Reconstruction talk:Proto-Slavic/bъzъ

Why meaning difference

@Fay Freak, do you know anyone explaining why the Slavic meaning differs from the meanings attested in Greek, Germanic, Celtic, Latin, and Armenian? Elderberries are not particularly similar to oaks, chestnuts, and beeches. 90.196.180.211 20:58, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

No, and it is not my profession to read reconstructionist stuff, unlike the frequent superiority of my conjectures to those of academics suggests – it particularly derives from my reticence about doubtful matters.

Formally the Slavic word for the elder could also be from the Semitic balsam-word which is in Aramaic bŭśam, with the Arabic forms coincidentally meaning elder (→ بَيْلَسان (baylasān)) though this is meseems not classical because of the elder’s distribution, and the word is as I now see said borrowed from Greek but بَلَس (balas, “fig”) seems to be comparable even more, or from the byssus-word *būṣ- (“sedge, rush, reed, flax”) connected in sense to the elder by the preferred places and forms of growth and no less than to oaks, chestnuts, and beeches. The presence of other obscure wander-plant-names in Proto-Slavic like *bъrъ (“foxtail millet”) increasingly supports Semitic connections of Slavic plant names, and indeed why wouldn’t *smerkъ (“spruce”) be the same as the Akkadian and Arabic and Persian and Chinese words mentioned there? And I forgot the fact that even the Latin name of the elder sambūcus derives from Semitic.

This only warns us to heed the likelihood of accidental similarity. If you have only a hammer everything looks like a nail and if you are an Indo-Europeanist everything derives from Indo-European. Fay Freak (talk) 01:02, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: Based on your comments, I reckon that the traditional etymology from PIE *bʰeh₂ǵos is not absolutely certain. On this account, I think it's misleading to talk with certainty about any relation with Proto-Slavic *bukъ... so I removed that information from the official entry. I also created the page of *bukъ, thus if anyone is interested in that term, they can look there. 90.196.180.211 20:44, 19 February 2020 (UTC)