Re: [tied] Re: Pre-Germanic speculation

----- Original Message -----
From: "Marco Moretti" <marcomoretti69@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 10:03 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: Pre-Germanic speculation


> It is not proven. The root *weih1- "to wind" is naturally the origin
> of Latin words like vi:men and vi:tis. I don't understand how a root
> meaning "to wind" > "ivy" or something similar can shift to indicate
> a precious liquid.

Grapevine --> grape --> beverage. The consonantal stem *wih1�:n 'grapevine'
is marginally attested in Greek, and *wih1nom ~ *woih1nom are just its
thematised relatives.

> Wine wasn't a product of steppe, it was simply
> unknown to proto-IE speakers in the time preceding the spread of the
> IE linguistic family. They can only know wine in late times by trade,
> importing it from some southern country.

I'm not worried by the absence of _Vitis vinifera_ from the steppe zone. I
happen to favour the Danubian homeland theory, and the the Danube valley
lies within the native range of the wild grapevine.

> We have an unique evidence
> of a proto-IE word for an alcoholic drink: *medHu-.
> The *medHu- (English mead, German Met) is a drink based on honey,
> water and yeast. I home-brew it with success, and I like it. It looks
> like a sweet white (an powerful) wine.

I like it too, but familiarity with mead doesn't exclude familiarity with
other drinks. As the IEs said, "Mead on wine makes you fine; wine on mead
gives you speed."

> Within IE, as far I know, we have evidence of *woy(h1)nom only in
> Greek, Italic, Armenian and Anatolian (Hittite wiyana-, wayana-).

Don't forget Albanian ven� ~ ver� < *woino-, which, whatever it is, can't be
a Latin loanword. It stands to reason that the word would have survived in
the southerly branches (not in Indo-Iranian, though, since they _did_ come
from the northern steppes).

Piotr

> In
> Celtic and in Germanic it is a loanword from Italic or from Etruscan.
> We find this root in Semitic, in Etruscan (vinum), in Rhaetian
> (phelna vinutalina, phelvinua, perhaps a Wine God), in Kartvelian
> (Georgian ghvino), in Hattian (windu).
> The item is simply unknown in Indic.