indoeuropean

[Stefan Georg]

>>[ Moderator's comment:
>>  If it is a cognate, that *is* the explanation.  Or do you mean simply that
>>  there is an *apparent* cognate (which would more properly be discussed on
>>  the Nostratic list)?
>>  --rma ]

>Esra Oden writes:
>This Kartvelian cognate may be a borrowing from the Pontic Greek spoken
>in S. Caucasus along the Georgian border of Turkey.

As long as the question is one of borrowing, we may have our moderator's
consent to discuss it here.

No, I wouldn't think so. The Kartvelian word is of Proto-Kartvelian age,
reflected in all K. languages including Old Georgian (reconstructable as
/*qel-/, Klimov detaches the final -l in the reconstruct, but since he
cannot assign a function to it, and since this detachment seems to be based
on Mingrelian only, I think he may not be right here). While it is true
that Old Georgian does display Greek loanwords, proto-Kartvelian is not
known to do. If we, for better or worse, assume that "hand" might be a
counterexample to this assertion, we would have to face the problem that
there seems to be no motivation for Gk. -r being replaced by Kart. -l.
We can safely, I think, exclude the alternative scenario, that of genetic
cognacy on a Nostratic level, as well. No matter what we think about an
ultimate genetic relationship between IE and Kartvelian, we will have to
take into account that the Greek word, as demonstrated, goes back to
*ghes-r, i.e. when we look at the oldest forms for both language families,
we get forms more different than the attested later ones (*ghes-r : *qel-
[or, if Klimov is right after all, *qe-] - cheir : xeli ), a strong
indicator that the similarity observed in the later forms has been produced
by chance convergence. With true cognates based on genetic relationship
(which involves that the languages *diverged* from earlier unity) we should
expect that the earliest recoverable forms are closer to each other than
the later ones.

Think that is enough to convince anybody that this is a chance resemblance
only.

St.G.