[Nostratic-L] Re: An example

> I see. So, OC still had the consonantal clusters, from
> which tones arose later. Yet still, Old Chinese was
> spoken approximately from the 12th to the 3rd century
> BC (approximately), wasn't it?

> Then, the source/target
> of borrowing could have only been an Indoeuropean
> language or dialect - hardly PIE itself. It could have
> been an early Indo-Aryan language, for example, or a
> language of the pre-Tocharian type, or sim.

Or it could have been Sino-Tibetan -> PIE.

> Anyway, I wonder what those prefixes meant or what
> their functions were (e.g. in *galakt- and *melg).
>

I'll get back on that.

> The Old Chinese -> Indoeuropean direction is possible,
> of course, but I doubt it was OC -> PIE due to the
> chronology (but I may well be mistaken). We might,
> however, think of the predecessor of Old Chinese
> (which I know little about, unfortunately).

S(ino-)T(ibetan)

> Also, I wonder what the most common semantic source of
> milk is. Since, as Miguel pointed out, the *galakt-
> root is only attested in Greek and Latin, my
> pre-Tocharian suggestion gets weakened a bit.
>

Greek *galakt-, Latin *lact-, Germanic and Slavic *melk- (note that
Germanic has -k-, which it shouldn't).

> I'm not sure what semantic shifts could lead to
> "milk", but let's consider the following expressions,
> more or less connected to the concept of "milk", from
> languages that did have linguistic contacts with
> Indoeuropean languages, as well as, perhaps, PIE
> itself:
>
> Kartvelian comparanda:
>
> PKartvelian *.qwel- "cheese"
> PKartvelian *lok.- "to lick"
> PKartvelian *loq.- "insipid, sweet"

> Uralic comparanda:
>
> Saam (Lapp): lak'ca^ -âvc- (N) "cream; thick sour
> cream" (a loan? from where?)

Arabic has a root for "lick" something like l-s^-, OC something like
*lVk- (by memory). But maybe it's not surprising there's an /l/ in
words for "tonge" and "lick".

> I'm not claiming anything at this point. The
> expressions above may well be ordinary look-alikes.

It does look a bit suspicious.


Torsten