Oldest words in English?

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:24 AM -0600 3/1/09, Joseph Salmons wrote:
>Ahhhh, the old pre-IE substrate vocabulary issue. There's a whole
>literature on just 'apple', by Hamp, Huld, D.Q. Adams, and others.

Including Theo Vennemann, whose paper a decade ago "Andromeda and the
Apples of the Hesperides" is a tour de force.  It's included in the
compilation "Europa Vasconica - Europa Semitica" is available for
sampling on google books.

We've discussed this here, back in 2001 if memory serves...ah yes,
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0106A&L=ads-l&D=0#3

But I see that was more about apples in the context of prostitutes
and The Big Apple (one of the more notorious etymythologies extant)
than about the Vasconic roots of "apple".  But I see in one of my
postings there I mentioned that Vennemann summarized his findings in
his Linguist List
posting 9.421, "Apple-Word" (Mar. 20, 1998, available through the
archives at www.linguistlist.org).

LH


>  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"Some as yet unpublished research indicates some words of a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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