PU trees (WAS: About the Yew1)

[Gordon Brown]

Ante, can you give us some modern reflexes of these tree names, say in
Finnish, Estonia, Saami, perhaps others?

> ----------
> From: 	Ante Aikio[SMTP:anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi]
> Sent: 	Saturday, June 09, 2001 10:11 PM

> An example of Uralic tree names is perhaps interesting in this
> connection. At least five tree names can be reconstructed in
> Proto-Uralic, and all of them show identical meanings in all the
> cognate languages. Hence, no change in meaning in some 7000-8000
> years. (The reconstructed tree names include at least 'birch',
> 'spruce', 'Siberian pine', 'bird cherry', and 'rowan'.) The corpus of
> PU etymologies is very small, so it seems that at least in the case of
> Uralic, the tree names have belonged to the most stable part of the
> lexicon.

>  -Ante AIkio