our sacred knowledge of linguistics they are not
> related (as haben/habeo). Usually these pairs are seen as tests
> of linguistic orthodoxy, a kind of linguistic parallel to the
> English teacher's split infinitives and dangling prepositions.
>
> But the real reason was something I found in Hermann Møller, back
> from, I think 1906. Trying to find a way to relate IE and AA, he
> came up with something he called alternate forms in IE (which means,
> in a single language there would be pairs like habeo/capio).
>
> If anyone is interested (after several "vade retro, satanas", of
> course) I could dig it up next time I'm in the library.
>
> Torsten

It seemes that you, like Godfather, don't believe in mere
coincidence. Well, we have per- 'go forward, go through' and bher-
'carry', from which, as it seemes, *bred- is derived. It's up to you
to decide whether they are related. I've never heard of any semantic
correlation between pVC and bhVC root types in PIE (maybe except mere
onomatopoeic).

Sergei