Re: Basque mendi 'mountain'

At 4:42:05 AM on Wednesday, March 28, 2012, Tavi wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister
> <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

>>> This is an old substrate root *pant-/*pent- also found in
>>> toponymy as *pend-/*penn- (e.g. Pennines, Apennines),

>> The British Pennines only got their name around 1747,
>> from Charles Julius Bertram, the compiler of the forgery
>> _De Situ Britanniae_ attributed to Richard of
>> Cirencester. The Alpes Pennines in Switzerland, on the
>> other hand, really do derive from Celtic *penno- 'a
>> mountain summit; a head; a hill; an end', PCelt. *kWendo-
>> 'head' (cf. OIr <cenn> 'head').

> Matasovic reconstructs *kWenno-.

He may do so in the final version; I'm using a downloaded
copy of the original on-line version. It makes no
difference to my point here.

>>> as well as in Celtic *bendo- 'peak, top'

>> PCelt. *benno- 'peak, top', actually, from PIE *bend-.

> Matasovic reconstructs PCeltic *bando-,

See above.

> because of Brythonic forms with /a/. But this can't a PIE
> word, so *bend- is actually a pseudo-PIE root.

Actually, it certainly could. However, its limited
distribution (only Germanic and Celtic, if I remember
correctly) certainly admits other possibilities.

>> Clearly unrelated to the 'head' word.

I note your failure to acknowledge that your original
attempt to lump these together was a mistake.

> This looks like a substrate loanword, probably
> Vasco-Caucasian (Celtic has quite a bunch of them).

<snort> 'Vasco-Caucasian' isn't even one of the more
plausible macro-families.

> IMHO both Basque and Celtic would derive from a common
> source.

Since Celtic is clearly IE, and Basque equally clearly is
not IE, any claim of an especially close relationship
between Basque and Celtic (apart from possible borrowing, of
course) is manifestly absurd.

Brian