From: Tavi
Message: 68061
Date: 2011-09-21
>That's right. But notice that other Germanic has a similar-sounding root *firk-a-/*furk-a- 'stake, stick' which misleaded me.
> Old English <forca> wk. m. and <force> wk. f. 'fork' are borrowed from Latin <furca>, which has nothing to do with <pergula>.
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> In my opinion <furca> is back-formed from <furcula> 'implement of enclosure or confinement' (as in <Furculae Caudinae>, the narrow passes near Caudium, east of Capua, where a Roman army was entrapped in 321 BCE by Samnites under C. Pontius). In turn <furcula>, earlier *furtla:, can be explained as a regular borrowing from the Sabine reflex of *g^Hr.-tlah2 'implement of enclosure', hence related to Lat. <hortus>, OE <geard> 'yard', etc. The <furca> was originally a yoke-like implement for confining cattle, then was applied to a similar device for constraining slaves and prisoners during whipping, then was extended to other two-pronged devices, in my view.I disagree. IMHO Latin furca derives from a non-native PIE root *g´hurk´-/*g´herg- shared with Baltic (Lithuanian Zirkle:s 'scissors'), a Paleo-European (an umbrella label for substrate pre-IE languages) loanword cognate to Kartvelian *gRdZGa/*k'rtSxa 'fork, bifurcated twig'.
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> You (Tavi) and Arnaud need to quit jumping to conclusions about similar-looking words being outputs of the same root, inside or outside Indo-European.Yes, and you also need to loose your ties with mainstream scholarship and open your mind to a wider macro-comparative framework.
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