Okay, I have got to be the biggest fool among linguistically-interested people. I told you all about how I asked the Kurdish hairdresser what the Kurdish word for "water" is, hoping to have a descendant of IE *wodr/n, and she replied with a word that sounded exactly like the North American English pronunciation of "water". Well, that's because she was merely repeating what I said. She was just confirming that I asked for the word "water" -- and then proceeded to forget to answer me, being very busy at her counter. She did not say it in the intonation of a question, which is why I thought she was answering my question, not repeating me. I said "So the English and Kurdish words are the same", but when she answered that "many words are the same", it was a misunderstanding of what I was saying, she wasn't really sure of what she was saying and was not really paying attention. I asked her today what the Kurdish word for "water" is
and she replied /aw/, which is /av/ in Iran. I asked her if Kurdish had /w/ and she said yes (but said that it is /v/ in the north), but when I asked her for examples in initial position she had none, so maybe she was thinking of medial and final position. So I tried to think of other words of IE that had initial *w that might be preserved in Kurdish, so one that I asked was the word for "see", to which she replied /bi:nim/ (/dabi:nim/ or similar in the present tense). I suspected that perhaps this is from *weid- and that Kurdish has /b/ for initial /w/. I'm sure some of you know the answer to this, so I'll wait for your replies before looking it up myself.
So I apologize for misleading you (albeit completely unintentionally, I misunderstood her because her reply sounded deceptively like an answer, not a request for confirmation which it was). I actually laughed my head off as I was coming home thinking about the gross misunderstanding.
Andrew