From: dgkilday57
Message: 68973
Date: 2012-03-14
>See message #68217, which corrects my earlier posts. I regard the /z/r/-less forms 'meed', 'woad', 'kien' as borrowed from NWB *me:do:-, *waida-, *kaina- in which the */z/ between a vowel and a voiced consonant was vocalized. OE <weard>, <werd> reflect inherited Gmc. *wazDa- 'woad', and Go. <ouisdil> (etc.) reflects Gmc. *wizDila- with /e/-grade, from PIE *wezdH-. In my opinion the Greek and Latin words are unrelated to this.
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@> wrote:
> >
> > By the way, *taGla- and *waiDa- are both common Germanic, with only
> > tentative cognates outside the branch; the older word supposedly
> > translatable as 'tail' survives as Eng. arse -- also an old and
> > respectable meaning, very possibly the original one for this word, if
> > Hittite evidence is anything to go by. I wonder why 'tail' is number
> 35
> > on the Swadesh list while 'arse' never made it there.
> >
> Speaking of 'woad', I've seen the Germanic protoform reconstructed as
> *waizda- (cfr. Greek isatis) elsewhere on this list. As the Latin form
> is vitrum, there's no possibility of reconstructing anything remotedly
> similar to a "PIE" root. This is consistent with this being a highly
> specialized word.