Res: Res: [tied] Re: (was Latin Honor < ?) Bestia

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

>
> [DGK]
>
> Possibly <lancea> belongs here also. Alessio compared Tuscan <schiancia>,
> <schianza>, <stiance>, <stianza> 'cattail, Typha latifolia', noting also that
> Veronese <lancia> denotes several types of reedy plants growing in swamps (Studi
> Etruschi 20:122-3, 1952). In his view, *stlancea was probably borrowed from an
> Etruscan word meaning 'type of swamp-reed' (from which lances could be made) and
> hence 'lance' itself.
>
> I find it more probable that <lancea> is of P-Italic origin based on an Illyrian
> loanword, and the plants in the modern dialects were named after the weapon.
> True lances were twisted with a leathern thong during release, and the spinning
> imparted greater accuracy than simple throwing. Hence the Indo-European root
> could be *slenk- 'to wind, turn, twist' (IEW 961-2), with the passive noun
> *slonko'm 'twistable thing, thong' becoming Illyrian *slankam, this in turn
> borrowed into P-Italic as *slankom and producing an adjective *slankejo-
> 'involving a thong'. I hypothesize that in Old Sabine, the lance was
> distinguished from the ordinary spear as *(fasta: slankeja:) 'thong-spear',
> commonly *slankeja: for short. When the archaic Romans adopted the weapon, they
> would have borrowed the name as Old Latin *stlancea:. Roman Latin of course
> simplified OL stl- to l- as in other words, but Alessio's comparison suggests
> that Tuscan Latin retained stl-. If this scenario is correct, the weapon must
> have become obsolete for Roman military use later, since Varro thought it came
> from Spain, and Festus from Greece.

> ***R Lances were made of cane-like reed in Meso-America for fighting, hunting
> and fishing and still are for Indigenous folkdances

I have no objection to the possibility of a semantic shift from 'reed, cane' to 'type of weapon, lance'. However, the phonetic shape of <lancea> is more compatible with Italic than Etruscan, and taking *slenk- as the IE base allows an explanation of the twisting. Those theorists who see <lancea> as an indirect borrowing from Greek <lo'gkhe:> must postulate Illyrian intermediacy in order to get the /a/, so I am doing no worse by suggesting a borrowing from a native Illyrian word.

Incidentally, Pokorny (IEW 961-2) has *sleng- as a variant of *slenk-, but the fact that all alleged reflexes of *sleng- are Germanic (that is, with Gmc. *slink-) should raise a red flag. Rather than imposing voicing alternation on PIE, I find it more plausible that the Gmc. words with /k/ result from post-Grimm's Law borrowing, probably from Belgic/NWB. The fact that a strong verb is involved (Old English <slincan> st. III) is no bar to borrowing; we have OE <scri:fan> (st. I, also German <schreiben>) from Latin <scri:bere> and several other examples.

DGK