Miguel suggested that <tabira> could
be a loan from IE -- namely, a borrowed reflex of *dHabHros, as in Lat. faber;
Miguel glossed it as 'smith, carpenter', but cognates like Slavic *dobrU 'good'
and, possibly, Eng. deft, OE gedafen 'fitting', suggest 'skilful, dexterous' as
the primitive meaning.
OIA ta:mrá- is not, strictly speaking,
_the_ word for 'copper' but _a_ word for it in the language. Like a number of
other metal names in various languages, it was originally a colour term, meaning
'dark red' (*tmh1-ró- from the root *temh1-, as in <tamisra->). Your
parenthesised <(b)> wasn't there, historically; it's an epenthetic segment
of late origin.
The verb <bHarati> (PIE *bHer-e-ti)
has so many meanings (just like its
cognates -- Lat. fero:, Eng. bear, Gk. pHero:, etc.) that it's quite easy
to read almost any sort of semantics into its derivatives. Nevertheless, the
ethnonym <bHarata-> is certainly to be analysed as an original participle:
'supported, maintained, ruled, ...' (or the like). Its use as a personal name or
divine epithet is also common: e.g. Agni is "the Bharata" = 'kept alive by the
care of men'. There is no reason to connect it specifically with
metalworking.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2002 7:06 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Decoding Meluhhan dialect
Piotr inquired about my comments on Meluhhan in the context
of Miguel's observations re: Sumerian <tibira> or <tabira> (written
LU2 URUDU-NAGAR, i.e. "[person] copper.carpenter") means "metal worker,
coppersmith". My remarks were intended to highlight (1) that many inscribed
objects of ca. 3300 BCE found in settlements on Sindhu and Sarasvati rivers
relate to stone-/metal-workers;(2) that the Indo-Aryan word for copper is:
ta_m(b)ra; and (3) metal-caster is a bharata which could be cognate with the
bharata-s (a group of people) mentioned in the R.gveda.