Re: [tied] Re: PIE's closest relatives

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 09:03:44 +0000, Marco Moretti
<marcomoretti69@...> wrote:

>I think the same, that Halloran's hypothesis of Sumerian invention
>process has a crackpot smell. I never said that Sumerian is entirely
>derived from expressive items. The word /a/ is surely a phonetic
>consumption of a longer, more ancient form, but nobody ensure us
>that /*ab/ is a credible ancestor.

Given such forms as abzu (> Akk. absû) "subterranean water" (written
ZU.AB), it's a good possibility.

>> <urudu> is too long to be a native Sumerian word. It's a
>borrowing, and
>> the source is quite clearly PIE *h1roudh-.
>
>In Sumerian there are many long words, but those are compounds:
>
>/lugal/ king (lit. man + great, big)
>/urugal/ Ades (lit. city + big)
>/kubabbar/ silver (lit. metal + white)
>
>and so on.

Yes, and they are written as compounds: lú.gal, uru.gal, kug.ud.

The word <urudu>, on the other hand, is written using a single uncompounded
sign, which has nothing to do with either ùr(u) or d(r)ù.

>If the source would be PIE *h1roudh-, we still must explain from
>where this root was borrowed. Sumerian worked precious metals already
>in remote times, while IE speakers hadn't this technology. So IE
>metal names are borrowed from more "civilizated" people. No one of IE
>metal name is really native (even if ultimate source is often
>unknown).

*h1roudh- is certainly native in IE. Copper working is older in the
Balkans than in Mesopotamia, which means that the Proto-Sumerians in
Eastern Anatolia or Northern Mesopotamia may well have acquired their
copper-working vocabulary from the Proto-Indoeuropeans in the Balkans
and/or Western Anatolia: urudu < *h1roudh(u/r) "copper", tabira [=
urudu.nagar] < *dhabr-os "[copper]smith".


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...