Re: floor

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:

>
>
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Tavi" <oalexandre@> wrote:
> >
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Torsten" <tgpedersen@> wrote:
> > >
> > > Alternatively, we could follow Kuhn and propose the existence of not
> > one but two substrate layers for Germanic in the NWBlock area:
> > >
> > > 1 a non-IE language, called the ar-/ur-language by Kuhn
> > >
> > > 2 an IE language, spoken but for a short time before Germanic took
> > over
> > >
> > > and assign the Germanic-like NWBlock roots to the latter, eg Meid's
> > > German flur, English floor, NWB placename Plore, OI lar "field"
> > >
> > Matasović reconstructs Proto-Celtic *fla:ro- 'floor', and he quotes
> > Old Irish lár 'ground, surface, middle', although the semantic shift
> > to 'field' is straightforward (cfr. Basque larre 'meadow', probably a
> > Celtic loanword).
>
> Why would Celtic *(f)la:rom, if borrowed into Basque, be reflected as <larre> rather than *laro?
>
> DGK
>

---

Galician and Portuguese have the (popular) word leira 'patch, plot, field', which was laria/larea in the Middle Ages (first documented in 870), and which is usually (Cf. Coromines; Meyer-Lübke 4911) interpreted as proceeding from a Celtic *larea or *lâria related to Latin plânus, Germanic *flôr-. But then we have also Galician and Portuguese morrer 'to die', which derives from Latin mori, with unexplained -r- > -rr-. I wonder if a similar process can have turned (Hispano-)Celtic *laria into Basque larre.

Cossue