Uralic, PIE and motivatited borrowings.

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

Someone wrote:
<<.. of course that is correct; so nothing can be generalized. The cases you
cited seem to be due to situations where water is quite precious.>>

In a message dated 2/5/00 6:17:35 AM, Georg at home.ivm.de replied:
<<I'm not beginning to understand? Serbocroatian borrowed its word for
"excrement" (balega) from Roumanian, and come to think of the English terms
/faeces/, /manure/ or the gloss above. Surely, "high value" cannot really
lurk behind the motivation for borrowing ?>>

I think my original question about why anyone would need to borrow a word for
water was meant to carry a little irony with it.

Ante Aikio seems to have said that these PIE borrowings made up something
like 10-17% of the words recovered from the period.  Words like 'water' and
'bring' individually may not seem to demonstrate much.  But a list of a lot
of basic words - and as high a number as one out of six would seem to say
something a little more.

The 'motivation' might be to use someone else's language often but without
adopting it - so that a fair number of those words logically become habit
among these native p-Uralic speakers.  This also would suggest regular
contact and enough to talk about to make the borrowings sooner or later feel
natural.

To see it as such suggests a stage of assimilation - like NY street Spanish -
where you switch languages on the basis of not only the listener but also on
the basis of subject - so that the word eventually continues to be used among
native speakers alone.

I also am reminded of Rick Mc Callister's observation:
<<I've seen "camisa de T" but only on packages of T-shirts made by US
companies.  I've only heard "T-shirt" /ticher/ used by US Hispanics and other
Hispanics in the US.>>

An extensive trade in goods might encourage a specific set of words borrowed
without total bi-lingualism or conversion to the other language.

Also, I'm reminded of Andrew Sheratt's newer theory that the large vats of
the Bandkeramik were perhaps meant to hold malted beverage - a possible
by-product of agriculturalism and a possible tool of assimilation.  Do these
borrowed words - 'water' (drink?) and 'bring' (six-pack?) possibly look like
they may reflect this kind of regular contact and 'motivated' borrowing?

Perhaps these PIE borrowings can be made to yield some coherent picture when
taken together rather than one at a time.

Regards,
Steve Long