--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "fournet.arnaud" <fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:
>
> Agricultural word : H2_r_H3
> Oddities :
> Indo-Iranian : doesn't exist
> Armenian : ar-a-wr with -a-
> Should not be there : CHC > zero
> Tokharian : are : noun instead of verb
>
> The next point is :
> Basque sara-tu ; soro
> Semitic : zara&
> Kartvelian : zil
> to cultivate is a verb with #z- as initial.
> Only the western PIE can be old,
> Eastern PIE with H2 instead of Z > Y
> means loanwords from Western PIE.
>
Arnaud choose the wrong Semitic cognate (a verb 'to sow, to cultivate'), and so his proposed sound correspondence
*h2- ~ *z- doesn't hold.
However, dialectal Basque
sara-tu 'to hoe' can be linked to IE
*sar- 'hoe, sickle' (Latin
sar(r)io: 'to hoe',
sarculum 'hoe') ~
*sarp- 'sickle' (Greek
harpé: 'sickle', Latin
sarp(i)o: 'to prune (vines)') and also to Altaic
*sàrpHa 'a k. of tool'. The EDAL note says: The root
must have denoted a k. of stick used in
agriculture, most probably a digging stick or hoe, with a later transition
to "plough", and in Tungusic, exotically, to "eating stick" or "chopsticks" (!).
Given the semantic correspondence, I wonder if initial s- in these words would correspond to the post-velar fricative of IE *h2arh3-tr-o- and Semitic *X\VruT-, as in other cases I mentioned before.