Re: Raven words

From: Rick McCallister
Message: 70935
Date: 2013-02-13

In Spanish, cuervo "crow" is the everyday word for "raven" but the archaic word is cornejo. known to all who read El Cid in school. I'm sure Tavi and João can fill us in on the rest of Ibero-Romance.

--- On Wed, 2/13/13, johnvertical@... <johnvertical@...> wrote:

From: johnvertical@... <johnvertical@...>
Subject: [tied] Raven words
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 10:18 AM

 

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.