The Germanic substrate - knives?

[proto-language]

Dear Steve and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 11:53 PM

> In a message dated 11/11/2000 9:19:50 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes:

> << You make a very interesting point regarding <knife> I think of knife in
> the sense of "cut, tear, strike, kill" but I can see how "flesher, scraper"
> can work>>

<snip>

> Well, the factuality of these supposed non-IE words is often repeated and
> without question.  In fact many have dead ringers with clear etymologies in
> other IE languages.  It seems the connections between them however have been
> discounted either because of bad definitions or because of the sound laws --
> which of course should not make us blind to obvious similarities that are
> impossible to assign to coincidence.  There are more of these words I'd
> like to address.

[PR]

It was the ambiguity of headings like *gen- in Pokorny that first started me
looking at proposals for Nostratic; however, I now believe I may have come
close to disambiguating:

pre-Ablaut-IE *gAn, 'press together';
pre-Ablaut-IE *g(^)En-, 'puncture' -> 'penetrate sexually'
pre-Ablaut-IE *gOn-, 'twist'

This really does not cover all the meanings because IE *g also is the
residue of an earlier velar nasal, [ng], which may have passed through a
stage of [G] before merging with [g]:

pre-Ablaut-IE *ngAn, 'tube';
pre-Ablaut-IE *ng(^)En-, 'lump'
pre-Ablaut-IE *ngOn-, 'ball'

My best guess would be that the 'knife' words started out as pre-Ablaut-IE
*g(^)En-, and originally signified 'daggers'.

'Cut' seems to be universally attached to pre-Ablaut-IE *k(h)Ol-.

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
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