Re: Portuguese, Spanish bode "buck"

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Tavi" <oalexandre@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <bm.brian@> wrote:
> >
> > You surely weren't expecting useful discussion from Tavi,
> > were you? He doesn't want to do linguistics: he wants to
> > make grand, sweeping claims about prehistory, which he then
> > 'supports' with pre-scientific pseudo-linguistics.
> >
> No more than Gimbutas, Mallory, Anthony & Co. with their warfare Kurgan
> PIE-speakers who were supposed to have conquered most of Europe with the
> aid of horse-driven chariots. See for example the introduction of this
> recent (2012) article by Guus Kroonen:
> http://www.academia.edu/2604857/An_Akkadian_loanword_in_Pre-Greek_on_the\
> _etymology_of_Greek_and_garlic

The evidence upon which an /a/-prefix in Pre-Greek is erected is not particularly convincing. The Greek words for 'lightning' with a- may simply have been folk-etymologically influenced by _aste:r_ 'star'. Elsewhere in Europe, both OHG _aruz_ 'ore' and Latin _raudus_ look like forms of IE 'red', _raudus_ probably from Illyrian or Japygian with the simple /o/-grade (PIE *h1roudHo-) found in OE _re:ad_, etc. Pre-Gmc. *arud- looks like zero-grade (PIE *h1rudH-) in a language which treated initial preconsonantal laryngeals as Macedonian did, with _abrouwes_ 'eyebrows' (Hes. -ou- for -u(:)-; -t- ms. error for -w-) against Grk. _ophru:s_ (PIE *h3bHruh{x}-). Likewise OHG _amsala_ 'ousel, blackbird' against Lat. _merula_ suggests an IE root *h{x}mes- with the same laryngeal treatment in the Pre-Gmc. IE lg. The alleged connection between Gallo-Latin _alauda_ and OE _la:werce_ (etc.) is, as they say, "del tutto campata nell'aria".

It seems to me that Schrijver, Kroonen, and their ilk should be putting more effort into identifying and characterizing Indo-European substrate languages before shoehorning everything without an obvious etymology in attested languages into a Pre-IE substrate.

DGK