Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "H.M. Hubey" <hubeyh@...>
> To: <Nostratica@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Friday, January 31, 2003 5:50 AM
> Subject: Re: [Nostratica] Cardinal and Ordinal Integers
>
>
>
> > If Germanic (English) f comes from PIE p, then it seems English
> first is cognate with the other *p words but then if Old English did
> not have it how did it get the f back? Apparently German does not have
> f either.
>
> *furista- (OE fyrst), which is cognate to those *p- words continued to
> exist in Germanic with the meaning 'foremost in importance' or 'coming
> before all others'. *airista- was more common in West Germanic in the
> meaning 'first in serial order', but the two were very similar
> semantically and in English <first> has ousted <erst>. Similar shifts
> are frequent. In Polish, Slavic *vUtorU 'second' (archaic Pol. wtóry)
> has been replaced by <drugi>, previously meaning 'other'.

Well, first, you created *furista, and *airista. Second, it still does
not answer whether the
*p word was originally "one" in some other language.

It seems unusual to have a new root for 1st other than a word derived
from 1.

--
M. Hubey
-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
The only difference between humans and machines is that humans
can be created by unskilled labor. Arthur C. Clarke

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