Re: Ligurian

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:

>
> > If this is a genuine Ligurian/NWB word, I'd link to the root *balt-
> > found in Tuscan (Lucchese) paltenna 'puddle' (an Etruscan loanword)
> > as well as Albanian baltë 'mud, swamp, clay soil' and Slavic
> > *bólto- 'swamp'.
>
> Those are from a different root. Etr. *palt(h)na, implied by Lucch.
> <paltenna>, is probably based on Lig. *balta: borrowed into Etr., but
> none of these would interchange /l/ with /r/ in this position.
>
> > Why not?
>
> Slavic and other reflexes of the 'swamp' word require original *-l-.
>

That's right. But rhotacism apparently happened in the Basque and Spanish words.

> Lucch. <paltenna> illustrates that this rhotacism did not occur pre-dentally. Lombardic <palta> and Piem. <pauta> 'swamp' apparently continue the simplex. I do not believe that the p- here is due to (re)borrowing from Etruscan. Instead, it very likely comes directly from Langobardic *palta, resulting from borrowing of local Gallo-Latin *balta after the High German shift had gone to completion. This G-L *balta could be of either Ligurian or Gaulish origin, since the root was apparently *bHelh{x}-. (Pace Derksen et al., the justification for deriving 'swamp' from 'white' is as clear as mud. I think the 'swamp' root, originally perhaps 'low, sunken', is distinct from the 'white' root, which was probably *bHelh2- on the basis of Greek words.)
>

AFAIK, this *palta- ~ *balta- is neither Gaulish nor IE. I also wonder why IE-ists insist on inventing IE etymologies for non-IE words.