Re: [tied] Re: Almost NO Indian or Iranian scholars active in IE li

29-02-2004 00:28, mkelkar2003 wrote:

> "For example, a hypothesis was advanced regarding the original
> homeland of the Indo-Europeans taking the postulated world *mori,
> "sea" to have been known only in Europe and Ossetic. But this is
> wrong since these linguists d(o) not know that Kashmiri, an Indo-Aryan
> language, has precisely the same word in the orginal meaning of swamp,
> marsh land or lake (p. 27)."

The distribution of *mori- means nothing by itself -- not enough at any
rate to base any hypotheses on. At most, its attested semantics suggests
that the people who had it in their vocabulary lived not far from some
kind of 'big water'. If the word was really PIE it may have been lost in
some groups for whatever reason. If Ossetic mal 'a body of deep water'
indeed comes from inherited *marja- < *mor-j-o- (cf. Slavic *morje)
rather than being a loan, that can only mean that the word did exist in
Proto-Iranian and has been lost in most of its offspring (cf. PIE
*pork^o- 'young pig', _almost_ but not _completely_ lost in Indo-Iranian).

> Even in Marathi "mori" means a place to wash, which in the old days
> before plumbing must have meant a place where water is readily
> available. In an urabn environment people now use it to indicate a
> bathroom or sometimes a sink. This goes back to my original comment
> about Indian scholars, for whatever reason, and i am not accusing any
> one of anything, being marginalized in the field of IE linguistic.

I leave the etymology to professional Indologists, who are better
qualified to judge if we are dealing with a surviving reflex of *mori-
or with a chance resemblance. It's beyond my understanding in what way
this question is connected with your original comment. Anyway, the
linguistic question is welcome here, but, please, let's keep the OT
stuff out of Cybalist.

Piotr