SV: the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 4:37 AM

>> X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>> This seems to me to be an interesting observation. Have you got any
>> bibliographic references on lactose tolerance?

> -- Cavalli-Sforza, "The History and Geography of Human Genes" and "The Great
> Human Diasporas".

>> Number one, linguistically, do we find the IE languages discriminating cow's
>> milk from mother's milk

> -- unlikely to be the latter, since the terms actually usually derive from a
> verbal form, "to milk"; eg., *melk

> Also *dhedhnos, 'sour milk, cheese'; *pipiusi, giving Lithuanian papijusi,
> 'cow rich in milk'; *tenki, 'buttermilk'; *nguen, 'butter'; *turo, 'curds,
> curdled milk', etc.

>> Number two, do all the milk of all cattle or even of wild cattle produce the
>> intolerance syndrome?

> -- if drunk unprocessed.

[Ed Selleslagh]

That's only true if 'processing' involves 'fermentation', because otherwise
lactose is still present. Fermentation transforms lactose (sugar) into lactic
acid, which causes no intolerance. That's the basic reason why Eurasian steppe
peoples invented yoghurt and similar products, apart from the fact that milk,
even boiled, spoils easily, while the products obtained through a fermentation
process (yoghurt, cheese, etc.) do not (except butter, but that's a different
story: formation of butyric acid).

Ed. Selleslagh