Torsten:
> It so happens that *arud-/*raud- > German Erz "ore", Finnish
> rauta "iron" etc (and in this case Sumerian <urudu> "copper" is one
> of the glosses of Schrijver's North European substrate 'language of
> bird names' with cognates in Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Baltic
> Finnic.
What made Schrijver to conclude that this stem is not-IE if it is met in
such a wide (both geographically and genetically) range of IE languages?
The "ore" meaning is also presented in Slavic languages - *ruda. This word
doesn't look like a loanword from Germanic (at least for me, perhaps
professional linguists have another opinion?). Besides, there is a bunch of
Slavic cognates (I give here only Russian variants) - rdet' 'to shine red',
ryziy 'of red hair, of orange color', rumyaniy 'ruddy', rzhavchina (Fe
oxide - Fe2O3) etc.. The origin from IE "red" word seems obvious. Cognates
can be easily found everywhere.
Another question - is the IE "red" word a proper IE word (i.e. a Nostratic
heritage) or an early loan (perhaps from Sumerian)? Illich-Svitych doesn't
list it among the Nostratic stems. On the other hand nothing suggests that
the early Indo-Europeans could imported the copper smelting technology and
therefore the word for copper from Sumerians. It is known that all the
Eneolithic cultures of the European steppes (Sredniy Stog, Khvalynsk and
related cultures) used copper from the Carpathian sources, therefore they
must have acquainted this technology from local cultures (in all probability
from the Tripolie-Cucuteni one), not from Mesopotamia or Caucasus. Buy the
way, the Balkan copper metallurgy was at least not worse than the
contemporary copper metallurgy from the Near East.
Alexander