30-10-03 11:16, Marco Moretti wrote:
> In Proto-Germanic we have a huge amount on non-IE lexicon, despite
> the opinion of many parochial IEists, that consider IE every item
> attested in every IE language.
That isn't nice. The "parochial IEist" is a straw man of your own
making. Show me an IEist as radical as that. As a matter of principle,
I'm in favour of a native etymology whenever a plausible one presents
itself, but I agree that e.g. the "silver" and "tin" words are non-IE,
and that Germanic *silubra- in particular represents a widespread North
European wanderwort replacing IE *h2arg^-n.t-
> For example, words of ultimately non-IE origin in English are:
> "sheep", "ship", "silver", "help", "drink", "delve", "blood",
> "land", "soul", "sea", "churl", "wife", "tin", "house", "knife",
> "shore", "(night)mare" (only the second part of the
> compound), "hut", "Hell", "if", "bone", "back", and many others.
> Deriving "blood" from a IE *bhl- "to shine" is a patent absurdity:
> like canis a non canendo, lucus a non lucendo, etc...
> In no IE language there is a similar semantic shift, and in no IE
> language a similar supposed "kenning" displaced the old inherited
> word. Every strange word for "blood" such as Latin sanguis or Greek
> haima is suspected to be of non-IE origin (substratum).
At least some of these words _are_ IE. For example, cognates of *dHelbH-
'delve, chisel' occur in Balto-Slavic, and since neither the shape of
the root nor its regularly ablauting behaviour militates against IE
origin, I see no reason to posit a loanword, despite its limited
distribution. Call it a "Northern IE dialectal word" if you like, but
there's no idication of its being non-IE. "Sheep" (West Germanic
*skæ:pa-) has a plausible cognate in Indic (Skt. cha:ga- 'goat' <
*sk^eh1gWo-). "House" may well be a derivative of *(s)keuh- 'hide,
cover' (*xu:sa- < *xu:ssa- = *xu:d-ta- < *kuh-dH-to-, cf. hide < hy:dan
< *xu:d-jan-). "(Night)mare" (*mar-o:n-) has a counterpart in Slavic
*mora 'nightmare' (cf. *morU 'plague, pestilence', also when
personified, and Skt. mara- 'death, killing'). Other items could be
discussed as well, if you feel like playing this game.
Piotr