Oldest words in English?

[Joseph Salmons]

Ahhhh, the old pre-IE substrate vocabulary issue. There's a whole
literature on just 'apple', by Hamp, Huld, D.Q. Adams, and others. The
word has some characteristics that have suggested that it wasn't of IE
origin -- a limitation to the northwestern languages, a *b (very rare
in IE), I think some funkiness between *a and *o vocalism, and
belonging to a domain where substrate words are pretty common (flora
and fauna). I'm not an expert, certainly, but the recent stuff I've
read on the topic has found plausible broader connections that would
suggest that the word is not in fact limited to the northwestern IE
area, as was once believed, which kills the substrate idea.

Surely there ARE substrate items, but identifying them securely is
really tough.

Joe

On Mar 1, 2009, at 10:05 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Oldest words in English?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> If you're like me, you have in front of you a copy of Norris
> McWhirter's
> _Guinness Book of World Records: New! Giant 1980 Super-Edition!_, and
> you're looking at p. 207, which states:
>
> "Some as yet unpublished research indicates some words of a
> pre-Indo-European substrate survive in English, including apple
> (apal), bad
> (bad), gold (gol), and tin (tin)."
>
> Comments?
>
> JL
>

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