Yew Two

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/30/01 7:35:48 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> Well, the problem is that I can't tell you when or how often the word would
> have been borrowed, if in fact it was ever borrowed.

-- then why are you wasting our time with an obvious piece of folk-entymology?

> And the reason I like it is because I don't think that any one can say for
> sure how <iophoros> would have been borrowed into Celtic or some part of
> Celtic.

-- do we have to go through the methods for identifying loan-words and the
period in which they were borrowed AGAIN?

> If you have a notion of what it would looked like, I'd be happy to hear it.

-- since there's no evidence at all of any such loan, that would be rather
futile.

> In Gaelic, of course, I only had <iubhar>, so that's what I used.  And it
> looked good.

-- until someone who knew the actual linguistic evolution commented.

> I should say - again - that the real problem I have with *ebor as some
> ancient name for yew is that the word seems to apply to a whole range of
> woods and bone materials

-- and your specific evidence for that _in this case_ is?  What?