24-06-03 06:53, alex wrote:
> 2)one example here: the word, "mare"= great is considered to belong to
> substratum. In Albanian the word is "madh", in OF was "mare" and you
> will explain it trough celtic I suppose.
Miguel has already noted the non-existence of OFr. *mare 'great'. Alb.
madh is an inherited derivative of PIE *meg^h2-. There's no way in which
it could be related to Rom. mare with any plausibility. "Is
considered..." is an Alexian generalisation of "some people (e.g. Russu)
think so". However, there is an age-old alternative hypothesis,
according to which <mare> comes from Lat. marem 'male' (Class.Lat. mas,
maris). It has recently gained fresh support: Herman Seldeslachts (1999)
notes that "in Hungarian, words like <kan> 'male' and <fiú> 'boy' can be
used to qualify big objects, whereas on the other hand <leány> 'girl'
and <no"stény> 'female' can denote smaller objects (e.g., <fiúeper> and
<leányeper> for a big and a small kind of strawberries
respectively...)". In Hungarian dialects <kan> may serve as a synonym of
<nagy> 'big', and <kanja> is attested in Transdanubia with the meaning
'the best, the greatest'.
Piotr