From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 19409
Date: 2003-02-28
----- Original Message -----
From: <a_konushevci@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 3:53 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Again about cornix, coturnix, çukapikth < çukapiks
> As a poet, I enjoy on Your sense of humor. I don't believe that You
do not know the meaning of English name stalnger "killer, murdere",
but it dosn't make a point.
I wasn't joking. There's no "stalnger" in English. It doesn't even look like a possible English word.
> I believe that our world didn't begin with us and its not important,
for me, did someone accept or not my explainations. The fact is that
all these birds names ended in an -ks. I hope the list one day will
be much bigger.
I'm afraid we already know all the Latin bird names that can be known. Latin is a dead language, so the list won't ever be much longer (you can add <perdix>, for example). The fact that some of these end in <-ix> has to do with the Latin preference for the feminine gender in names of small avifauna (the partridge and the quail hardly qualify as giant killer birds). <-ix>, a rather common feminine suffix, appears also elsewhere, perhaps most conspicuously in <-trix>, the feminine counterpart of <-tor>, the agent suffix. It reflects PIE *-ih2 with a *-k- extensions (in fact, it has often been claimed that this /k/ is of "laryngeal" origin).
> As a linguist, to see the fact and to not take a risk to explain it
is like to live without any reason.
The trouble is that there isn't much to explain here.
Piotr