The Iceman's Berries

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 4:39 AM

[snip]

> Thus, there is a large class of roots in Pokorny, and elsewhere, that are
> only attested anciently from northern Europe and immediately adjacent
> areas.  These form a substantial corpus of words that, while locally
> shared, cannot be confidently reconstructed for PIE proper.  One
> interesting factoid about this corpus is that it includes most of the roots
> in Pokorny with a reconstructed *a that is not traceable to an a-coloring
> laryngeal.  (Note, this is not an identifying characteristic, it is an
> observation).

> Now, my *hypothesis* about many of these words is that they are borrowings
> from a non-IE language family formerly wide-spread in northern Europe, but
> now extinct.  I wish I could figure out how to test this idea.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Try Basque. You never know. But that's tricky: often, initial consonants have
disappeared, in other cases initial consonants may mask ancient initial vowels
(like the old verb-prefix e-: jaten < e-aten), so you have to go back to
reconstructed Proto-Basque forms. And many roots are actually of IE origin
(Latin, Gaulish, Romance...)

Maybe people like L. Trask could help.

Ed.