Re: HORSA vs. EXWA

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Trond Engen <trond@...> wrote:

>
> > I think *jork(´)-o- 'roe deer' is a loanword from the NEC root
> > *GHwo:r[ts']o 'deer, game' I've already mentioned. This
> > "centumization" is found in other Vasco-Caucasian loanwords already
> > described by Starostin in an old
> > article<http://newstar.rinet.ru/Texts/iecauc.pdf> .
>
> If there really is such a thing as VC, if it's been correctly
> reconstructed, and if these words really are co-original (big ifs, all
> three of them), wouldn't it be phonologically far more plausible that
> the loan went the other way?
>

I define "centumization" as a sound shift from a coronal to a dorsal consonant (the opposite process is "satemization"). From the correspondences proposed by Starostin and others I myself discovered, I think sibilant affricates were centumized as "palato-velars" in the IE paleo-variety I call "Pontic" (roughly equivalent to "Indo-Greek" and Adrados' "IE III A").

But in other paleo-varieties these consonants either gave /s/ or dental stops. The latter were first proposed by the Nostraticist Alan Bomhard and the amateur Jörg Rheimeier, of course within their own models.