Re: badgers

I'm just teasing you militantly. My problem with V-C is that it rests on too many houses of cards and can't really be taken too seriously for now. Things may change in the future but IMHO the work to prove it is only about 1% completed, if that. Nostratic rests on much stronger and many fewer "houses of cards." While much more work needs to be done, it seems much more likely than not, although the work is still somewhere between 10-25% completed IMHO. But I'm speaking subjectively. Once Indo-Uralic and Altaic are squared away as valid nodes, I think it will be on its way to general acceptance, but that's a lot of work.

I see Bomhard as a sort of symphony conductor of Nostratic but there is a real need of people who can do the hard work of showing relationships between lower nodes.

From: Tavi <oalexandre@...>
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2012 6:35 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: badgers

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
>
> For those of you tired of arguing over the same old thing, here's something new to argue about: badgers.
> My 2 cents: Isn't there a Gaelic term taigh (vek sim.) for "badger" that also comes from *tek'-?
> French, of course, has blaireau and Spanish has tejÃ³n --which I'm sure one of our friends will shortly link both to Vasco-Tasmanian or whatever.
>
Rick, I don't know the reasons why you're so militant against the Vasco-Caucasian hypothesis (and yet you're a subscriber of my own list), but certainly Spanish tejÃ³n and other similar Romance words come from Late Latin taxo: (accusative taxo:nem), itself a Celtic loanword, probably Gaulish. Although unknown to Ruhlen & Bengtson, Basque azkoin 'badger' is also a Celtic loanword *taskone.

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> I think Joshua Katz's badger article (1998, "Hittite tas^ku- and the
> Indo-European Word for 'Badger'", _Historische Sprachforschung_ 111,
> 61Ã¢â‚¬â€œ82, based on his UCLA conference paper) is still the last word on the
> subject. At any rate, Katz's analysis militates against the
> traditionally postulated connection between PGmc. *ÃƒÂ¾axsu- etc. and
> *tetk^- 'build'. Not the builder of setts, but rather the owner of
> smelly glands.
>
These two hypothesis are quoted by Delamarre in his "Dictionnaire Ã©tymologique de la langue gauloise". Of course, the traditional one is a mere "lookalike" and thus rejectable. I think Katz's proposal is very interesting, although it actually points to a different animal, the skunk or polecat. But as in the case of other carnivores such as 'weasel', 'marten', etc., this kind of semantic shifts are rather common.