*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?

[Stanley Friesen]

At 11:51 PM 2/13/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>Let me ask, does evidence of (*hwergh-, *hwerg- or *hwerk-?) appear in any
>other IE languages?

>I guess it would have to.  Otherwise you'd have at best a Tocharian/Hittite
>connection, but not necessarily PIE.  Am I right?

Not necessarily.  In fact in the *particular* case of a cognate in
Tocharian and Hittite, reconstructing a PIE word is at least reasonable.

>After all, you wouldn't want to be finding PIE roots every time just two
>ancient IE languages showed cognates

Naturally.  One does not reconstruct a PIE root for just *any* cognates
found in a pair of IE languages.  But when the languages are as
geographically separated, and when at least one of them is likely to have
split off very early, then there are few other good alternatives.

Thus cognates in Latin and Celtic just suggest an old northern European
word.  But a word in Sanskrit and Celtc is hard to explain by means of
later shared vocabulary (whether borrowed or jointly innovated).  Tocharian
and Hittite are about as deeply split as any two IE languages can be, and
there is no real possibility of late contact.

>I wouldn't of course think - if these two languages were the only evidence of
>root mentioned above - that a PIE root or root-stem would need to be
>conjectured simply because of some assumption that Hittite and Tocharian had
>no contact or common ancestor after PIE split.  I can't take seriously the
>idea that it is ENOUGH to say that Hittite and Tocharian are "very widely
>separated IE languages."  For one thing, all IE languages are geographically
>widely separated from Tocharian, but that couldn't always have been true.
>And for another thing, some trees at least (e.g., the UPenn tree) have
>Hittite and Tocharian right next to each other in terms of relatedness.

But with no shared ancestral nodes that are not also shared with all other
IE languages.

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May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com