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Browsing through the The American Heritage Dictionary "Indo-European Roots Appendix", a favorite activity of mine, even before the pandemic lockdowns, I came to "pel-³" and was stunned when I saw that one of the derived words was Greek peltē, a shield (made of hide), about which three years ago I had written a very long post (nearly three thousand words): 

"Of armaments and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 6" (12/23/17)

Utilizing a mass of archeological, art historical, textual, linguistic, and other types of evidence, I had shown a close resemblance between the Greek peltē and Sinitic fá 瞂  pelta; small shield — Middle Sinitic bjwot — as defined in Paul Kroll, ed., A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 104a.  In that whole, long post, I did not mention Sinitic pí 皮 ("skin; hide; pelt; leather"), because I was determined to cite only linguistic evidence from the Classical Greek to the Middle Sinitic period and the associated artifacts and images.

Today, looking at PIE pel-³ ("skin; hide") and its derivatives (see below), I immediately thought of Old Sinitic pí 皮 ("skin; hide; pelt; leather"):

• Middle Sinitic: /bˠiᴇ/

(Baxter–Sagart): /*m-[p](r)aj/

(Zhengzhang): /*bral/

(source)

In comparing PIE pel-³ ("skin; hide") and Old Sinitic /*m-[p](r)aj/; /*bral/ ("skin; hide"), we do not need to worry unduly about the final "-t" of the English word "pelt", which is what inspired me to undertake the research that resulted in this post, since that is a suffixed form derived from the PIE root.

pel-³

(AHD appx. IE roots)

If you want to get a quick sense of words for "skin" in many different languages around the world, check here.  This list, however, must be used with care.  As Jim Mallory cautions:

Just looking at this website, I would only regard it as a starting point. For example, it lists the Irish word as pelt. It might be used as such in Irish although I could not find it in the standard Irish-English dictionary nor in the English-Irish dictionary where you would use the Irish word for skin to which you would simply attach 'animal' or a separate word meaning 'green hide' (used in tanning). Also it gives pelt (in Cyrillic) as the Russian word – again not in my Russian dictionary (perhaps not so complete) but I would expect 'shkura' 'skin, hide". In any event, if the word simply seems to be a loanword, I suspect that the compiler did not make much of an effort trying to find the right word.

In these days of the super close presidential election, I can't help but think of the strange expression, "by the skin of my teeth", as I bring this post to a close.

Selected readings

• "The dissemination of iron and the spread of languages" (11/5/20)
• "Indo-European religion, Scythian philosophy, and the date of Zoroaster: a linguistic quibble" (10/9/20) — with a bibliography of numerous relevant previous posts
• "Sword out of the stone" (8/9/08) — see especially this comment
• "Trefoils across Eurasia: the importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 4" (10/11/20)
• "Headless men with face on chest" (9/28/20)
• "The geographical, archeological, genetic, and linguistic origins of Tocharian" (7/14/20)
• "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 3" (6/3/20)
• "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics" (5/1/20) — with a list of more than a dozen previous posts related to archeology and language
• "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 2" (5/11/20)
• "Archeological and linguistic evidence for the wheel in East Asia" (3/11/20)
• "Of armaments and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 6" (12/23/17) — particularly pertinent, and also draws on art history as well as archeology
• "Of horse riding and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (4/21/19)
• "Indo-European 'cow' and Old Sinitic Reconstructions: awesome" (1/16/20)
• "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19)
• "'Horse Master in IE and in Sinitic" (11/9/19)
• "'Horse' and 'language' in Korean" (10/30/19)
• "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/19)
• "Of horse riding and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (4/21/19)
• "Of reindeer and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/23/18)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 5" (3/28/16)
• "Of dogs and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (3/7/18)
• "Of jackal and hide and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/16/18)
• "Galactic glimmers: of milk and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (1/8/19)
• "Mare, mǎ ('horse'), etc." (11/17/19)
• "The Names of Metals in the Turkic, Indo-European, and Finno-Ugric Languages"
• J. P. Mallory, The Problem of Tocharian Origins: An Archaeological Perspective (Sino-Platonic Papers, 259 [Nov. 2015]; free pdf, 63 pp.)
• Victor H. Mair.  "The Horse in Late Prehistoric China:  Wresting Culture and Control from the 'Barbarians'."  In Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew and Katie Boyle, ed.  Prehistoric steppe adaptation and the horse, McDonald Institute Monographs.  Cambridge:  McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research,  pp. 163-187.
• C. Scott Littleton, "Were Some of the Xinjiang Mummies 'Epi-Scythians'? An Excursus in Trans-Eurasian Folklore and Mythology." In Victor H. Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington D.C. and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 746-766.
• C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor, From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail (New York and London: Garland, 1994; rev. pb. 2000). In the British journal, Religion, 28.3 (July, 1998), 294-300, I [VHM] wrote a review in which I pointed out that the celebrated motif of a mighty arm rising up out of the water holding aloft the hero's sword can also be found in a medieval Chinese tale from Dunhuang. That review is available electronically from ScienceDirect, if your library subscribes to it. Otherwise, I think this version on the Web is a fairly faithful copy.
• Andrew Sherratt, "The Trans-Eurasian Exchange: The Prehistory of Chinese Relations with the West," in Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2006), pp. 30-61.
  
• Barry Cunliffe, By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2015).

November 7, 2020 @ 8:03 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Borrowing, Etymology, Language and archeology, Reconstructions

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