IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Stefan Georg]

>AA>there is internal evidence in Uralic supporting the loan origin of p-U
>AA>*weti 'water'.

>.. Please try to fancy that there /could/ have been a common origin of
>that word !
>I do not know a single linguist who would confirm that a word like 'water'
>could be object to borrowing!

Well, I can introduce you to at least one such person:

Tamil borrowed /udakam/, one of its "water"-words, from Sanskrit.

Gogodala (/wi/), Awin (/wae/), and Gira (/wai/), three Papuan languages,
borrowed Austronesian *wayEG  (reconstructed by some Austronesianists as
*vaSeR, which does remind me of a language I know, but I cannot remember
which one ;-).

Several non-Semitic languages of Ethiopia have borrowed their word for
"water" from Ethiosemitic (I'll have to dig for the details both in my
memory and my files, if you insist).

I have encountered more examples. It may not happen all too often, but,
say, every ninth or tenth time I inspect a list of loan-words exchanged by
languages in close-contact I haven't seen before, a "water"-word is among
the suspects (and in most cases then it is found guilty too).

The claim that signifiants of some semantic notions are "so basic" that
they cannot be subject to borrowing is just one of those myths our
discipline seems to have real trouble to rid itself from. It is not true.
There are no such concepts. Everything can be borrowed, and there are
examples for everything actually having been borrowed at some point in
space and time.

St.G.

Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstraße 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
Tel./Fax +49-228-691332