Bears and why they mostly are called otherwise

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl
Sat Mar 4 16:43:44 UTC 2000


JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>>anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes:

>>Aryan / Iranian (e.g. Avestan vr.ka- 'wolf'). Any parallels?>>

>-- there's the fact that Anatolian (Luvian) walwa/i means "lion" rather than
>"wolf", as in all the other IE languages.

I don't see how that word can be related.  G&I give walwa-,
walwi- with question mark as Hittite, besides Luwian walwa-, but
that could be a Luwian borrowing into Hittite.  Still, I'm not
aware of a development *kw > w in Luwian (*k^ > zero, yes).

The Anatolian word is much more likely to be related (as wa-lwa-
< *lwa-l(e)wa- ?) to the general Eastern Mediterranean word for
"lion", Egyptian <rw> (< *lw), Kartvelian *lom-, Semitic *labu?at
("lioness").  As to Greek-Latin/Germanic-Slavic *lew-, G&I argue
with some justification against the Germanic > Slavic word being
< Latin, although I probably wouldn't go as far as establishing a
PIE *lew- "lion" (well maybe, if Toch. <lu> "wild animal" is
another reflex).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl



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