Re: proof that most etymologies are only fairy-tales


On Aug 21, 1:50 pm, Harlan Messinger

<hmessinger.removet...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

laughable.

Loveable. BIR belongs to the permutation
group of BRI concerning fertility and means
fur, especially the fur whereupon a newborn
was laid. Now yesterday evening, to my great
pleasure, I found this entry in a Shakespeare
glossary:

  bearing-cloth, the cloth in which a child
  was carried to be christened

BIR as fur on which a newborn was laid,
and bearing-cloth the cloth in which a child
was carried to be christened ... Religious
customs often reach far back in time. The
Church replaced pagan customs by similar
Christian ones and thus keeps a memory
of former rituals. For example the Christmas
tree testifies to a former celebration of the
winter solstice involving trees and lights.

The best fur, longhaired, soft and warm,
was provided by the bear, hence bear
from BIR. Most fur is brown, hence *bher-
'brown' from BIR. BIR was the origin, bear
and brown are secondary word formations.

Good old Grimm assumed that Bär 'bear'
and Latin pario parens parentes are
related. The original meaning of parent
would then have been: a happy couple
who can lay a newborn in a warm fur ...
Lovely. And this fur, preferably a bear fur,
would later have been replaced by the
bearing-cloth in which a child was carried
to be christened, a religious reminder of
a very ancient practical custom that left
a pattern, one may even say kind of a
holographic pattern, in language.

The bearing-cloth occurs in The Winter's Tale,
Act III Scene III. Antigonus lays a baby on the ground,
next to it a bundle containing (as we learn later on)
"a bearing-cloth for a squire's child" and gold, and
then he is chased away by a - bear !! As if the bard
knew that the origin of the bearing-cloth had been
a bear fur, and as if the bear chased Antigonus
in revenge for all the people who had chased bears
for their precious fur.

Was Shakespeare guided by the similarity of
bear and bearing-cloth? or by fables he heard
as a boy? or may some bearing-clothes actually
have been made of bear hides? Stratford-upon-
Avon is not very far south of Birmingham. The
Midlands, in the Mesolithic and Neolithic, could
well have been a hunting area and a trading
place of furs. If the name 'Birmingham' is of
an ancient origin, it may contain the compound
BIR MAN --- fur (bir) right hand (man), meaning
people who handled fur in one way or another.
BIR MAN might even be the origin of English
woman women: birman furman woman women
(the spoken plural keeping the initial -i-), while
the compound BIR BEL --- fur (bir) warm (bel,
PIE *wel) may account for English and German
warm: birbel birm (bel subsumed under m)
wirm werm warm.

The bearing-cloth was a rich cloth (or mantle
or gown) in which a child was wrapped and
carried to be christened. In the Midlands, around
Birmingham and Stratford-upon-Avon, some of
the bearing-clothes might actually have been
made of bear furs, perhaps witnessed by young
Wiliam, or told to him by old people in his youth.

The official etymology explains Birmingham
as home (ham) of the descendants (inges)
of one Brem or Berm (an Anglo-Saxon name).
The name of the town is written and spelled
and pronounced in 144 ways, the prevailing
one Brummingham, and the inhabitants call
themselve Brummies. Reminds me of German
Brummbär Dutch brombeer 'growling bear,
grumbler'. Berm could perhaps be a derivative
of BIR BEL, if so Birmingham would once have
been the place of the descendants of a trader
of warm furs. Consider also Wolverhampton
near Birmingham, might well have been a
Mesolithic and Neolithic hunting zone and
trading place of furs. But I give up on the city
name, and on the compounds BIR MAN and
BIR BEL - Magdalenian is still very young,
I shall first explore the immediately plausible
compounds.

And there is more to say about BIR. Fur is
the cover of the bear and other furry animals.
In a like way bark is the cover of a tree trunk,
it might have the same origin BIR. Also birch,
whose bast was used to make clothes (on
the Schnidejoch in Switzerland, over 2700 m,
between the canton of Bern and the canton
Valais, have been found some 300 Neolithic
objects, about 6,500 years old, one thousand
years older than Oetzi from the Similaun glacier,
and among those objects are pants made from
the leather of domesticated goats, and remains
of a piece of cloth made from bast). Then there
is barque embark and German Barke, so to say
the protecting cover against the water. English
bare might also come from BIR and would
originally have denoted a skinned animal,
stripped from its fur. Then there is German Berg.
An indication to the origin of this word is given
via Sanskrit. In Grimm I found two Sanskrit words
for bear, ruxi and urxi. The latter goes along with
Greek arktos, from ARC, while the first would go
along with RAG for the line of head and back of
an animal, the first line drawn by a cave painter
and strongly evocative of the whole animal
(Leroy Gourhan). The bear was considered king,
says Grimm. Derivatives of RAG are German
ragen 'loom, tower' and Latin rex 'king'. In Greek
there is a derivative meaning hill, comparing the
line of a hill with the one of an animal's head and
back. The back line of a cave bear, magnified
by fear, would then have been seen in the line
of this or that hill and mountain, and then a
general meaning of hill and mountain, German
Berg, would have taken place ... What Mallory
and Adams 2006 say of *bher-, namely that it
was very productive, I can claim with even
more right for BIR. And the killrating frenzy in
this thread confirms me ever more in my opinion:
Panu Petteri Höglund and his aliasses and fellow
killraters are wildly decided to finish off with me,
but they utterly and desperately lack arguments.
And so do Harlan Messinger and Brian M. Scott
and Trond Engen and John Atkinson. They can
neither disprove my etymology of bear, nor
defend the PIE etymology. They don't even try,
their lack of will indicating to me a lacking ability.

The killrating frenzy almost reaches the intensity
of 2005 when I began drawing up my permutation
groups. I was on the right way then, I am on the
right way now. The killrating tells me so.

I just consulted the Proceedings on the Annual
UCLA Indo-European Conference and found
a paper on the bear by Martin Huld (Tenth C.).
Prakrit rikkha, Pahari rikkh, Gujarati rich,
Marathi ris(h) and Sindi richu go along with
the above RAG, while the Old Indic root rksa
is ambigous, combining ARC and RAG in
-rk or in r-k. As for the tabu-mechanism, Huld
says that "the exact social conditions which
would be the justification for tabu have not
been documented, and whenever tabu is
invoked, the social conditions that that induce
such irregular linguistic developments must be
defined unless tabu is to become a methodological
wild card." (In my reply to Douglas G. Kilday
I called the tabu-mechanism a deus-ex-machina
sort of argument, now Huld gives me the term
wild card at hand.) "Old Norse berserks were
symbolized by the wearing of bear-skin shirts."
OE bera, MDut. bere, OHG bero, runic OSw
personal name biari. All close to BIR. Now
consider OPrus. clokis 'hairy' and Serbo-
Croatan dlaka 'hair' - "a circumlocution
similarto Ostyak 'fur-man' or Lapp 'wooly one'.
I will study the paper at home and say more
in a later message.

PS. Also fear and fury could be derivatives
of BIR, considering that OE beorn means
warrior.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: proof that most etymologies are only fairy-tales
    ... fur, especially the fur whereupon a newborn ... and bearing-cloth the cloth in which a child ... was provided by the bear, ... 'brown' from BIR. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Greek Psi
    ... BIR means fur, especially the fur on which a newborn was laid ... he will name it a bear ... ... for the PIE explanation of bear as the brown one, which, in my ... I can easily unite the six *bher- homonyms under BIR, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: are El/ohim and Allah related?
    ... Of course I claim that bear and beard are etymologically ... Both come from BIR meaning fur, ...
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  • Re: Greek Psi
    ... BIR means fur, especially the fur on which a newborn was laid ... he will name it a bear ... ... for the PIE explanation of bear as the brown one, which, in my ... I can easily unite the six *bher- homonyms under BIR, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Magdalenian experiment (continuation)
    ... Magdalenian BIR and English bear, ... Magdalenian BIR means fur, especially the fur ... meaning fertile. ...
    (sci.lang)