Re: [tied] Re: Ducks and Souls

11-09-03 13:19, tgpedersen wrote:

> You won't get off that easy. Either all Schijver's examples should be
> rewritten with initial *H2-, in which case there is no 'language of
> bird names' or the duck is one of them.

I haven't analysed Schriver's examples to see if assuming an initial *h2
really solves all etymological problems. If it does, then of course
there's no reason to posit a langue of birds' names and Schrijver's
likely wrong. However, I don't think a linguist of his format would have
overlooked a simple phonological solution, so I suspect there's
something more to that. I'll see into that when I find the time.

> How come your opponents never have a shred of evidence?

Don't be silly. They often do, and if they do I concede my point. You,
Torsten Pedersen, haven't got a shred of evidence in this particular
case, have you?

> The word exists in the neighbor families, so presumably I must have died out
> at some time in Proto-Celtic. Where's your evidence, shredded or not,
> that the word disappeared before Halstatt?

Toi be precise, it died out and was replaced by other terms _not later_
than Proto-Celtic, and possibly before Proto-Celtic. It's you who are
theorising about ducks and souls in a language unknown to you or to
anyone else, so the burden of the proof is on you. Without some positive
evidence you duck symbolism theory has no foundation.

> Let me walk you through this piece of logic.
> WRT the 'duck' word and Halstatt, there are two possiblities:
> 1) They knew it
> 2) They didn't
> Assuming 1) is the case, they would be able to pun on it. Assuming 2)
> is the case, they wouldn't be.

Actually, you make a further assumption. Point 1) means that the
Halstatt people had a 'duck' word based on the IE root *h2anh2t- (or
however you reconstruct it). But you also assume 3) that their word for
'soul, breath' was homophonous with their 'duck' word (the similarity of
the roots is not enough, cf. Lat. <anas> vs. <animus>, not much of a
pun). Only then would punning have been possible. The far-reaching
conclusions I mentioned were the non-linguistic ones about the alleged
symbolic meaning of duck representations in Halstatt.

>> Actually, there are some Greek and Roman anatiform artifacts, including
>> fine duck oil lamps.

> And I have a collection of illustrated stories of an American family
> of ducks. But somehow I don't think they should be read symbolically.

I merely falsified your claim that the Romans made no duck figurines.
How do you know that the Halstatt ducks (as opposed to the Roman ones or
to Donald Duck) had a cultic meaning?

>> BTW How did the Romans produce duck oil?

Stress "OIL" in the phrase <duck oil lamps>.

Piotr