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

On 2008-02-11 19:05, tgpedersen wrote:

> 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.

I didn't say that *rugHi- couldn't be a loan. But in order to argue that
is is a wanderwort one would have to propose a plausible scenario
specifying the source of the borrowing and its historical trajectory,
and explaining why it looks the way it does.

>> 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'?

It's supposed to be a Dravidian loan with an original _affricate_ for
which Indo-Iranian speakers substituted their *j^H. That affricate
wasn't and had never been a Satemised dorsal stop in IE. Whoever acted
as the intermediary between Indo-Iranian and the languages of Central
Europe, the replacement of a palatal affricate by *gH is unlikely,
_especially_ in Balto-Slavic.

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

Well, neither are sheep, yet there are IE words for 'ewe', 'ram', 'lamb'
and 'wool'. Most of out crops come from the Near East, and rye is no
exception. The rye plant apparently began its career as a weed growing
among wheat and barley and that's how it travelled from Anatolia to
Europe -- like a stowaway. It never played any important role in its
homeland -- some early farming communities in Anatolia experimented with
rye domestication but apparently abandoned the idea...

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

... Therefore, it seems that the domestication of rye in Europe was the
outcome of a successful local experiment, not an echo of its success
elsewhere.

>> I find it safer to assume, until proven otherwise, that
>> *rugHi-/*rugHjo- is a separate term.
>
> Separated, not separate.

That remains to be proved.

> 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.

You mean typical Danish rugbrød? It's delicious, though white, crisp
sourdough rye bread is the favourite kind in Poland. It's one of the
things that make me feel really homesick in wheat-bread countries :).

Piotr