--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
> To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Friday, May 14, 2004 12:59 PM
> Subject: [tied] Re: An odd etymology
>
>
> > All under the assumption that the word is a bona fide IE word and
has
> made the trip all the way from PIE in all branches. Note Basque
> <aizkora>. If it's a loan word, these inconsistencies suddenly look
> acceptable.
>
> Once you start permuting segments at will, anything can be made to
look like
> almost anything else. Basque <aizkora> is SIMILAR to many other
things, e.g.
> to Polish siekiera < *sekyra and Latin secu:ris (s-k-r), both
meaning 'axe'.
> How do you decide which (if any) of two or more competing but
mutually
> exclusive similarity-based proposals is preferable?
>
On axe:
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Hg.html
and double-axe?:
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Opr.html
(search for 'axe')
One more thing about Greek <pelekus> "axe" etc:
English has <pole-axe>, which has nothing to do with a pole.
Danish has <bol-økse>, which has little to do with <bol> "tree trunk".
Imitating Vennemann's method, I think I'll propose that these two
words are folk etymology reinterpretations of the original,
corresponding to <pelekus> etc.
Note the b/p alternation. Feilberg's "Ordbog over det jyske
Almuemaal" has so many initial b-/p- and p-/f- alternations that it
devotes a special section to them at the beginning of p-.
One of them is (appox.) begá:s-, peg:ás "baggage". I might dismiss
this as a fluke, a variation on a loan of <baggage> from French, but
respectable dictionaries (Falk/Terp) tell me English <pack> and <bag>
are somehow related. Is the stressed suffix (also in Engl. <moráss>,
Da. <morads>, supposedly from Germanic
*mar(a)-isko > Fr marais) then much older? An alternation b-/p- in
Nordwestblock would be PIE *bh-/p-.
Torsten