Re: [tied] Re: slavic "dalto"

----- Original Message -----
From: "Abdullah Konushevci" <akonushevci@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2003 1:27 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: slavic "dalto"


> Bisedes Alb. Gdhend `to rough-polish, to carve' and gdhe `knot',
also dal "to go out, to separate', to claim that daltë is Slavic
loan, it seems something is not correct as to claim that Slavs was
before the Illyrians and Dacs in this region..

I haven't claimed anything like that. The Slavs may have appeared about AD 600, still early enough to impart a couple of unmetathesised loans.

> Albanian verb dal 'to go' has it cognate in Latin dalo 'to cut' and can easy be derived from PIE *dail- `to divede'.

You can't have it both ways. *dal- and *dail- don't match very well, and Lat. dalo: doesn't even exist (do you mean <dolo:> 'hew with an axe'? that's from *del-).

> In the word daltë `chisel', as in words baltë `mud', mjaltë `honey' -të is common ending (cf. *mel and Alb. mjaltë `honey').

Even a "common ending" has to be explained rather than taken for granted. In <mjaltë> the *-t- is of PIE date (the PIE word was *melit) and appears in some other branches beside Albanian (e.g. in Greek, Hittite and Gothic). In <daltë> and <baltë> its function is simply ornamental.

> Also, to claim that PIE *da- and *dail- `to divede', northern Indo-European root extended from *da(h)i- (C. Watkins, Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, *da-, *dail) is again something not correct.

What's not quite correct is the methodology that allows one to work with very a short root plus plenty of unrestrained extensions (a la Pokorny at his worst). It's bad practice even if done by a great scholar like Watkins, since it's basically a recipe for connecting anything with anything else at will, and it doesn't yield itself to any kind of verification. Watkins tries to get round Grimm's Law in a way that should activate a "red alert" light in any linguist's head.

If one wants to reconstruct a northern lexeme meaning 'divide' on the basis of Germanic (*dailjan-) and Slavic (*de^liti), the only realistic reconstruction is something like the noun *dHoilo- 'share' (perhaps *dHoh1-ilo- from *dHeh1- 'put, place'), cf. Slavic *de^lU, Gmc. *dail(-j)a-, and a denominal verb based on it. Another possibility, hard to exclude, is that Slavic borrowed *dail- from Germanic. None of this has anything to do with *del- ot <daltë>.

> The same thing is true about baltë `(cf. also Alb. balë "white spot
in forehead') mud' from PIE *bhel- or, to be more precisely, from
its o grade form *bhol-.

Where I live, mud isn't white.

Now let's contemplate these correspondences:

Slavic *bolto 'mud, swamp, sludge, pool', *dolto 'chisel'
Romanian baltã 'swamp, pool', daltã 'chisel'
Albanian baltë 'mud, ooze, sludge', daltë 'chisel'

Is this coincidence?

Piotr