Hittite walwa 'lion' WAS: Bears and why they are mostly...

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

alex at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) wrote:

>	As to the shape of this putative PIE lexeme, hittite walwa
>	posits a lot of difficulties. I know of a hypothesis,
>	which i find attractive, but the text can hardly be accessible
>	to any of the list members  (it appeared in the
>	"Jazgulamskij sbornik", St-Petersburg, 1996 and belongs to A.
>	Ryko). I am taking the liberty to outline it briefly, as it
>	is of interest. A "broken reduplication", suggested by G&I,
>	is an extremely rare type, if exists at all.
>	That is why the author suggests to reconstruct the word as
>	a o-grade nominal formation from the root *welw/wlew, which
>	om its part can be an w-enlarged root *wel- 'to tear' (some
>	of the other PIE roots with the same shape *wel-, such as 'to
>	see', 'to deceive', 'hair'  are compelling candidacies, too. -
>	- why not trace wl.-kw-os to the same root, whatever it might
>	be? And what is gr. alo:pe:ks then?)
>	The initial *w- in this Schwebeablauting root can be proved
>	with the help of the greek material, cf. e.g.
>		Tro:es de {F}leiousin eoikotes o:mophagoisi
>	"de", which stands in the beginning of the 2nd foot, should form a long
>	syllable, and the length is caused by the dygamma, which
>	closes the syllable.
>
>	Any comments?

Interesting, but how to explain the loss of w- in Latin (if not
from Greek), Germanic/Slavic (if not from Latin) or Tocharian
[hmm, in Toch., *wla:nt- gives both nom. <walo> and acc.
<la:nt>].  And what about the extra-IE parallels (none of which
show initial w-)?

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl