R: Urheimat animals

[Alberto Lombardo]

-----Messaggio Originale-----
Da: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Data invio: domenica 6 maggio 2001 11.41

> In a message dated 5/6/01 3:27:06 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
> centrostudilaruna at libero.it writes:

>> I think we could add to the sentence whales, beavers, elks, many kinds
>> of birds and salmons too

> -- I would certainly agree on "beaver" (PIE *bhebhrus).  Note that Avestan
> retains a derivative with exactly the same meaning -- bawra, 'beaver',
> bawraini, 'of the/pertaining to beavers'.

> Now, in Old Indian/Sanskrit, there has been a semantic shift; there's a
> cognate term, babhru, but it means 'mongoose'.

> So the more northerly Indo-Iranian languages retained the original meaning,
> while in the southerly one, moving into an area where beavers weren't
> known, shifted the term to a roughly similar animal.  Similar in color, at
> least; Sanskrit babhru also means 'red-brown', and the derivation from a
> color term is obvious in PIE *babhrus.

> The neolithic range of the beaver stopped well short of the mediterranean
> and most of Anatolia.  Again, this reinforces the PIE lexicon for animals
> as being specifically north-central Eurasian.

fiber seems to find a correspondance in the gallic Bibr(acte) (a personal
name), in the high old german bibar (modern german Biber), in the lituan bebras
and in sanskrit babhru, which has two different meanings: as adjective it means
“brownred” and as male noun it's the name of the icneumon. Also
the greek phrne comes from the same theme, which is the i.e.
*bhebhru- (I take those informations from the Pokorny).