Re: [tied] Re: Occam's Razor

That's a bunch of good ideas!

The meaning of "speckled" also appears in *perk^-
Grk perke: "perch"
OE forn "trout"
Irish earc "salmon"
Ligurian Porco- "fish"?
ON fjörsung <*ferxsungaz<*perks-nkos "Trachinus draco"

Other curious PIE(?) word for a kind of fish:

*kopH- or *kupH-
Greek kyprinos "carp"
Sanskrit s'aphala
Lithuanian s^apalas
Latin clupeus "hering" - maybe <*cupleus <*cup-


Joao SL
Rio

----- Original Message -----
From: <S.Tarasovas@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2001 10:24 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: Occam's Razor


> --- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> > Here's a simple example. The "Italo-Celto-Germanic" word for 'fish'
> has traditionally been reconstructed as *pisk(o)- (Latin piscis, OIr
> íasc, Gothic fisks), but if we analyse it as *pik^-sk(o)- with
> cluster simplification, an attractive hypothesis emerges: *peik^-
> means 'paint, mark, decorate', and so the 'fish' word can be
> interpreted as 'speckled, spotted' -- the original meaning being
> perhaps 'trout'. We violate the principle of parsimony (*pik^-sko- is
> not the simplest analysis, though it remains within the bounds of
> formal acceptability), but the payoff may justify this offence: we
> find previously unrecognised cognates outside the Western IE area
> that support the new analysis, like Slavic *pIstr-o~gU 'common trout'
> (with *pIstr- < *pisr- < *pik^-r- = *pIstrU 'piebald, variegated'),
> and by finding a semantic derivation for *pisko- we arrive at a more
> elegant and intellectually more satisfying etymology. Of course the
> next step should be to show the new hypothesis to the public so that
> critics can identify its weak points and possibly make us abandon it.
> >
> > Piotr
>
> Proto-Slavic *ryba 'fish' can be (and has been, by Toporov)
> interpreted as *ry2ba, where y2 is a hypothetic phoneme for nasalized
> *y (*y,) < *o:n (this developement is usually postulated for auslaut
> only, but there are some facts that allow to extend it to inlaut in
> some cases [most probably prosody plays some role]). A connection to
> Proto-Slavic *re,b- 'specky, pocky' is obvious in that case. This can
> support pik^-sk(o)- reconstruction typologically.
>
> Sergei
>
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