Re to J Silk: kaDevara & cadaaver

[Allen Thrasher]

On Wed, 30 Oct 1996, Dominique Thillaud wrote:

> >I am almost entirely ignorant of IE and associated problems, but is it
> >possible to explain briefly why a connection between kaDevara and lat.
> >cadaaver is correctly ignored by Mayrhoffer?
> >
> >J Silk
> 
>         Briefly: A link between this two words is not strictly impossible, but:
> we can't prove it by known phonetical laws nor our knowledge of their languages:
> 
>         1) both words are long but don't split in their own languages, none
> of them looks clearly as compound or derived in an IE way:
>         2) in kaDevara, hesitations in spelling betray a non-IE origin,
> kaDa/kala 'dumb' is very far from 'body, corpse' and what would be i(i)vara
> ?
>         3) cadaaver is perhaps related with cadoo 'fall' but this latter
> corresponds probably to skr. zad- and, anyway, the final is obscure (and if
> a perfect participe -wes we expect skr. -vas)
>         4) in a diphthong the 'i' in kaDevara (and other forms) can't be a
> laryngal, just a poor 'i': why vanished in cadaaver ?
>         5) we don't know equivalent word in a third IE language.
> 
>         The only possibilities I can see are: both belong to a badly known
> part of IE (popular, womanly, funeral, ?), are reinterpretations by false
> etymologies of a unknow isolated IE word or are borrowed from an other
> unknown language. But nothing of that is a better proof than: they come
> from the venusian teachers in their flying saucers and that's an
> irrefutable proof of their existence!
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> Dominique Thillaud - Universite de Nice - Sophia Antipolis
> email : thillaud at unice.fr
> 
> 
> 
>