Re: PIE *a -- a preliminary checklist

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "jouppe" <jouppe@...> wrote:

>
> > BTW, interestingly, he has
> > http://koti.welho.com/jschalin/lexicon.htm
> > both Fi. kalja "weak beer" and Fi. olut "beer" corresponding to the
> > PIE "ale" word. Now the latter is an areal word, covering Germanic,
> > Baltic, Baltic Finnic and Slavic, it seems it must have belonged to
> > some erased culture of the area. So did the older loan survive two
> > invasions?

> The two words are semantically distinguishable, even today. 'kalja'
> is an artesanal home made (weak) beer. 'olut' is a beer made from raw
> materials and by techniques learned from iron age foreigners.
>

True, but that was not my point. If 'olut' is an areal substrate word
then it was picked up by the Finns when they arrived in their present
territory, which means they picked up 'kalja' somewhere else. The
reason I think Germanic *aluþ- (and the corresponding roots in Baltic
and Slavic) is probably a loan from the substrate, but PIE language of
the area, from *leu- "dissolve" (that sense would also take care of
the semantic gap to the proposed cognate, Latin alu:men, Germ. Alun),
with an a- prefix as in Schrijver's substrate 'bird language' (Germn.
Amsel, Ameise, Du. merle, mier).
However, as to the the PIE-ness of *leu itself, see
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/44457


Torsten