Re: [tied] Re: Ossetic fox

On 2007-02-02 05:04, Gordon Barlow wrote:

> As to the derivation of any animal's name from an IE name: I make no claim
> one way or another. I think it was Piotr who once wrote that IE as a single
> posited language without dialects can have had only a momentary existence,
> and I agree with that line.

Did I say so? I could more easily imagine myself saying that PIE never
existed without any dialects. That's what one expects of any natural
language with enough speakers to guarantee its long-term survival. One
could fancy (but scarcely demonstrate) that the actual common ancestor
of the IE family was just one of the PIE dialects and that the
consequences of that fact were similar to the founder effect in biology,
but even if that "bottleneck scenario" should have been the case there
would be no reason to assume that the parent dialect was "pure", i.e.
free of interdialectal borrowings and its natural share of grammatical
and/or lexical variation.

> There is too much danger of over-shooting and
> under-shooting for anyone to be sure of any IE word.
>
> I will say no more than that the words at issue are compatible - perfectly
> compatible - with variants of English "wolf' - and the Latin word for "fox",
> too. My general line of enquiry with words is: what cognates are
> recognisable in the dialects of England, and how might they have become
> differentiated through the interaction of speakers of the dialects?
>
> "Lupus" and "vulpus" are clearly dialectal variants, so the origin might not
> have been all that far back from their currency.

They are admittedly similar in Latin, but their cognates in other
languages are far less similar (Skt. vr.'ka- vs. lopa:s'a, Gk. lukos vs.
alo:pe:ks), suggesting secondary convergence (and contamination?) in
Latin rather than dialectal divergence in PIE. The variation
*wl.'kWo-/*lukWo- in the 'wolf' word is perhaps of PIE date, but that's
a different problem.

Piotr