Re: Existence of PIE

From: tgpedersen
Message: 51931
Date: 2008-01-27

> Will the 'war' words lile _guerre_ and _guerra_ do? What's the
> Proto-Romance - *guerra? The absence of a Romanian reflex might be
> viewed as suspicious.

I think they will. The 'war' word would be *werra (cf Dutch 'in de
war' "confused, jumbled", German Wirren "times of confusion, of armed
incidents", verwirrt "confused") and it would be a a word of the
language of the legions in Western Europe. The fact that vado: > Fr.
vais, but vadum > gué, where the latter was classified as Germanic,
not Latin, shows western Proto-Romance must have had a system similar
to English: /v/ for Latin, /w/ for Germanic words.


Torsten