Re: Sun salt

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>
> > Yes, I must accept /a/ as a PIE phoneme, since it sometimes

occurs

> > in environments where it would cause even greater embarrassment

to

> > posit /H2e/ or /eH2/. Some examples are *yag^- 'sacrifice', *sal-
> > 'salt', *na:s- 'nose', but there are not many.
>
> I was wondering if there might be a way to connect sun, *sh2-wel-,
> with salt, *sh2el-? (also sea, salt water). Semantically it would

make

> sense, since the way you got salt was by letting sea water

evaporate

> in the sun in dammed-in fields (note also the various Germanic

verbs

> in sw-, German schwelen "smolder", sweat (*swed-), seethe (*seud-)).
>
>
> Torsten

**********
Solar evaporation of sea water is one way to get salt. Mining
salt deposits is another. The latter was probably preceded by simply
scraping efflorescences off rocks of the proper chemistry (usually
nasty bitter stuff but I've done it in a emergency myself).
So your suggestion, if true, has implications for the homeland of
IE, which is generally considered lacking originally maritime words.
Dan Milton