Re: Taxonomic list (and Re: poll 30? (long...Sal at her most voluble)

On Tue, 3 Jun 2003 19:32:08 -0400 Sally Caves <scaves@...>
writes:
> Yeah, a lot of the "Indo-European," or basically Latin borrowings
> were
> products of my graduate student years when I was studying
> historical
> linguistics.  I'm not overly fond of them either.  I just now read
> in _The
> DaVinci Code_ that "rose"... oh, how did the dashing American
> Harvard Prof
> put it?... that the word for "rose" had little variation as it was
> used
> across the Mediterranean and Western worlds.  Now immediately, of
> course, my
> warning signals went up.  Come on, now... of course it's going to be
> the
> same in the romance languages.  But could there be any truth behind
> this?
> What's "rose" in Hebrew?  Greek?  Damn that I don't have a Greek
> dictionary!
> Sally Caves
-

Hebrew: |vered|.  One of the few words in the language beginning with the
letter |vav|.  Most vav-initial words and roots in Hebrew shifted to
|yud|, for example Hebrew |yeled| ~ Arabic |walad| "child".
|Vered| may be a borrowing... i don't have a Hebrew etymological
dictionary to look it up in, though.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "there is darkness all around us;
  but if darkness *is*, and the darkness is of the forest,
  then the darkness must be good."
     ~ song of the BaMbuti in troubled times