Also known as the 'swallow, throat' root
(not to mention 'cheek', 'neck', 'chew' etc.), cf.
and the interesting discussion of chance
similarities at
To quote Roger Lass's remark about the same
global etymology, "This is all very 'suggestive', but the question is whether it
suggests anything even remotely similar to a typical entry in a single-family
etymological dictionary of the standard type." A list of similar words
(each taken from any odd language where something
impressionistically like M-L-K happens to occur with a meaning like 'swallow,
milk, breast, neck' "and so on"), is useless without the argumentative
background provided by comparative analysis. Mass comparison is not a
reconstructive method, so "a world reconstruction" of this kind is illegitimate
to begin with.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, August 23, 2002 4:07 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Milk and a Gaulish Love Poem
Merritt Ruhlen in his 1994 book "On the Origin of Languages"
offers (Chapters 11 and 14) suggests a "global" root M-L-K 'nurse, suckle,
female breast'. His evidence for its reality doesn't overwhelm
me, but he does make some interesting comments pertinent to the "milk"
word problem. It does make sense that the first dairy herdsmen
(herdswomen?) adapted terms from familiar activities.