Raven words

From: caotope
Message: 70934
Date: 2013-02-13

Background: I've been exploring some evidence for a possible unknown Uralic substrate in Finnic. One feature of this hypothetical substrate would be *w > pp after a liquid, e.g. _kärppä_ "stoat" vs. PU *käDwä "weasel".

One of the words of this shape in Finnish is _korppi_ "raven". This is normally analyzed as a loan from Scandinavian _korp_, and I see no obsctacle to this - this replaced the common Finnic word for the bird, *karnV, which is probably inherited Uralic. I however believe the Sc. word does not have a credible IE etymology (after all, k-p makes the very premise suspicious).

So, the question is: can an IE original such as *korwV be reconstructed, which would allow a loaning into Scandinavian from the hypothetical substrate? Latin _corvus_ suggests something along these lines. I see this has been compared with Lithuanian _karvelis_ "dove", but the semantic difference is a bit wide here, I think.

Original *krowV might also work, given that some IE loans in Finnic show a metathesis CrVCV > CVrCV for resolving initial clusters. This brings _crow_ and its relatives in mind, though no original 1st-syllable *o seems possible to assume here (NWGmc *kraawoo).

_j.