Re: pottus, Genua, Durantia (was: Bart; was: Ligurian)

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

>
> For example, we've got the western *pºrt-u- 'passage, way' (Latin
> portus, Germanic *furT-, Celtic *p\ritu-),
>

This would be one of the Paleo-European words from NW Europe (Mallory-Adams), possibly from a paleo-dialect which spread in the Mesolithic from the Franco-Cantabrian refuge (Villar).

> which corresponds to the
> eastern *bred- 'to wade, to jump' (Balto-Slavic, Albanian) ~ *brod-o-
> (Slavic), whose stops correspond to series III (traditional "voiced
> aspirated") and has the IE ablaut.
>

This one is from the "Central Region" between the Baltic and the Balkans, possibly from a paleo-dialect arising from the Balkan refuge.

Please notice the Steppe dialect has a different word *pent- 'to find's one way' ~ *pont(H)-o- 'passage, way'.

> As external cognates we've got
> Kartvelian *bo(r)d- 'to wander, to roam' and Berber *barid- 'road'
> (Dolgopolsky's ND 241).
>

Contrarily to "Nostratic" theories, I don't think these lexical correspondences necessarily imply genetic relationships.

> IE-ists usually link *pºrt-u- to *per- 'to pass, to go through',
> which has the Afrasian cognate *?\a-bir- 'travelling (across a road),
> passing by, crossing (rivers)' (Militarev). If he's right in associating
> PAA to the Natufian culture in the Levant (roughly
> 13,000-9,800 BP), this would put a terminus ante quem for the
> dephonologization of voiceless stops.
>

As this word is found in Semitic, Berber and Chadic, it would be part of what I call the "Neolithic pack" of shared lexicon between the European Neolithic and Afrasian, especially those branches.