Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: "Ralf-Stefan Georg" <Georg at home.ivm.de>
Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 12:05 PM

[ moderator snip ]

> 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.

Well, I guess we need someone else to assert "elsewhere to IE". My view
roughly parallels your own; and like you, I acknowledge the likelihood
though not the certainty of that direction of movement though, of course, I
would also consider the possibility of a common Nostratic derivation.

"Wine", after all, seems only to be a specific use of "vine" so perhaps the
region of origin for grapes is not really the bellwether,

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek,
at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er
mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)