From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 60460
Date: 2008-09-28
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Jarrette" <anjarrette@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
> ========
> Yes, that's the reason to think it's borrowed in Eastern PIE.
Here, by "Eastern PIE" you mean Greek, do you not? The root doesn't
occur in the Eastern PIE branch of Indo-Iranian.
===========
My idiosyncratic classification of PIE is like this :
- Anatolian
- Western : Italic, Celtic, NWB, (maybe Albanian)
- Eastern (or Central) : Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Armenian,
- Far eastern : Germanic, Tocharian, Yeniseian
Arnaud
> ======
>My reasoning was flawed. For some reason I confused 4000 BC, the
>conservative estimate of the splitting-time of the Indo-Europeans,
>with the time of the first appearance of agriculture. So you can
>ignore my last sentence, _it_ is erroneous.
======
No problem,
Nobody's perfect.
Arnaud
========
>
> It seems you are finally agreeing to the fact this word cannot be a
cognate,
> whatever the time it entered IE languages ?
>
> Arnaud
I think my reasoning would imply that it was borrowed _late_ enough to
be reflected by *sar- in Latin substrates (since /z/ has changed
little in this substrate word), and _late_ enough not to show evidence
of a change *z > y in eastern IE, and therefore so late as to be less
likely to be reflected by *H2- in western IE, if it indeed came from
Semitic *z_r_&-. But since it _is_ reflected by *H2- in western IE, I
would think it therefore is not borrowed from this Semitic root. But
of course you have implied earlier that the time of the *z > y change
is irrelevant to this root since the eastern languages borrowed it not
in the *z- form but in the later western *H2- form. So based on that
it could still be a loan from Semitic *z_r_&- (or Kartvelian *zil-).
But I still don't see why it absolutely _cannot_ be a cognate (you
mean native to PIE?) that only survived in the western branches of IE.
Are there no cognates that were not borrowed from Semitic or other
language family that survive only in western IE and not in Indo-Iranian?
AJ
===========
If I understand your point,
you are saying that it could be a dialectal word limited to Western PIE that
later on spread to Eastern PIE ?
I would agree with that.
But the conclusion is that in all cases, PIE then split before -8000 BC.
Because you need PIE to be already split in at least two branches.
Arnaud