Re: floor

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

>
> I never said that I thought these words were borrowed. I regard
> Basque <txakur'> as inherited from West Mediterranean.
>
> > But its phonetic shape is mostly un-Basque. Also Basque has lots of
> > loanwords from extinct languages.
>
> The phonetic shape agrees well with <lapur'> 'thief'.
>

But this is clearly an IE loanword (PIE *la(m)bh- 'to seize'), not a native one.

> The only plausible cognates which I have seen are those cited by
> Hubschmid, namely Corsican <ghia'garo> 'hunting dog' and Sardinian
> <g^a'garu> 'id.'.
>
> > Don't forget Balkanic zagar and Greek zágaros, zágari 'a k. of
> > bloodhound' (Trombetti). But IMHO these words aren't related to zakur
> > but they reflect a Mediterranean Wanderwort found in PNC *tsEhwo:le (~
> > -a) 'fox, jackal', Kartvelian *dz\aGl-, Dravidian *dZa:[v]il- 'dog' and
> > ultimately from the Eurasiatic root *dZE:lGV ~ *dZE:GlV 'a small
> > carnivore animal (fox, weasel)' (Dolgopolsky's ND 2776).
>
> I have seen the Greek words explained as involving the prefix <dia->,
>

Sources?

> and I am very skeptical about the alleged connections among the rest of the words.
>

This is your problem, not mine.

> For the phonology, cf. Bq. <etxe>, <etxa-> 'house' from Celtic *tegja:,
>
> > This etymology is highly unlikely.
>
> And yours is ... ?
>

Possibly from PNC *=undzzE 'to hide, to conceal, to steal', which (with a labial prefix) gives native Basque *bints > mintz 'membrane, film; milk cream'. Semantics is straightforward.

> As (e.g.) <txori> was regarded as the diminutive (properly hypocoristic) of <zori>,
>
> > This is a case of homonymy, as txori 'bird' is semantically unrelated to
> > zori 'luck'.
>
> What?? You never heard of divination from bird-flight?
>

Sure, Latin auspicium is a compound from avim specio: 'to look at bird's flight', but this isn't the case of Basque zori 'luck'. Clearly, you've been deceived by the traditional explanation given by Vascologists.

> > But there also exists the forms kakur and ttattur /cacur:/, the last
> > with expressive palatization, which suggest the initial consonant was
> > formerly a velar, assibilated in txakur, zakur.
>
> All these suggest to me is back-formation from <txakur'> by analogy with different sets of words in which hypocoristic palatalization was actually applied to the primary.
>

If you're right, it would make txakurr a straightforward reflex of PNC *tsEhwo:le (~ -a) 'fox, jackal' cognate to native Basque azeri, azegari 'fox' < *a-tsegali (please forget the Vascologists' "etymology" from Asenarius > Aznar).