--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Daniel J. Milton" <dmilt1896@...> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@> wrote:
>
> > > > I was watching on TV how to make Japanese swords. Tempering,
> > > > by plunging the blade into water, is important.
> ........
> > The semantic development I propose is:
> > "tempered" ("dipped"), used of blades ->
> > "of special quality, well-crafted", used of everything.
> > Pokorny doesn't get beyond the last meaning.
> >
> ******
> But if Pokorny is right, *dabh- meant 'fitted' (or 'well-crafted')
> in PIE (or something ancestral to Armenian, Germanic, Slavic, and
> Italic), predating the forging of iron.
> I believe tempering by chilling is only for iron.
Latin faber has a dubious etymology as a Latin word, according to
Ernout-Meillet, further, it has /a/, which makes it a 'mot populaire',
and those I believe were borrowed from some substrate by the Italics
in their old home in central Europe.
According to
http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Steel_-_History_of_iron_and_steelmaking/id/607442
"The oldest quench-hardened steel artifact is a knife found on Cyprus
at a site dated to 1100 BC."
This is time enough to loan the word to Armenian and some
'Atlantic'-containing substrate language in NWEurope (the vowel
alternation in *dhabh-/*dhubh- which Møller handles as vowel infixes
is more likely an a/u-ablaut, which would identify that language as
Kuhn's ar/ur-language, probably Semitic; the -p-/-bb-/-pp-/-mp-
alternations in the *dubb- set of words simultaneously identifies iot
as Schrijver's language of geminates. In that case the semantics of
the 'goodness'-words of Germanic and Slavic is secondary to the their
use in iron-making, as I claimed.
Torsten