Re: HORSA vs. EXWA

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski gpiotr@ wrote:
>
> By contrast, *h2r.tk^o- is represented in
> Anatolian and in several branches of Core IE, which to all intents and
> purposes demonstrates its PIE status.
>

I'm afraid this doesn't "demonstrates" anything but it makes reasonable the hypothesis of this being a native IE word, which I've got no problem to accept.

However, I must insist the PIE reconstruction is imperfect as regarding the internal cluster *rC, due to the lack of external data, the same which has helped me to assert *C as an affricate sibilant (possibly alveolo-palatal). Also the geminate velar in Hittite hartagga- has mislead IE-ists to reconstruct a cluster *tk´  in the same way than *dhgh´om > tekan. But IMHO this is most likely a suffix like in the Turkic cognate qarsaq 'steppe fox'.

> There are also exclusively English words for 'pig', 'dog', 'badger'
> and many other animals, replacing older terms. Does this fact support any
> fairy-tales about long-range contacts?
>
> > Once again, the example you're quoting is irrelevant for the matter.
> > Archaeological data tell us when and where the horse was domesticated,
> > and linguistic evidence gives us a 'horse' word native to that area.
> > Unfortunately, it looks like most IE-ists are too busy (or perhaps too
> > lazy) to look at any data outside it own field.
>

I meant of course "... THEIR own field."