Re: [tied] russian vor [was: IE thematic presents and the origin of

george knysh wrote:

> *****GK: One wonders, then, why it wasn't borrowed
> into Ukrainian or Belarusian (both groups, esp. the
> former, geographicallhy closer to the Greeks.)
> Russian, on the other hand, is contiguous to many
> Finnic dialects (not just Finlandic if that's what
> people think of as Finnic here) which had the word
> (e.g. vargas in Vepsian), so a northern source does
> sound more plausible. BTW is Lithuanian vagas (sp?)
> =thief, at all related (it is missing the "r"...?*****

Also, Byzantine Greek <pH> /f/ would not have been replaced by Slavic *v
in a loan. The normal substitute for such a sound was /p/ in the oldest
layer of borrowings, and then /f/ as the Slavic languages acquired such
a phoneme.

Piotr