Re: badgers

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> > I said (although apparently my post didn't appear on the list) that
> > there's no PIE word for 'badger' (much less for 'skunk'). But

there's a

> > PIE word for 'bear' I've linked to other similar words meaning

'marten',

> > 'otter' or 'badger'. This means a semantic shift must have happened,

due

> > to the migration of PIE speakers to a Boreal environment where the
> > Eurasian Brown Bear
> > <http://admin.scirecordbook.org/images/species/E17.jpg> (Ursus

arctos

> > arctos) li ves.
>
> This picture is completely anachronistic: it shows the range of the
> brown bear *today*. But in early historical times (and a fortiori in

PIE

> and pre-PIE times) brown bears lived in all of Europe, northern Africa
> and almost all of Asia (with the exception of the Arabian Penninsula

and

> regions that had their own bear species -- the Indian subcontinent and
> SE Asia). It's quite impossible to locate the PIE speakers in *any*
> place where they would have been unfamiliar with bears.
>

Then why do you explain the semantic shift in the PIE word?