Re: Divergence vs. convergence (was: Witzel and Sautsutras)

From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Message: 70521
Date: 2012-12-08

Hallo Indo-Europeanists!

On Saturday 08 December 2012 15:57:04 Tavi wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
> wrote:
> [...]
> > Indeed, *sam- looks like a substratum loanword, and it may be
> > that Pokorny's Sanskrit cognate is wrong.
>
> From now on, I'd use the term "Paleo-European" for this kind of words,
> because I think it's less prone to confusion than "Paleo-IE", which I
> adapted from Villar.

Fair. It is much less confusing. Everybody will understand that
you are referring to languages spoken in Europe before the spread
of IE.

> > Anyway, the dictionary is not worth much because the phonology
> > Pokorny uses is utterly out of date, and many items have
> > semantic problems. He evidently tended to hammer things into
> > place that actually did not belong there, and to contrive PIE
> > etymologies for items that cannot be ascribed to PIE by any
> > reasonable method. (Possibly in an reaction on the harsh
> > criticism he earned earlier with his hypotheses about a Semitic
> > substratum in Celtic.) It is widely recognized that Pokorny's
> > dictionary has many problems, and that there indeed is a
> > pressing need for a more modern PIE etymological dictionary.
>
> Unfortunately, this is most unlikely without a major rebuilding of the
> current paradigm. In an earlier post, I mentioned Mallory & Adams',
> updated with regard to "laryngeals" but largely dependent upon earlier
> works in semantics.

Certainly, the current model of PIE is not the final word!
The question remains, however, how radical a revision will turn
out to be necessary. It seems certain, at least, that one has
to distinguish between Early and Late PIE (Adrados's "PIE II"
and "PIE III"), with Early PIE being the common ancstor of
Anatolian and Late PIE, and Late PIE being the common ancestor
of the non-Anatolian IE languages. But I am repeating myself.

> And since you mentioned "hammer", Pokorny wrongly
> atttibuted Latin faber 'smith' to a "root" *dhabhr-o- 'good-fitting' vel
> sim, but IMHO this is actually a *phonosymbolic* root *tap- ~ *dab-
> reflecting the hitting of metal.

That may be the case. Recall also that smithing was a rather
recent innovation in PIE times - the word cannot be earlier
than the introduction of metals to PIE society! Perhaps the
word is a loanword from a non-IE people of the Ancient Near
East from whom the Indo-Europeans learned metallurgy.

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