[tied] Re: 'Dog' revisited

> Hi Torsten,
>
> Thanks for the compliment ;-) but I hesitate to accept unearned
> praise. Where did I slip in an assumption that any group was
> sedentary? All I said was that dogs could pass from group to group
> without any contact between the humans in either group. That says
> nothing about whether the humans were sedentary or not. All it says
> is that dogs are not always sedentary.

True. That slipped by me. As far as I can see your theory works,
given one small extra assumption: that the dogs who strayed to the
neighbors had the name 'kwon' engraved on its collar, so that the
neighbors didn't start calling it something irrelevant.

>
> As for the speakers of Eteo-Cypriot, Minoan, Sardic etc. which you
> allude to, what evidence is there that they acquired dogs through
> trade rather than bringing the canines with them when they first

came

> to their islands themselves? Note that I am not denying the
> possibility of trade, I am just questioning the necessity of it in
> explaining the spread of dogs.

True, we might do almost without it. But look at what we have: two
species (dog and pig) that were domesticated in SE Asia, an area in
which the Austronesian-speakers are the traders, while speakers of
the other language groups are landlubbers, furthermore that these
Austronesian-speakers even today are associated with these two
animals, and to top it, that these two species are considered unclean
in the Middle East, as though it were a reflection of an old
controversy between trading Austronesians and sedentary AfroAsiatic-
speakers. It's almost too tempting, right?

>
> Since the perceived common root for a canine term in many different
> language groups is probably illusory anyhow,

I don't think so. Here are Orël & Stolbova's "dog"-words for Hamito-
Semitic:

HSED 917: *ger- "dog, cub"
HSED 1425: *kan- "dog"
HSED 1434: *ka[ya]r- "dog"
HSED 1498: *kun- "dog"
HSED 1511: *küHen- "dog"
HSED 1521: *kV(w|y)Vl- "dog, wolf"

This looks like a several times borrowed word.

>the following is moot,
> but just for the sake of discussion- how does your hypothesis

account

> for the fact that in some cases the word applies to hyenas instead

of

> dogs?

(A) it is a mere accident of chance when it occurs if it

> happens to apply to hyenas, but is definitely of significance if it
> happens to apply to dogs; or

(B) the Austronesians were carrying on a

> long distance trade in hyenas during the Neolithic.
>

It's a good point. I haven't thought about it, so I haven't got an
answer.

Torsten