Urheimat animals

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 5/6/01 3:27:06 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
centrostudilaruna at libero.it writes:

> I think we could add to the sentence whales, beavers, elks, many kinds of
> birds and salmons too

-- I would certainly agree on "beaver" (PIE *bhebhrus).  Note that Avestan
retains a derivative with exactly the same meaning -- bawra, 'beaver',
bawraini, 'of the/pertaining to beavers'.

Now, in Old Indian/Sanskrit, there has been a semantic shift; there's a
cognate term, babhru, but it means 'mongoose'.

So the more northerly Indo-Iranian languages retained the original meaning,
while in the southerly one, moving into an area where beavers weren't
known, shifted the term to a roughly similar animal.  Similar in color, at
least; Sanskrit babhru also means 'red-brown', and the derivation from a
color term is obvious in PIE *babhrus.

The neolithic range of the beaver stopped well short of the mediterranean
and most of Anatolia.  Again, this reinforces the PIE lexicon for animals
as being specifically north-central Eurasian.

As for salmon, there's a very similar fish present in rivers draining into
the Pontic-Caspian area, and so PIE *loks could have referred either to
this, to the Atlantic salmon, or to both.  In my opinion, probably to both,
or it just meant something like "a big river fish with reddish meat".

Note that in Tocharian (which was spoken in an area with nothing resembling
a salmon) a cognate word has undergone semantic shift to mean just "fish"
in general.