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Re: Etymology of English 'black'

From:Danny Wier <dawiertx@...>
Date:Sunday, June 6, 2004, 19:08
From: "Emily Zilch" <emily0@...>

> { 20040606,0915 | Danny Wier } > > "Arabic _lahab_ 'flame' might be related by a stretch of the > imagination; there would've had to have been metathesis, maybe *blh > > lhb. I doubt it seriously. Maybe _balq_ 'mica' might be a better > candidate, since mica is a shiny and smooth mineral." > > And because [bh] is a UNITARY phoneme. > > Sorry, don't mean to sound harsh, but there is no evidence (AFAIK) of > any metathesis happening involving PIE "aspirates" treating their > aspiration as separate bits.
True, but what I was referring to is a belief among Nostraticists is that Indo-European *bh is related to Afro-Asiatic *b. Though Nostratic may or may not be a valid theory in the 'real world', it is in my conworld, and Tech is a direct descendant of this. Since the form of Indo-European I'm using is modified according to the 'glottalic theory', the belief that PIE didn't have triads of p/b/bh, but p(h)/p'/b((h) (making Grimm's Law a conservatism and not an innovation), there will be some words in Tech that will be similar to Germanic words with similar meanings! For example, 'tying together, marriage' is _ban^d_ (the ^ should be a caron/hac^ek); its passive, _b@n^d_ (@ = inverted e, that is, 'schwa'), means 'house, home, family, community', close to German _Bund_.

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Emily Zilch <emily0@...>Tech's Hacek