> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" richard.wordingham@ wrote:
>
> > Given that dogs were domesticated in East Asia, the suggestion the
> > Sinitic word for 'dog' is an IE loanword (rather than the other way
> around) is plainly RIDICULOUS.
>
> If domestication was as long ago as 33,000 years BP, the word could have passed either way if it is a loan.
Very true, English dog shows up in other languages -- Germans call the Great Dane Deutsche Dogge, and bulldog is pretty universal, sometimes reduced to dogue, dogui, etc. So this word could have at a time just referred to the domesticated dog, as opposed to wolves et al.
>
> > The language involved must have been an ancestor of IE, because the IE family didn't exist at that time. I'm > > also afraid IE-ists weren't aware of such a deep chronology before making that proposal.
>
I
should replace "IE" by "Kurganic", i.e. the language(s) spoken by Kurgan people.
> More significant is that the word is not just Sinitic, but general Sino-Tibetan (no grouping implied), apparently > with Tibetan and Karen cognates.
>
> > If you look carefully at data, you'll see that Sinitic has an extra /n/ not found in Tibeto-Burman. This made
> > me suspicious they're actually two different words, one for TB and another for Sinitic. And while the former
> > is related to the NEC word for 'dog', I think the latter evolved from an older root designating some kind of
> > carnivore and represented by Yeniseian *ku:n´ (~ g-) 'wolverine' and NEC *h\n@:q'q'w@: (~
> > *h\q'q'w@:n@) 'mouse, rat'.
> >
> > Interestingly, Altaic has a possible cognate *pHjun[e] 'a small
wild animal' (with reduction of the initial
> > labiovelar cluster), from
which another 'dog' word has developed: Uralic *pene, Kartvelian
(Megrel) pin-.
>
> Matisoff puts forward two suggestions in his Handbook of Tibeto-Burman. One is
> that the -n is a collective suffix, and the other that Chinese derives from a
> different PTB word, albeit possibly related, *kywal 'wild dog, dhole'.
>
I wasn't familiar with Matisoff's work at that time, but now I accept the relationship between the Sinitic (which became a Wanderwort) and the TB 'dog' words. In fact, Starostin's NEC protoform *XXHweje has a suffixed variant *XXHwej-rV, which he regards as an oblique case.
I also think Starostin's "North Caucasian" is a much older entity than he thought and thus a *parent* node not only to NEC (upon which is modelled) and NWC, but also to Sino-Tibetan, Burushaski, Basque, as well as other extinct languages, thus being the real Vasco-Caucasian.