This paper discusses the etymological nest of Dravidian and Altaic lexemes with the meaning “to bow, bend” and the terms for the “elbow,” “knee,” “ankle” as a dynamic etymological model. The lexemes have the general formal structure of the CVC- root with an initial dental (stop or nasal) and medial velars or labials. In the first section of the paper the verbs and some of their derivatives are listed and discussed also with regards to several overlapping etyma with different meanings. The second section sums up the terms for the body parts related etymologically to the respective verbs. In the conclusion select Altaic reconstructions are listed for comparison.
This paper discusses the etymological nest of Dravidian and Altaic lexemes with the meaning “to bow, bend, stoop, incline, curve. ” The paper is divided into two parts according to the formal structure of the root. The first part deals with etyma, whose roots have initial labial p-/b-/v-/m- (variants with initial n-!) in the CVC- root, medial velar stops, and nasals or nasal-stop groups. The second part adds the VC- roots, i.e. those in which the initial labial consonant is missing while the medial is a velar or labial consonant of the same structure (a stop, a nasal, or the respective nasal-stop group). It concludes with a note on the borrowings in IA related to this group of Dravidian lexemes.
In recent years, Prof. Vacek has dealt systematically with various lexical classes as represented by the comparison of Dravidian and Altaic, be it verbs (Vcek 2003, 2004b), designations of various animals (Vacek 2002c, 2004a), or other lexemes with concrete (Vacek 2002a) or abstract (Vacek 2002b) referents. The comparison of Dravidian and Altaic done by other scholars is also discussed and the author refers readers to papers on the subject by K. H. Menges (1994, 1977) and K. V. Zvelebil (1991).
The paper sums up some of the results of the previous research on this topic with regard to lexical, morphological and phonetic parallels, points out some of the problems of formal and semantic interpretation of these parallels and proposes a new approach to the comparative study not only on the basis of individual lexemes but on the basis of established models. The relatively high number of regular phonetic parallels coupled with a number of what appears to be irregular correspondences, does not allow the interpretation of these parallels in terms of a classical language family, but rather in terms of a prehistoric linguistic relationship filtered and altered through an ancient linguistic area, or areas.