--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "elmeras2000" <jer@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
> wrote:
> . It
> > occurred to me that PIE *albh- "white(?)" follows the same
pattern
> > (Latin Albis, German Elbe; Slavic Labe, Russian lebed "swan").
> Which
> > is nice, since it's also a river and conforms to Krahe's other
> > reconstructions.
>
> Hej, Torsten, let me just whisper this before anyone notices:
> They've got a thing called liquid metathesis in Slavic, whereby Lab-
> can reflect Proto-Slavic *olb- (from *albh-).
>
I think they call it a stage whisper? Somebody forgot to put a
consonant in front of *olb-, or I would have recognised the
metathesis. Out goes that piece of evidence. Which doesn't matter
much; the fact that the bird name language alternates with an /a-/
and that Old European is full of /a/'s (and Kuhn explains away most
of its occurrences of /e/~/o/) means they must have been loaned into
IE at the same stage and time.
Kuhn also notes that oldest PIE words for cattle raising and
agriculture (Viehzucht und Ackerbau, to avoid terminological
confusion) have almost no /a/'s, whereas the names of younger
domesticated animals, ie goat, goose, duck and chicken, is full
of /a/'s. According to Gimbutas, the kurgan/corded ware culture
overran Europe in several waves, the first ones only incompletely; so
if assume the last wave did not spread from the former wave, but
overran it completely (and then some), then the river names would be
Pre-PIE loanwords in (western) PIE.
Torsten