--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" wrote:
>
> > A similar case would be IE *penkWe- '5' ~ NEC *fimk?wV 'fist'. If I'm not mistaken, Petr suggested that Starostin's f should be replaced by X\W or XW.
>
> What are the attested words on which this NEC reconstruction is based?
>
> > See here: http://newstar.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?single=1&basename=/data/cauc/caucet&text_number=1008&root=config
> >
> Very interesting. The phoneme *f is relatively rare, and the correspondences for this lexeme are regular. That does not exclude borrowing from an IE source after the breakup of Proto-NEC.
>
I strongly disagree. The NEC word means 'fist', a meaning which in IE only appears in a *derivated form* found in Germanic, Slavic and Baltic (the latter with initial k-), while the bare lexeme shifted to '5' at an early date, probably in the Neolithic as other numerals. So in my opinion this would be another case where a word from a language ancestor to IE is preserved in NEC.