Re: [tied] alb. gji (breast)

Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:

>
> My other candidate is <gjarpër>, which you analyse rather
> satisfactorily in PIE terms (but I wonder if you can acount for
> <shtërpinj> equally well). Until yesterday I had little doubt that
> the word was inherited, but the parallel case of <gji> and the
> strange incident of Rom. $arpe (< *sErpen) have undermined my
> certainty. Here we have another case of Romanian/Albanian agreement,
> and the likelihood that <$arpe> is a substrate word is practically
> zilch (see Miguel's note about the treatment of consonantal stems in
> Romanian). If so, why not derive both words from Balkan Latin
> *sErpen, "thematised" in Proto-Albanian? That would save us the
> trouble of explaining the Albanian form independently of <serpent->.
> I have no other candidates yet, but it's a fresh idea. Other examples
> may be lurking somewhere
>
> Piotr

1) could you please explain what means "zilch"?
2) the Latin serpen (tis) has the second /e/ an short /e/. That means
the PBR form should have been *sErpEns. Accepting the lost of "s" is
usual for Italian and Romanian, accepting the lost of "n" is not at all
usual. But let us accept it.
Miguel derives it as *SerpE > *siearpe > Searpe > Sarpe, meaning that
the final "E" become an "e".

It seems more probable that the root is the *serp- like the Sanskrit
"serpati" and greek "erpo" forms point out. The Latin verb "serpo" means
the same. The verb in Romanian for " to meander"= Serpui.
It seems that everything can be derived with "*serp-" in Latin,
Romanian, and in Albanian. I am not sure about Sanskrit and Greek if the
root *serp- changes when making derivatives.


Alex