On Mon, 01 Oct 2001 11:23:53 -0000,
tgpedersen@... wrote:
>--- In cybalist@..., Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv@...> wrote:
>> Gmc. *aiz (> Eng. <ore>) has nothing to do with Gmc. *i:sarn- (>
>> Eng. <iron>). The froms <ayas>, <aiz>, <aes> etc. derive from a PIE
>> *aio- (*h2ai-o-) "copper (ore)".
>
>All this assuming, of course, that the words weren't loaned, in which
>case there's no telling whether or not they were related.
There's telling. The form *h2aies- {this is the correct form}
"[copper] ore" (secondarily in Indo-Iranian "iron") is found, with
regular correspondences, in Indo-Iranian, Latin and Germanic, which
surely means that the word, if borrowed at all, must have been
borrowed at least as early as the period of "post-Anatolian PIE". The
form *i:sarno- "iron", is limited to Celtic (and borrowed from Celtic
into Germanic), and, if borrowed, must have been borrowed as late as
the proto-Celtic period. Since copper metallurgy is native to the
area where, IMHO etc., PIE first emerged (the Balkans), there's no
reason at all to suppose the word *h2ayes- is anything but native IE.
The Celtic word *i:sarno- may well be a borrowing, and we have two
possible known candidates in Etr. <ais> "god", pl. <aisar> and in
Basque <izar> (/isar/) "star". Iron is known as the "sky metal" (e.g.
in Sumerian and Ancient Egyptian) because of its earliest use as
meteoric iron. Both candidates are defective in that there is no
known evidence from either Etruscan or Basque that <aisar> c.q. <izar>
were ever used in those languages to denote "iron" or any other metal
(I don't know the Etruscan for "iron", and the Basque is <burdina> [+
variants]).