Summer and apple: history of a Nostratic Wanderwort

In Greek mythology, Hēméra was the primeval goddness of the day. From this word and Armenian awr 'day', Indo-Europeanists such as Mallory-Adams¹ reconstruct an IE protoform *h₂ēm-ər- '(heat of the) day', which I link to Semitic *ħamm- 'to be hot; warm'², with the voiceless pharyngeal fricative ħ corresponding to "laryngeal" h₂. 

It doesn't take a long stretch of the imagination to devise a derived variant *HVmV-lV/HVmVlV which gave (with metathesis) Nakh-Daghestanian *mhalV/mhanV- 'warm' and IE *mah₂lo- 'apple', with a straightforward semantic drift from 'warm (season)' to 'fruit'. Several IE languages of North Europe (Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic) reflect a protoform *abVl- 'apple' (< *amHVl-?) which is regarded as a Paleo-European substrate loanword by some specialists.⁴

A Nostratic³ variant *ʕu-malV/*ʕu-manV would be the origin of Uralic *omena/omVrV 'apple' as well as  Basque udare, udari, madari 'pear'⁴ (with denasalization and further delabialization), umao (B), umo 'ripe, seasoned'.  This makes sense because the apple tree is originary of Kurdistan, precisely in the area where Nostratic was presumably spoken.

On the other hand, we've got yet another IE variant *səm-/*səm-ro- 'summer'⁵ and Hittite sam(a)lu- 'apple (tree)'.⁶ 

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¹ J.P. Mallory & Q.D. Adams (2006): The Oxford Introduction to PIE and the PIE World.  

² Also cognate are Hurrian am- 'to burn' and (possibly through an Etruscan intermediate) Latin amāre 'to love', amor 'love'.

³ My own concept of "Nostratic" isn't the one of a very large macro-family including IE, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, etc. but a language spoken in the Taurus-Zagros mountains, where several species of plants and animals were domesticated in the Neolithic.

⁴ For example, Theo Vennemann links it to Afrasian *ʔa-bul- 'male genitals', which (in his own words) is "semantically unsatisfactory although phonetically perfect". See T. Vennemann (1998): Andromeda and the Apples of the Hesperides, in Europa Vasconica, Europa Semitica, 591-652.

⁵ The ablaut form *sem- usually quoted in dictionaries isn't attested anywhere.

⁶ Explained by ortodox IE-ists such as Kloekhorst as the result of a "s-mobile".

The Labyrinth (updated)

Greek labýrinthos (Mycenean DA-PU-RI₂-TO-JO 'of the labyrinth') designated an elaborated place built by the artificer Daedalus for the king Minos of Crete and whose function was to hold the Minotaur, a legendary creature half man and half bull. Although the Cretan labyrinth had a square or rectangular shape, there is an older circular version found in several ancient cultures, mostly in petroglyphs. 

From the Greek word, I'd reconstruct Minoan¹ *ɮabur 'fence, wall', with an initial voiced lateral represented as /d/ in Linear B. Seemingly related words are Etruscan spur 'city', Egyptian ʃzp(a) 'fence', Central Chadic *ɮabˁ- 'fence, to fence', Low East Cushitic (Afar) sabsab- 'wall' (reduplicative). 

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¹ The Pre-Greek language spoken at Crete, attested in Linear A tablets and loanwords to Greek.

Celtic *longā 'boat, vessel' (updated)

Celtic *longā 'boat, vessel' is attested in Welsh llong 'ship', Old Breton locou 'vessels, vases', Old Irish long 'vessel, (little) vase, ship', to which corresponds the Gaulish toponymic element Longo-¹. There's also Cisalpine Gaulish (Todi) lokan /longan/ 'cinerary urn', an accusative form where /ng/ is rendered as k.

Although some authors have suggested a loanword (with reanalysis) from Latin nauis longa 'warship' (lit. 'long ship'), specialists such as Matasović² think this is a genuine Celtic word without IE etymology, which I consider it to be a cultural loanword from North East Caucasian *leqˀV 'a k. of vessel' (NCED 1511), where the ejective stop became prenasalized. Also related would be Latin lanx 'dish, plate'³, apprently borrowed from Etruscan in account of its /a/ vocalism.

This lexeme was also borrowed into IE *lonko-/ā 'valley' > Lithuanian lankà ‘valley, rivermeadow’, Old Church Slavonic lǫka ‘gulf, valley, meadow, marsh’, Tocharian B leṅke ‘valley’, and Late Latin *lanca ‘depression, bed of a river’⁴, with a straightforward semantic shift.

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¹ X. Delamarre (2008): Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise, p. 206-207.

² R. Matasović (2009): Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic, p. 244.

³ This meaning is reflected in Tsezian.

⁴ J.P. Mallory & D.Q. Adams (2006): The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. 122.

The Indo-European horses (updated)

The Indo-European word *h₁eḱw-o- 'horse' (Latin equus, Greek híppos)¹ has been used by defenders of the so-called Kurgan theory as part of the evidence supporting the speakers of PIE (i.e. the proto-language of the IE family)² were the people who first domesticated the animal in the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 4,000-3,500 BC³.

However, this appears to be a Wanderwort whose earliest form can be traced to North Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) *ɦɨ[n]tʃwi (^~ -e) 'horse' (NCED 211) and which also spread to Sumerian anše 'donkey' and Hurrian eššǝ 'horse'. As pointed out by Uralic *ki(n)tʃe/*ky(n)tʃe 'nail, fingernail, claw', my bet is this word would have first been originally to some Pleistocene ungulates.

As pigs, sheep and goats -which together with cattle made up the Near East Neolithic package- were first domesticated around 9,000-8,000 BC in the Taurus-Zagros mountains area, it's possible for Afrasian *ʕi(n)ʒ- 'sheep, goat' (Semitic, Cushitic) and *χu(n)ʒ(-ir-) 'pig' (Semitic, Chadic)'⁴ to be also related.

 
Incidentally, this is the time and space framework where the linguist Allan Bomhard placed his Proto-Nostratic⁵, which his collegue Kerns regarded as being part of the Dene-Caucasian phylum: I believe that Nostratic languages did not exist except as a part of Dene-Caucasian until the waning of the Würm glaciation, some 15,000 years ago⁶. However, in my view this wouldn't be the common ancestor (Mother Tongue) of a plethora of language families such as Indo-European, Afrasian or Kartvelian, but rather the source of several Neolithic Wanderwörter. 

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¹ Luwian *aššu-/*azzu- 'horse' and Georgian aču/ačua 'interjection for calling horses' are loanwords from Indo-Iranian.

² See J.P. Mallory (1989): In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Language, Archaeology and Myth, p. 143-185.

³ The domesticated horse (Equus ferus caballus) is a different subspecies than the wild horse of the Eurasian steppes (Equus ferus ferus), also called tarpan (a Turkic word). There is also another subspecies native to the Eurasian steppes, the so-called Przewalski's horse (Equus ferus Przewalski's), which has never been domesticated.

⁴ Whose specialization could have involved phonosymbolism in the initial fricativec

⁵ A. Bomhard (2008): Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic. Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary, vol. I, p. 235-241. 
⁶ A. Bomhard & J.C. Kerns (1994): The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship, p. 153.

Etruscan φersu 'masked character (in games)' (updated)

Etruscan φersu 'masked character (in games)'¹ can be analized as a derivative from an unattested form *φers 'husk', an agricultural term with correspondences in Hittite paršdu 'leaf, foliage'², linked in turn by Alexei Kassian to Kartvelian *purtś 'husk, foliage' (Georgian purcel ’leaf, foliage', Megrel purča 'chaff, husk', Laz purča 'sweet corn ear', purčumale 'a k. of weed'), *prtś-wn- 'to husk, to scale'³.

Presumably related to this etymology is the Greek theonym Perséphonē (Etruscan Φersipnei, Latin Proserpina), attested on several Attic vases from the 5th century BC as Persóphatta, P(h)erséphatta, Pherréphatta. Rudolf Wachter analyzes it as a compound whose second member would be derived from Indo-European *-gʷhn-t-jā < *gʷhen- 'to beat, to kill', and the first one related to Sanskrit parṣá- 'sheaf, bundle', Young Avestan parša- 'ear (of corn)', to which Michael Weiss -in a personal communication to Wachter- also adds Latin porrum and Greek práson 'leek', from a supposed Indo-European lexeme *pr̥s-o-'⁴. Thus the reconstructed meaning of the theonym would be 'sheaf-beater', i.e. 'threshing maiden'⁵. 

However, like most Indo-Iranian lexicon related to agriculture, *parš appears to be a substrate loanword from the language spoken by BMAC people⁶. On the other hand, for Slavic *proso- 'millet', Georg Holzer posited a loanword from a substrate language he called Temematic (Temematisch in German) after its proposed sound correspondences with PIE and where *r̥ > ro⁷. Although Holzer's theory has been discredited as a whole⁸, it could still explain the etymology of the Slavic word from IE *bhar(e)s 'a k. of cereal (millet, barley, spelt)' (Latin far, farris), a remnant of the languages spoken by the Neolithic farmers who colonized Europe from the Near East.

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¹ Latin persōna 'theatre mask' is a loanword from Etruscan *φersu-na.

² Wrongly translated by some authors as 'sprout, sprig'. See A. Kloekhorst (2008): Etymological Dictionary of Hittite, pp. 645-646. 

³ A. Kassian (2009): Anatolian lexical isolates and their external Nostratic cognates, in Orientalia et Classica, §48.

⁴ M. De Vaan (2008): Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages, pp. 481-482.

⁵ R. Wachter (2006): Persephone, the Threshing Maiden, in Die Sprache, vol. 47, no. 2 (2007-2008), pp.163-181.

⁶ M. Witzel (2003): Linguistic Evidence for Cultural Exchange in Prehistoric Western Central Asia, in Sino-Platonic Papers 129, p. 33.

⁷ G. Holzer (1989): Entlehnungen aus einer bisher unbekannten indogermanischen Sprach in Urslavischen und Urbaltischen, §2. See also F. Kortland (2003): An Indo-European substratum in Slavic?, in Languages in Prehistoric Europe, pp. 183-184.

⁸ R. Matasović (2013): Substratum words in Balto-Slavic, in Filologija 60, pp. 75-102.

Gaulish buððutton 'spindle; penis' (updated)

Gaulish buððutton 'spindle; penis'¹ is attested on the spindle whorl Gallo-Latin inscription Moni gnatha gabi buððutton imon 'Come, girl, take my penis'². The word must have designated the instrument itself and then applied to the male organ in a metaphoric way. Basque buztan 'tail; penis' is presumably a Celtic loanword, probably from Gaulish itself.

From this and other Insular Celtic words (Old Irish bot 'penis, tail', Middle Welsh both 'umbo, shield boss'), Matasović reconstructs a Celtic protoform *buzdo- 'tail'³, supposedly derived from IE *gwozdo- (Germanic *kwast(j)ō 'bunch of branches', Albanian gjeth 'leaf, foliage', Slavic *xvost 'tail'⁴), assuming the original meaning was 'to sprout'.

On the other hand, English button is a loanword from Old French boton (modern bouton) 'bud; button; pimple, spot', itself from Late Latin *buttōne-, usualy regarded as a Germanic borrowing, but IMHO actually from Gaulish, which would be also the source of Germanic *buddōn 'bud'.

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¹ X. Delamarre (2008): Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise, p. 92-93. 
² W. Meid (1994): Gaulish Inscriptions, translates the Gaulish word as 'kiss', cfr. bussu- 'lip'. 

³ R. Matasović (2009): Etymological dictionary of Proto-Celtic, p. 85-86.
⁴ Conflated by Vassmer to *gvozdis 'nail'.