The Iceman's Berries

[Stanley Friesen]

At 11:10 PM 7/7/01 +0200, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

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

>> 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...)

So far as I have been able to tell, there are few good candidates source
words in Basque for these roots.  Most Basque cognates seem to be fairly
well established as borrowings the other direction.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net