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

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

> 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

************
It's quite interesting that Alb. seems to have basic root with *mer-
in verb <përmjerr> 'to piss, to pee, to piddle', <përmirrem> 'to wet
oneself, to pass water> (probably with expressiv /rr/), besides many
place names, where the river flows across them, like: Mir•ushë,
Mir•akë, Mir•at•ovc, Mir•enë, even very intriguing and much
discussed horonym Mirë•dita in Albanian and place name in Macedonia
too.

Konushevci