Reconstruction talk:Proto-Indo-European/h₂ébōl

Relation with *meh₂lom

M Kapović, AG Ramat, P Ramat propose in the 2017 book, The Indo-European Languages, that h₂ébōl might be related to the word *meh₂lom that would originate malum. I'm certainly no expert on the topic, so I will just leave the resource here, in case someone feels it's worth adding it as an hypothesis or not. - Sarilho1 (talk) 21:51, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

I'd certainly like to know how they think they are related, because it's not at all obvious to me. —Rua (mew) 08:12, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Kümmel on p. 304 mentions a proposal that *b is rare in Proto-Indo-European because it generally became *m (only *m appears before resonants). It is true that there is an obvious problem: the place of the laryngeal. The only way to reconcile the two would be a reconstruction like nom. sg. *h₂ébōl ~ gen. sg. *h₂mlés, with laryngeal metathesis leading to a root *mh₂l- that could, in principle, be the source of Greek μῆλον. Not sure if this possibility can be buttressed with parallel cases, but it's an interesting thought.

The presence of the lexeme in at least Proto-Germanic (with archaic derivations pointing to ablaut, and Grimm's law of course), Proto-Celtic (it's attested in Insular Celtic and Gaulish, so reconstructing it for Proto-Celtic seems reasonable), and Proto-Balto-Slavic (with archaic ablaut and Winter's law, which precedes the already Proto-Balto-Slavic merger of *o with *a) speaks for significant antiquity. Especially the presence of the ablaut and the fact that the noun appears to have originally been a consonant-stem noun in *-l is remarkable. Also, there are no obvious non-Indo-European-appearing irregularities. While it is in principle not completely impossible that the noun was borrowed into Indo-European from an external source only around the end of the Bronze Age or the beginning of the Iron Age, this does not seem very plausible. The lexeme looks quite regularly Indo-European, with the *b the only unusual feature, and the arguments for non-Indo-European origin are overall weak. Wild apples could have grown in the Neolithic steppes of Eastern Europe and certainly grew in Neolithic Anatolia, so a Proto-Indo-European word for "apple" would not be unexpected. Either *h₂ébol- is inherited from Proto-Indo-European and survived (almost?) exclusively in Europe (there are verbal roots whose attestation is similarly geographically limited yet whose Proto-Indo-European status is not considered to be in doubt, such as *bʰleh₁- 'to howl, blow' or *ǵʰeh₁y- 'to yawn', so European distribution cannot be adduced as a particularly suggestive – let alone compelling – argument), or it was borrowed into Indo-European very early (early Bronze Age at the latest; in this case, a borrowing in the context of the Corded Ware culture would suggest itself), and adapted so completely as to appear native. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:00, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

Possible Albanian descendant

There may have also been an Albanian descendant, *abōla in Proto-Albanian and possibly ubël/ukël in the modern form. It is, however, (possibly) only presevered; mollë may have replaced it if this was indeed the original word for it. For this, I refer to thënukël.

On this basis, would it be reasonable to include this too? It must be noted that it is not used as a seperate word, of course, as mollë does so instead. ArbDardh (talk) 19:34, 23 January 2020 (UTC)ArbDardh

Clueless Semitic comparisons

Dear @Odssaid and @Profes.I., it is, if we know anything of geographic likelihoods, all wrong anyway, so it doesn’t matter and the etymologies went into the naughty corner just to be cast doubt upon (which is a thing we are not averse to do on Wiktionary if we can more or less exclude etymologies by accepted methodology), but as implied by me already in the editor history, someone in an Proto-Indo-Europeanist book which I back then, two years ago, searched on Google Books in order to find which word was meant to fill the script request correctly actually referenced Dozy by page with the word Arabic أُبُلَّة (ʔubulla, “figs pressed in a mass”, literally “a bulk or mass”) (a word which nobody knows and I deemed to be the classical أُبُل (ʔubul, “dry herbage upon which camels fatten”), derivative from the well-known Arabic إِبِل (ʔibil, “camels”)). Profes.I. apparently reverse-transcribed, though he admittedly entered a better-fitting word (unless he himself found someone referencing those words, which would assume those Indo-Europeanists have so little clue which words they are even citing that the words can be replaced without them realizing). Fay Freak (talk) 12:51, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

Possible connection with Sanskrit?

फल n. phala = fruit

OR

अफल m. aphala = Indian Plum [Flacourtia indica - Bot.]

93.70.66.172 07:32, 27 April 2021 (UTC)