Re: [tied] Re: Latin pinso etc.

----- Original Message -----
From: "alex" <alxmoeller@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 12:23 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Latin pinso etc.


> At least I don't see any
> argument for sustaining it is more probable the posiblity of *serpens >
> Sarpe ( what about ns > s > i here Piotr??????????)

<serpens> tended to become <serpe:s> in late Latin because of the general
confusion of <e:s> and <ens> through the frequent denasalisation of the
latter (Appendix Probi warns: "Hercules non Herculens", "mensa non mesa").
This led to the development of a new paradigm in some varieties of VLat.:
<serpes>, <serpem>, <serpis> instead of <serpens>, <serpentem>, <serpentis>.
Romanian is not isolated. Reflexes of *serpe(m) are found in several other
Romance dialects, so this protoform is not an ad hoc trick to explain the
Romanian word.

> als the probability
> of *serp- >Sarpe _even_ in a satem language? Where is the absolutely
> Latin feature here which differentiated the word from PIE root and which
> let no other way as to derive it without the help of Latin?

How else, if not via Latin, do you propose to explain the final /-e/? By
invoking an arbitrary "suffix"? What suffix, namely? Ockham, come here for a
moment, and bring the razor.

> Where is that? There is no one. OK, we loose the time that way. There
> are roots which does not change too much in 5000 years and there are
> roots they do change. ( see Latin "palma" > Rom. "palma"= 2000 years of
> attestation).

Bla bla blah. What's that to do with the matter under discussion? Do you
want to say that if Romanian is an descendant of Latin then there should be
no differences between the two?

> The root *serp- is one of these roots they do not change too much and
> there is nothing on the earth which oblige us to go with that word
> trough a Latin filter since there is _no need_.

Unfortunately for you, *serp- did change in the ancestor of Albanian,
producing *zerp- already before the Roman period. If the Romanian word were
substratal and Albanian-like, it would reflect a voiced fricative, which it
doesn't. The Albanian word also involves a suffix of which there is no trace
in Romanian. Maybe you want to claim that <$arpe> comes from some different
(non-Albanoid) substrate, but since there's nothing wrong with the Latin
etymology, the assumption of a totally unknown substrate as its source is
simply gratuitous. I don't have to prove that your scenario is impossible,
just as I don't have to prove that Neptune hasn't got a satellite composed
of blue cheese. The burden of the proof is on the shoulders of the proponent
of an eccentric hypothesis.

Piotr