Re: [tied] Whence Grimm?

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

> 05-04-2004 14:02, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > I forgot to mention that the saddle (according to what I could

find

> > on the net) is considered to be a Sarmatian invention. The

Iranian

> > and Indic mismatching cognates of "saddle" that Piotr provided

are

> > from Avestan and Sanskrit repectively, so they don't disprove the
> > assumption of a Sarmatian provenance for *saDula. Apart from it

being

> > Iranian, we don't know much about Sarmatian.
>
> Well, at least we know that it was a collection of Northeast

Iranian

> dialects, and if Alanic was a variety of Sarmatian, then the

Ossetes are

> speakers of Modern Sarmatian.
>
> "They don't disprove the assumption" is not a legitimate argument.

If so

> little is known about Sarmatian, you could use this convenient

ignorance

> as an excuse for the wildest claims about it, just repeating the

same

> weary statement: "It has not been disproved ...". But ignorance is

no

> substitute for positive evidence. If you want to put forward an
> etymological proposal, the burden of proof in on your shoulders.

You

> can't shift it on the critics.
>

True in principle, but I don't think it applies here. If the last
half of *saDula is the "tool" suffix PIE *-tlo, the first half would
be *sed- and not any other ablaut form, judging from the other "seat"
words, and /e/ > /a/ is characteristic of the II languages. That
together with the general assumption that the saddle is a Sarmatian
invention makes the idea that *saDula is a loanword from an II
language at least plausible.

Torsten