Re; Hermes/=Mercury

H.M. Hubey wrote:

> > changes p>t>k and p>b>m could
> have taken place and
> > could have taken place long time
> ago. This seems like a
> > Nostratic matter. In the CVC
> syllable the two C's
> > changed independently.
> >
> > ...............H E R M E S
> > ...............M E R C U R Y
> >
> > H=M and M=C (k). I don't know
> what else to say.

In this case, I think the less the better. If they are _inherited_ words,
they were mangled beyond recognition by the time they reached PIE. If one
has been borrowed from a non-Nostratic languages, we don't know which
language it
has been borrowed from, so again the comparison tells us nothing.

And what can you mean by, 'In the CVC syllable the two C's changed
independently'? You are comparing two syllables, CVC HER v. MER and CV ME
v. CU (unless you were naive enough not to analyse the Greek form and were
comparing MES v. CU). The only other interpretation I can think of is that
you meant HERM and MERC were CVC syllables, but that is too ridiculous an
idea to be entertained.

> Strange things happen and they are ignored usually. For example, there are
> two words in Hittite, both meaning essentially, "cooked food" or "cooked

dish"

> hapalzil, and parsSur (S=sh). The first is especially "cooked
> dish" I think. If hap=kap (container, cup), then we have *hap-palzil thus

we have

> palzil=parSur, thus
> ..........................P A L Z I L
> ..........................P A R S U R
> L=R, and Z=S and again L=R. If
> these liquids were all around in existence, why
> are they getting confused with each other? If we look at examples from
> the real world, ie.. Japanese/Chinese/Korean, the confusion occurs because

they have

> only a single liquid phoneme, not because they have 2, or 3, or 4.

Sanskrit is probably a better example; it is a mix of a dialect with l > r
and one with r > l. For a more recent example, we have Romanian, with
intervovalic l > r.

> Examples can be found on the Internet but there are words like
> digital > dijitaru

Unexceptional distortion on borrowing.

> printer > purintaru

I see no confusion. And I suspect an English listener would hear [prInt&r].

> BTW, the l-r and sh-z are by no means perfectly regular. Look at
> how both l-z and sh-r occur together. One of these for sure, e.g.

[Hittite] parSur
has gone into

> Turkic as pish (too cook), and via the Altaic Turkic p>...B> 0, giving

rise to

> ash (food), asha (to eat), etc. But since we already have similar words in

IE, e.g.

> English parch (to heat up, dry), essen (to eat), eat (to eat), etc. not

only do we see the same

> kinds of sound changes as here but also the same as I gave before.

What makes you think English 'parch' can be an inherited word?
(1) If you had a dictionary with any pretensions to give etymologies, you'd
find its origin is unknown. You are thus 'reaching down' with a vengeance.
(2) If you had a good dictionary, you'd find that the best, but rejected
guessses, made it a compound with the Latin prefix per-.
(3) If you could accept that comparative linguists have *some* idea of what
they're talking about, you'd know that inherited English p- ought to imply
PIE *b-, but that any instance of PIE *b- is highly suspect.

Are you just being mischievous in quoting German essen 'eat'? It is a
perfectly regular derivative of PIE *h1ed 'eat', though I could understand
if you rejected laryngeal theory and kept the old reconstruction of PIE *ed.
'ed' appears undisguised in Latin and Greek. (If you don't like the
values assigned to PIE phonemes, think of them as spelling. It avoids a lot
of confusion.)

> In fact, I think

Khaladj has hash (instead of ash) adding further evidence that the
bilabial-F/B (which still exists in Japanese) changed to h in Turkic
(already theorized by
Turkologists) and still retained in Khaladj. It is also pretty clear that
kap (cup) etc is originally Turkic or Prototurkic ...

What distinction are you making here?

Richard.