Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology

Ralf-Stefan Georg Georg at home.ivm.de
Sat Dec 18 12:05:29 UTC 1999


>> I would like to make a correction. Armenian <ort'> (not <ort>) doesn't
>> mean 'wine', but 'grapevine, grape'. There are two plausible hypotheses
>> regarding its IE origins, by Pedersen and Ajarian. The latter adds that
>> Albanian <ard, ardhi> is unrelated to the Arm. term. Incidentally,
>> "wine" is "gini" in Armenian, both English and Armenian terms coming
>> from a common PIE source, seemingly borrowed from Proto-Semitic
>> (according to V. Illyich-Svidich).

>I have heard this claim often but frankly have never run into anyone who is
>willing to defend the proposition.

>Are you game? Or is VIS the last word on it?

The wine-word has for long been thought to be an originally near-eastern
Wanderwort, mainly because it is so widespread in the NE and because this
region is generally thought to be the origin of wine-cultivation. However,
there may be reasons to believe that the word is originally IE after all,
since a connection to the root *weiH- "twist around athl." seems likely
(cf. Latin vi:tis "vine",  vieo: "bind", Lith. vyti, veju` "wind" etc.).
The NE words, then, would be loans from one or several IE sources (Hattic
windu-, Ar. wain, Hebr. yayin [which show a rather old intra-Semitic
sound-law, pointing to some early date of the borrowing], Georgian Gvino
may evidence the intermediate stage of the Armenian w- > g- shift, and thus
point to a loan-scenario from (pre-)Armenian to Georgian (it doesn't seem
to be of proto-language age in Kartvelian).

So, the IE > elswhere-scenario is favoured over the elsewhere > IE one by
its possibly being derived from an IE verbal root. Of course, there is room
for doubt.

St.G.

Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32



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