Piotr:
>"Ultimate" is a tricky word. Anyway, *sem- looks pretty archaic
>within IE. Note its pronominal functions (same, some, etc.) and its
>agglutinative use in pronominal declensions (*to-sm-i etc.).
I agree with you. This root _is_ archaic in IE. I'm just interested
in this idea of early NWC contact. I figure it would have occured
somewhere between 8500 and 7000 BCE. (Frankly, I'm still unsure
whether Tyrrhenian-OldNWC contact is feasible or only OldIE-OldNWC
contact, since the few words I so far suspect to be loanwords,
like *gWo:us "cow", *nebh- "navel", *sem- "whole" and *penkWe
"five" are so far unattested on the Tyrrhenian side.)
At any rate, *sem-, even if an early NWC loanword, would appear
at least many millenia old by 4000 BCE, there is no doubt, and
complete with the regular zero/full-grade alternations, wide usage,
and just about the whole kit-and-kaboodle that one would see in a
more native root.
>As with "five" ~ "fist", we have words which are probably somehow
>related, but it isn't clear which concept is more primitive.
Yes. However, since it's more likely for words to be derived by
taking short roots and building upon them with affixes rather than
by back-formation, the view that *penkWe is the most original root
remains a safer one.
>All that can be said about the form of the numeral "four" is that
>it looks as if it were a derivative in *-wr, i.e. *kWet-wr, collective
>*kW(e)t-wo:r, animate *kW(e)t-wor-es. All would be
>very nice if *kWet- were an identifiable verb root, but apparently
>it ain't.
That's what methoughts. And even if **kWet- existed, what would
**kWetwr signify at all? How does "corners" become "four"? So,
beyond this hurdle of finding proper evidence for an assumed root
lies the hurdle of semantics. This theories has too many hurdles
to be taken seriously.
I sympathize with the temptation that one sees in etymologizing
*kWetwores as something recent, though. It _seems_ like a long word
and long words tend to be newer than old and eroded ones, it's true.
However, it only looks long because of the plural *-es. Without it,
we have *kWetwor-, which isn't very long at all. It's the typical
two syllables that one sees elsewhere. The odd consonant pattern
also makes people assume that this root couldn't be very old and
must consist of at least one suffix, usually thought to be *-wr
in order to break up the *tw cluster, as if it were some sort of
intolerable linguistic abomination. Yet again, though, if *tw
were once a single phoneme *tW, we originally would have had no
consonant clusters and a very clean looking stem up until more
recent times (up to approx. 5000-4500 BCE).
The view that *kWetwor- is a single atomic root, however, has
the advantage of being connected externally to the Tyrrhenian
numeral *xotta (Etr. huth, Gr. Ytte:nia=Tetrapolis) and further
to Altaic "five" (OJapanese itu-) while avoiding typical ad-hoc
dissection of a common IE root.
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