[tied] Re: 'Dog' revisited

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> > 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.

Hi Torsten- and if you make the further assumption that Piotr and all
his linguistic colleagues, who say that the supposed commonality re
the term for dogs is illusory, are correct, then it works fine. :-)

> >
> > 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,

Your statement is a wonderful example of two wrongs making a right.
As has been pointed out, the point of origin for domesticated dogs
was supposedly East Asia, not South East Asia. Fortunately for the
tatters of your theory, at that time the predecessor language of
Austronesian was probably spoken in East Asia and not South East Asia
too.

However, whether any group deserves the description "the traders" at
that time has not been established.

while speakers of

> the other language groups are landlubbers,

I don't see why being landbound would have been an impediment to the
spread of dogs- it wasn't to the spread of wolves.

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?

Evidently right in your case, but not in mine. Anyway there is a
chronological problem with your hypothesis re the uncleanness of
pigs. There is no evidence that pigs were regarded in the Middle East
as unclean until the emergence of the Hebrew tribes c. 1100 BCE (one
way archeologists judge whether a site of that time was Hebrew or
Canaanite is the presence or absence of pig bones). There is too big
a gap between the introduction of pigs and the emergence the taboo
against them to fit with your hypothesis. I don't know enough about
the history of attitudes towards dogs to judge that aspect.

> >
> > 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.

If so, it would only show a borrowing (or common ancestry) between
PAA and PIE, not a chain stretching across Eurasia.

Regards,
Ned