[tied] Re: 'Dog' revisited

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

> 25-11-03 13:11, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> >> It's pure speculation,
> >> of course, but I prefer this kind of speculation to proposing
> >> Proto-World *kuan- a la Merritt Ruhlen.
> >>
> >
> > But what's to become of Ruhlen's other "dog" words if you orphan
> > them? Have you even considered that? Tsk, tsk. ;-)
>

> We've been through that. The method consists in selecting a number

of

> roughly similar words from random languages (sometimes incorrectly
> quoted -- see the discussion of the Old Chinese item some time

ago),

> with referents ranging from 'dog' to 'hyaena', without even

attempting

> to establish systematic correspondences or to analyse the

individual

> etyma. Mysteriously, the impressionistic "reconstruction" resembles

the

> PIE word more than anything else (by the same token, Ruhlen's
> Proto-World *akwa means ... [answers on postcards]). I disagree

with

> Ruhlen, because by comparing English dog 'dog' with Mbabaram

dOg 'dog'

> and Proto-Kartwelian dz^aG 'dog' I have already established beyond
> reasonable doubt

Well, there are a lot of unreasonable people out there.

>that the Proto-World word for 'dog' was *dog ... well,
> perhaps *dag, because some details can be expected to change as

time

> goes by.
>

You're probably right. So, the proper theory is then, that as the
domesticated dog passed out of SE Asia from one linguistic community
to the next, the languages of those communities did not borrow words
similar to *kwon along with the dog, but decided independently to use
words similar to *kwon for that particular trade article, presumably
for onomatopoeic reasons, since dogs go "kwon, kwon" in erh, some
language?

Torsten