W dniu 2012-03-09 02:28, Rick McCallister pisze:
> Which would be from the IE original: hart or roe(buck)? Or both?
> The vocabulary, as you point out, is often determined by dominion
> --priestly taboos words or hunter's terms. In the US, most hunters refer
> to deer by sex --as "bucks" or "does". My next-door neighbor feeds his
> whole extended family on 25 to 30 every season.
The little roe and the big red deer are consistently distinguished by
those familiar with them (not only by Robbie Burns, "a-chasin' the wild
deer, and followin' the roe"). <hart> and <roe> both have PGmc.
protoforms, *xeruta/u-z and *raix-an- (f. *raix-o:n-), respectively. The
former looks descriptive (related to the PIE 'horn' word-family), the
latter is unclear, possibly a metathetic variant of the original term
(see below). If one can speak of PIE terms for the two species, the most
likely candidates (with the largest cognate sets) are *h1elh1-on- (vel
sim.) 'red deer (stag)' (*h1elh1-n-ih2- for the hind) and *jork(^)-
'roe-deer' (which may have given pre-Gmc. *roik- by metathesis).
Branch-specific replacements of either or both by new terms are commonplace.
Piotr