cat < ?

[proto-language]

Dear Gabor and IEists:

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Gabor Sandi
  Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 2:55 PM

  <snip>

  Pursuing the matter, I checked in Burrow & Emeneau's Dravidian Etymological
  Dictionary (DED), which has about eight root-sets with "cat" words in them.
  Item 4520 looks - at least to a naive observer - as a possible indication of
  Dravidian substratum origin: Tamil veruku 'tom-, wild-cat', Kannada berku,
  bekku 'cat'.

[PR]

You might be interested in knowing that at Sergei Starostin's website:

  http://iiasnt.leidenuniv.nl/cgi-bin/main.cgi?flags=eygnnnl

has Proto-Dravidian *bil-, 'cat',

which I would compare to an IE 8. *wel-, 'catch' (Greek hali'skomai); also
seen, perhaps, in Greek aie'louros, 'tom-cat'.

Pat

  PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com
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