IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Eduard Selleslagh]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stefan Georg" <Georg at home.ivm.de>
Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2000 10:28 AM

>>AA>there is internal evidence in Uralic supporting the loan origin of p-U
>>AA>*weti 'water'.

>>.. Please try to fancy that there /could/ have been a common origin of
>>that word !
>>I do not know a single linguist who would confirm that a word like 'water'
>>could be object to borrowing!

> Well, I can introduce you to at least one such person:

> Tamil borrowed /udakam/, one of its "water"-words, from Sanskrit.

> Gogodala (/wi/), Awin (/wae/), and Gira (/wai/), three Papuan languages,
> borrowed Austronesian *wayEG  (reconstructed by some Austronesianists as
> *vaSeR, which does remind me of a language I know, but I cannot remember
> which one ;-).

> Several non-Semitic languages of Ethiopia have borrowed their word for
> "water" from Ethiosemitic (I'll have to dig for the details both in my
> memory and my files, if you insist).

> I have encountered more examples. It may not happen all too often, but,
> say, every ninth or tenth time I inspect a list of loan-words exchanged by
> languages in close-contact I haven't seen before, a "water"-word is among
> the suspects (and in most cases then it is found guilty too).

[Ed]

What about a.Grk. to hydo:r that was replaced by mod.Grk. to nero'? Was this
borrowed too? Where from?

[ Moderator's comment:
  No.  This is an internal development in Greek, from the water-carrier's cry
  _to neron hydo:r_ "fresh water!".
  --rma ]

> The claim that signifiants of some semantic notions are "so basic" that
> they cannot be subject to borrowing is just one of those myths our
> discipline seems to have real trouble to rid itself from. It is not true.
> There are no such concepts. Everything can be borrowed, and there are
> examples for everything actually having been borrowed at some point in
> space and time.

[Ed]

Tagalog speaking Pilipinos count in Spanish.

Ed. Selleslagh