Pelasgian/was Etruscans

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2001 4:29 PM

[snip]
> Heb. <ko:pher> lit. 'covering' (also
> 'village', 'pitch', 'ransom') was applied. The resemblance between this and
> <go:pher> seems fortuitous.

[snip]
> DGK

[Ed Selleslagh]
It doesn't look so fortuitious to me: pitch is also used to impermeate walls or
roofs (also in Antiquity, e.g. in (Semitic) Babylonia, according to a Latin
writer I once read), and is thus a 'covering'.

Villages consist of houses with a roof, and in the oldest villages, you could
walk over the roof from one house to the other (e.g. Kül Tepe), making it
look like 'one' roof; in Mediterranean countries, even today, the roof is often
more of a terrace (Sp. tejado<>techo) than in northern climates. A roof is a
'covering' (Cf. Lat. tectum/tegere).

As to 'ransom' : it 'covers' certain (unwelcome) obligations, doesn't it?

If <ko:pher> can mean 'pitch', and <go:pher> 'sticky stuff', couldn't there be
some semantic link, leading either to convergence of two originally different
words, or to two variants of the same original word?

Ed.