From: Joao S. Lopes
Message: 68642
Date: 2012-02-29
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
>
> > Given that dogs were domesticated in East Asia, the suggestion the
> > Sinitic word for 'dog' is an IE loanword (rather than the other way
> > around) is plainly RIDICULOUS.
>
> If domestication was as long ago as 33,000 years BP, the word could have passed either way if it is a loan.
>
The language involved must have been an ancestor of IE, because the IE family didn't exist at that time. I'm also afraid IE-ists weren't aware of such a deep chronology before making that proposal.
> More significant is that the word is not just Sinitic, but general Sino-Tibetan (no grouping implied), apparently > with Tibetan and Karen cognates.
>
If you look carefully at data, you'll see that Sinitic has an extra /n/ not found in Tibeto-Burman. This made me suspicious they're actually two different words, one for TB and another for Sinitic. And while the former is related to the NEC word for 'dog', I think the latter evolved from an older root designating some kind of carnivore and represented by Yeniseian *ku:n´ (~ g-) 'wolverine' and NEC *h\n@:q'q'w@: (~ *h\q'q'w@:n@) 'mouse, rat'.
Interestingly, Altaic has a possible cognate *pHjun[e] 'a small wild animal' (with reduction of the initial labiovelar cluster), from which another 'dog' word has developed: Uralic *pene, Kartvelian (Megrel) pin-.