Re: Existence of PIE

[The HTML part has been removed -- Piotr.]


Tsalam? t?ob

Guerre with -g- is a Parisian French-made word out of Frankish werra.
Guerra with -g- is an Italian inherited word from Longobardic self-made guerra.

Compare :
Trève "truce" a Frankish word. Intervocal -w- never become -g- in French.
Tregua an Italian inherited word from Longobardic self-made tregua.
Longobardic turns -w- into *-gw- in all positions (Cf. Norse)
Both from *triwwa.

Romance has nothing to do with all this in the first place.

Arnaud

----- Original Message -----
From: tgpedersen
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, January 27, 2008 11:40 AM
Subject: [Courrier indésirable] Re: [tied] Existence of PIE



> 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