[tied] Re: PIE's closest relatives

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Alexander Stolbov" <astolbov@...>
wrote:

> 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?

North European 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.
>

The relationship is obvious, true. The direction of derivation isn't.
The alternative explanation is that PIE *h1roudh-ro- means "copper-
colored" and not that copper is "the red metal". The color red is not
very common in nature.

Torsten