--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...>
wrote:
> [commenting his own earlier statement that "Marathi Koti and
> Hindi Karode means 10,000,000 a multiple of kentum"]:
>
> I thought of the above after reading the following (Abbi 1997)
> Bangani word.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/6ynf4f
>
> " kO:~tia 'several hundred, hundreds of' < PIE *kmto-...
> Surprisingly, we found this word attested by some informants in the
> metaphoric meaning of 'many', 'too many' etc... This definitely
> draws our attention to the possibility of this word of Kentum
> origin as suggested by Zoller (1988,1989) or being associated
> to some Western IE language. "
It actually seems that C.P. Zoller's Bangani term kO:~tia (/O/ =
open-mid back rounded vowel; /~/ = nasalization), which he later
emended to kO~tia, cannot be the reflex of a Proto-Bangani *koto-
'hundred' < PIE *kmto-. In fact, the word as transcribed by Abbi
(see the link above) doesn't mean 'hundred', but rather '(very)
many' and, by extension, 'several hundreds'!
See what the perfidous George van Driem, Zoller's arch-enemy in the
Bangani debate, got the Indo-Europeanist R.P.S. Beekes to write
about this hypothesized Bangani "kentum" word for '100' in the
English version of his work _Comparative Indo-European Linguistics:
An Introduction_ (Amsterdam 1995, pp. 19-20):
http://tinyurl.com/4jqncc
"My Leiden colleague George van Driem went to the Bangani area in
December 1994, and observed that these forms are incorrect and
especially their supposed meanings. Most words have good Indo-Aryan
etymologies. Thus *koto is kiti 'how much'... This is the end of the
Bangani story."
Thus, Zoller's kO~tia would actually be Indo-Aryan kiti etc. 'how
much, how many, anything' < Sanskrit kiyatta 'how great' -- see
Turner's CDIAL at
http://tinyurl.com/47o8yk
Regards,
Francesco