Re: More Chinese milk, lick, tongue

>"

...

> 14 In my previous work (including the first version of this paper),
> I had assumed, wrongly it now appears, that the meaning 'poison' had
> been derived from 'cure, medicine', as Fr. poison, NG pharmaki,
> etc., the meaning 'cure' itself being from the notion of 'care for',
> which has an occurrence in Yi Jing (hexagram 7). However, the
> passage in question comes from the Tuan Zhuan .. .., a late addition
> to the Yi Jing text. The meaning 'care for' thus cannot be shown to
> be ancient. Moreover the meaning 'cure' is slightly later than the
> meaning 'poison', and under my previous explanation the collocation
> with 'bitter' in the early examples is unexplained.
> "
>
>
> Semantically, the best fit (for *luk/duok) would be "bodily fluid",
> specifically one of the four cardinal bodily fluids (blood, phlegm,
> black bile, yellow bile). Then in 'eating dried meat, find [duok]
> Small inconvenience. No catastrophy.' it means "fluid, non-dried
> matter" (as that theory predicts there would be). I think Sagart's
> previous assumption, in his note 14, is the right one. This would
> mean that milk was used at first for medicinal purposes, possibly to
> redress a 'lack of phlegm'?

I learn from my TV set that medical researchers are introducing the
use of colostrum, raw milk, in the treatment of skin disease. With a
suitable interpretation of a theory of four cardinal fluids, milk
would have been found effective for some ailments.
Odd, BTW, that *dhe:- (*dheG-?) means both "suckle" and "make", and
*dhewgh- means both "milk" and "produce". Is the "milk" senses the
original here? The word(s), representing this hot new technology,
might have become so overused in transferred senses as to become a
general expression. Note the importance of cows and milk in creation
myths.
Cf.
http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=config&morpho=0&basename=\data\alt\altet&first=361
"
Proto-Altaic: *dile
Meaning: udder
Turkic: *jelin
Mongolian: *delen,
Tungus-Manchu: *dilba
"


Torsten