--- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:
>
> it would be nice if we could demonstrate that *mr- (and perhaps *ml-
) survived in Germanic till after Grimm's Law to become *br-, *bl-
(phonetically [Br-, Bl-]). Any etymologies worth reexamining?
For what it's worth (not a lot), I couldn't find any candidates for
Proto-Germanic ml > pl or mr > pr.
Possible ml > bl:
Could Latin blatera:re, blati:re 'blabber' and Old Norse blaðra 'talk
nonsense' be related to one another and more distantly to the *mloi
root seen in Slavonic mle^sk- and Sanskrit mlecchati (
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/8294 )? It seems a
long shot - the root extension is different - /t/ v. /i/, and there
is a high risk of these forms simply being onomatopoeic.
Possible mr > br:
Onions suggests that Proto-Germanic *brauðam 'bread' originally
meant 'fragment, piece, morsel' as in Old English plural bre:adru.
Might the word actually be cognate with 'morsel', derived from Latin
morde:re 'bite'? However, I am not confident the dental element is
the same - PIE rdH or udH would have yielded Latin rb or ub (
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/14530 ).
Richard.