From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 59924
Date: 2008-09-02
----- Original Message -----
From: "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
>
> The weakness of my explanation is that I have not found evidence that
> <accipiter> ORIGINALLY referred only to headfirst-falling birds of
> prey and was later generalized to similar birds. Nevertheless,
> the 'fast flier' explanation overlooks the fact that many birds fly
> fast, such as the <swift>, which is not hawk-like at all, and
> the 'acceptor' explanation could equally well apply to eagles, owls,
> and indeed all predatory birds. Both of these also suffer from
> phonetic difficulties more severe than a simple haplology.
>
> DGK
>
=
This is like saying that blackbirds are not the only one bird to be black.
Actually female blackbirds are brown.
I don't know if it's been point at,
but such a syntagm as *ad-caput-pet-
should be followed by -â- in Latin,
like in prae-caput-â- > precipita-te
In that case, accipi-pit- should be **accipitâ-rius or the like.
I can't see what's wrong with a simple fast-flyer > accipiter ?
Arnaud