Re: The meaning of life: PIE. *gWiH3w-

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> On 2008-02-11 09:54, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > The Germanic words for "rice" clearly have no initial/w/ either.
> > Therefore they shouldn't be confused with all those pre-IA
> > *vrijhi-, Pashtu wriZE, Greek o'ryza, o'ryzon etc?
>
> We know when and how this word found its way into English etc., and
> how to account for its shape, including the loss of the original
> initial. What I'm arguing against is, in the first place, the
> reconstruction of an IE *wrugHjo- for 'rye', as proposed by Pokorny.
> The _only_ reason why he posits an initial *w is the existence of
> Thrac. briza. He doesn't offer any comments on the absence of *w- in
> Germanic.

True.

> A wanderwort like *wrij^Hi- might of course explain the form (but
> not the meaning!)

But several items of the *wrij^Hi- word family mean "millet" and other
non-rice cereals.

> of the Thracian word quite nicely, but it wouldn't work so well for
> Balto-Slavic and Germanic (to get *rugHi- one would have to admit an
> irregular treatment of both the initial cluster and the vowel,

You're arguing something like: "we know when and how the "rice" word
found its way into Germanic but not how its cousin for "rye" got into
B.-S. and Germanic and therefore the rice word was loaned into
Germanic and the "rye" word wasn't". This sounds like a parody, of
course. Please point out where I'm mistaken.

> and if the word got into Europe via the Iranian languages, why do we
> have a reflex of *gH, not *g^H, in Balto-Slavic?).

Who said 'Iranian'?

> There's also a semantic problem: why 'rice' --> 'rye'? Rye is not a
> recent import into Eastern and Central Europe. It's been widely
> cultivated here at least since the Bronze Age as one of the main
> crops and THE bread cereal (not to mention vodka :)). Why borrow a
> word for it from peoples who did not cultivate rye at all?

It's not indigenous to Central and Eastern Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rye

They must have been experimenting all over the place to find new crop
grasses once they heard of the success of their neighbors.

> I find it safer to assume, until proven otherwise, that
> *rugHi-/*rugHjo- is a separate term.

Separated, not separate.

Denmark is ryebread country too. FWIW, some Danish nationalist writer
on Schleswig claimed there was an old 'taste barrier' between
Schleswig and Holstein; we find their pumpernickel too coarse, they
find our ryebread sickly sweet.


Torsten