Re: hunt

> Pokorny's derivation of Gmc. *drenk- by nasalization of PIE *dHreg^- is not bad. I see however that his *dHera:gH- (whence 'draw' etc.) is only represented in Gmc. and Slavic, and /g/ in the latter makes it hard to associate with *dHreg^- anyway. He brings in *tragH- (Lat. <traho:>, <tra:gula>, etc.; "dissimilation of spirants" in Proto-Latin from *dHra(:)gH- is ad hoc).
>
> If your water-transport-word theory indeed holds water, perhaps we are dealing with a PIE root *treh2- extended by *gH (thus no root-restriction problem); this *treh2gH-, *tra:gH- (in IE dialects losing aspiration, *tra:g-) might have been borrowed into Proto-Lappic as *Dra(:)G-, then back into both Gmc. and Slavic. Gutenbrenner suggested a similar mechanism for getting 'boar' into Gmc. beside 'farrow' etc., *pork- or *park- being borrowed into the adstrate language as *BarG-, then into Gmc. Since I know little about Uralic, this appeal to "Proto-Lappic" to get voiced fricatives may not itself hold water, however. It is really just a wild guess.
>
> DGK

This indeed is not quite watertight - if you mean Proto-Samic, these particular words do not exist, and neither do initial consonant clusters nor *B *G exist either. Moreover, there is no motivation to turn onset tenuis stops to voiced spirants - no Uralic language does that (the Samic distinction between *t *D is inherited). You could just as well go with an entirely unrelated substrate.

What exactly is the "water transport theory" anyway? Torsten's latest renames it "amber trail theory", but I thought this was supposed to cover all IE-Uralic interactions, not just those near the Baltic Sea.

John Vertical