--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> On 2007-08-10 10:35, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/43771
> > http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/48662
> > http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/46346
> >
> > Connection with *saiwa-la- "soul" (water creature)?
>
> Incidentally, the 'seal' word is *selxaz, with short *e
> (diphthongised to <eo> in non-Anglian OE, hence <seolh>; cf. ON
> selr). The only thing it shares with the 'sea' word is the initial
> *s.
It's not certain to be IE.
from Schrijver: Lost Languages in Northern Europe,
in Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European
"
The second substratum language I shall label "the language of bird
names", as a number of non-Indo-European bird names in western
Indo-European languages provide evidence on some significant points of
the structure of that language (Schrijver 1997). Most importantly, it
had a prefix a-, which was probably stressed and accompanied by
syncope of vowels in the rest of the word; the language had fricatives
such as x, ð, and it had a diphthong alien to Germanic and Celtic,
something like [a&], which was rendered as a in British Celtic and ai
in Germanic.
"
Torsten