From: Tavi
Message: 66140
Date: 2010-05-11
As it has been discussed earlier on this list, Germanic *sajwa- 'sea, lake' is a substrate loanword cognate to Kartvelian *zoGw- 'sea'. But unlike somebody suggested, this doesn't necessarily implies the source language was Kartvelian itself, as it could be perfectly a Mesolithic European language (i.e. what I call "Paleo-European").
Trying to find a native IE cognate, I came across a root which Mallory & Adams reconstruct as *H2/4eHpero- 'bank, shore', found in Greek é:peiros 'shore' and Germanic *o:fVr- 'bank' (Old English o:fer). Nikolayev merges this root with *H2eP- 'living water' (Mallory & Adams), thus leading to a PIE root *H2eHP-, with an extension *-ero-. The labial consonant *P would match Kartvelian and Paleo-European *w.