Reconstruction talk:Proto-Indo-European/bʰeh₂ǵos

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“Transformed” Pokorny stuff, ominously sourced by the Leiden school.

• The beech isn’t in the range (!) of the Proto-Indo-European homeland.
• The Slavic page is properly *bъzъ. The Serbo-Croatian descendant does not count for *bazъ because Proto-Slavic *ъ generally gives a in Serbo-Croatian, the Russian and Ukrainian given are obscure dialectal forms, as well as the Bulgarian, which are unstressed while Bulgarian has suffered vowel reduction and Bulgarian а (a) and ъ (ǎ) are very close; ominously one gives an Old Church Slavonic only for *bъzъ. The current Slovak form which I added, apart from being anomalous as a feminine, can also be from ъ, this can be seen *dъždžь → dážď and the variation for *čexъlъ. Against the evidence from all Slavic languages one cannot posit such a byform, more easily *bazъ is an etymologist’s fabrication to shoehorn all into an Indo-European-etymology. Which does not work anyhow because the Slavic words mean elder, not beech. These plants are not confusable.
  • The page is in ESSJa, ’tis true, but apart from the entry’s age as I have noticed often, they do not take a stand for every entry in their Proto-Slavic dictionary, which is but hypothetical. They apparently create some index files, here motivated by Pokorny, and look what they can find to support the form, then they publish all anyway if the result is negative. See the RFD already filed for the adjective *bazovъ in WT:RFDO, Useigor did not understand this and created bare objectionable entries this way.
• Proto-Germanic *bōks means “book” but there is yet no proof the Germanic peoples used beechbark writing or anyone else as opposed to birchbark writing. And how can *bōkō (“beech”), different paradigms, be from the same Proto-Indo-European form? There is something unaccounted. The existence of that word also conflicts with *bʰeh₂ǵʰús (“arm”) giving *bōguz, as the consonant outcome differs and because “the slot is filled” i.e. the alleged word for a tree is too similar to a word for the arm for both having existed.
  • Also the sound correspondence is not necessariy, I see that PIE eh₂ can give (with and without acute) ō, there is *bʰréh₂tēr → *brōþēr, *wréh₂ds → *wrōts, but it depends on ablaut and more typical is the result ā or a, e.g. *séh₂ls → *saltą, *stéh₂tis → *stadiz. Also considering the actual sound value in PIE given at *bʰréh₂tēr. This additionally decreases the likelihood of PIE origin.
• Albanian bung is very tentative and random as always.
• Armenian բոխի (boxi) has been thrown out of the equation meticulously after the creation of the PIE, much reasoned at its entry.
• Where is the Gaulish word attested? Probably fishy if it is claimed to be only Gaulish but not retained in other Celtic languages. What do the other Celtic languages have? With such things I am accustomed to have the suspicion that it is somehow conjectured from unfathomable placenames.
• The Latin word may be an early borrowing from Northwest Greek φᾱγός (phāgós), like even mālum (“apple”); as Italy was Greek-settled and the beech is found in Italy only at some places and not right at Rome, only somewhat outwards. Whereas the beech is very frequent in the Proto-Hellenic area. In Latin likely a foreign word. I say this also from general impressions about substratum origins of Latin plant names, after having dealt with many Latin plant names and their origins.
• This is well a loanword after Proto-Indo-European when Germans, Italians/Romans and Greeks took new settlements judging by analogy. Remarkably the Slavic words *bukъ and *buky are Germanic borrowings for some reason, apparently because the Slavs settled right at the Northeast of the distribution of the beech, of course also Hungarian bükk (“beech”) is loaned. So if not even the Slavs before expansion (3rd century CE) had a word for the beech, the Proto-Indo-Europeans hadn’t either; if the Slavs borrowed this word, the Germans and Greeks and Romans did it likewise earlier. The correct etymologies for the German and Greek words are “borrowed from an unknown source common to ”. Fay Freak (talk) 15:37, 27 July 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Fay Freak: agreed. This has always been a dubious reconstruction, made worse by shoehorning more descendants to it, and further comical by reconstructing it with *-eh₂-. Also see {{R:ine:HCHIEL|86}} --{{victar|talk}} 18:28, 30 July 2020 (UTC)Reply

I have read it. So I have found it is actually a debunked canard since half a century ago, called beech argument. It might have went past the Soviet theorists. In Krogmann, Willy (1954) “Das Buchenargument”, in Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der Indogermanischen Sprachen (in German), volume 72 1./2, →DOI, page 13 it is expounded how the Gaulish name is derived by reconstruction, from placenames. It is to be added that the literature finds it problematic that the Greek word means an oak and not a beech. Fay Freak (talk) 20:44, 31 July 2020 (UTC)Reply

I disagree. Where else would "book" come from — This unsigned comment was added by 72.76.95.136 (talk) at 19:57, 6 December 2020 (UTC).Reply

It says where it possibly comes from. Often explained as in Germanic from the word for beech, which last is a word borrowed from somewhere. I do not need to have an explanation for or know everything to disprove an etymology. Your argument is none. Otherwise aliens built the pyramids because “how else”. Fay Freak (talk) 23:32, 16 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

Several invalid arguments here.

1) “Transformed” Pokorny stuff, ominously sourced by the Leiden school." -- This is frankly just rude, not reasoned. Kroonen's dictionary is extremely respectable (even if one disagrees with it) and tested by peer-review, unlike this nomination for deletion. The reconstruction is cited by philologists in other "schools" than Leiden. Check out e.g. Ringe (Pennsylvania/Oxford). Wiktionary should be reflecting the general scholarly consensus, not novel, non-peer-reviewed proposals of independent-minded contributors.

2) "beech not in homeland" -- irrelevant, as many words change in meaning over time, and with different environments in different geographical locations

3) "yet no proof the Germanic peoples used beechbark writing". No, but Germanic peoples' first contact with "books" would probably be Roman writing-tablets, which were often made of beech wood. (See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.orghttps://dictious.com/en/Vindolanda_tablets)

4) "Latin word may be an early borrowing from Northwest Greek φᾱγός" -- Even if that is true, that still leaves Germanic (NW Indo-European) and Greek (S Central Indo-European) as cognates, which is generally regarded as sufficient to support the hypothesis that it is ancestral to both of those branches. But what on earth is "an unknown source common to " other than the common ancestor of the European side of PIE?

Signed: an anonymous academic peer-reviewer, who is a tenured Professor in a Philology Faculty (no, not Leiden). But the decision about whether to delete the page or not should be taken on the merits of the arguments alone. 82.132.228.243 11:19, 9 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

Furthermore, the argument that “the slot is filled” i.e. the alleged word for a tree is too similar to a word for the arm for both having existed" is unreasonable, because homophony and doublets are actually perfectly common phenomena cross-linguistically. 94.196.220.242 14:57, 9 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

You are rude and not reasoned, okay?

Bare editors are stricter about meaning differences than I am, e.g. I presume @Metaknowledge mildly not amused about this lumping beeches and elders and what not. To reconstruct we need to pin down a more or less vague meaning, which these equations do not meet, and formally it is a scarecrow greater than many reconstruction pages we decided to delete, just not on first glance, but after a review of the possibilities (possibilities are hard to assess for the casual observer by magnitude, hence all those antivaxxers; our judgement needs specific training for the assessment of specific possibilities, so even if you are a professor in one area you may stay without insight in a closely related area and ignore its possibilities even though these should influence the decision).

We all have read very odd things that are peer-reviewed, as some academics have built parallel universes to make a living. And the beech argument is one of it, not a respected theory any more (if I understood respect correctly as being more than being constantly repeated out of courtesy and the university habit of citing everything that is available) but a fringe view, certainly not adding, in the traditional meaning of science, to our knowledge, but you are right that the decision about whether to delete the page or not should be taken on the merits of the arguments alone, since you yourself know your colleagues enough to distrust them.

It is symptomatic though that a tenured professor in philology fails to consider the presence of unknown language groups before Indo-European; that’s how one regularly comes up with reconstructions that should never be made: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, if you only know Indo-European, “everything” is from Indo-European. It is partially not your fault, given that the other language groups of Europe are scatteredly or not at all attested, and partially it is your fault in so far as you never deal with language areas where well-documented languages have stood in manifest contact (the usual case with the bulk of scholarship about Greek and Germanic and Germanic languages, you know those who live in a Germanic country and study Germanic do kind of a cheap thing, and if a European classical language is added this only opens the horizon a little).

Different semantic fields of a language have various propensities to contain borrowed terms, plant-names are especially notorious in it. If I was only an Indo-Europeanist I would hardly know but in the Semitic, Turkic, Iranian languages half of them (I exaggerate but little) are certainly loans from each other or other less-known or completely unknown language groups; e.g. another Wiktionary professor saw that خُلَّر (ḵullar) is surely borrowed and likely Hurrian but for the Greek ὄλυρα (ólura) the mainstreamers fail to do anything but speculate Indo-European (native or “pre-Greek”) origins although with the Near East data they should have classified it as wanderwort. However about every second time I open a Greek etymology Beekes claims a Greek word to be pre-Greek: while the intrinsic value of this label is close to zero due to the multifariousness of the frequent Pre-Greek claim, the idea of unknown sources of borrowings has been defended very well and is being concretized while we edit Wiktionary etymologies more and more.

So we pray you, Professor, to register and solve words occasionally, and especially if to disprove people as rude and uneducated as me. The more you learn of this dictionary business the more you realize that there is a thin line between daring comparisons—adding to our knowledge by maverickism—and academic dishonesty. And IPs are evil. After all you already do not rely on the majority of the comparisons on which that PIE “reconstruction” is made, if Germanic and Greek are left: In our experience the farer away a reconstructed historical language the more descendants one needs, and for PIE two are regularly (without very good reasons) not enough, while for Proto-Slavic not rarely one is enough—if a term must have been formed in Proto-Slavic, e.g. *mězgyrь, while for PIE there are too many millennia in between of what could have happened and we do not know that *bʰeh₂ǵos must have been internally derived in PIE (usually between Arabic, Iranian and Turkic and often inside their language groups themselves we know where a term was formed and hence whence borrowed by our understanding the internal morphologies of the languages: all things you do not know for this term).

This is all to say that, in comparison to more certain etymologies, here you know absolutely nothing. But you should somehow be confident about a reconstruction rather than many mismatches and coincidences and alternative scenarios (and I have engaged in shaky reconstructions out of excitement, but this is so shaky that it crumbles apart the more you think about it—if it were better I would come to maintain this PIE term: obviously I come correct in thinking about reconstructions, you will hardly deny this experience in having a consistent and carefully weighed approach about reconstruction entries). Fay Freak (talk) 17:12, 9 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

• According to w:ru:Буковый аргумент, the modern range of w:Fagus orientalis falls inside the Proto-Indo-European homeland. And its range several millenia ago might have been broader than today. --Ghirlandajo (talk) 18:38, 26 June 2022 (UTC)Reply
• I'm surprised there haven't been any updates to this request for deletion thread since last year. Is anyone willing to contribute journal articles discussing the presence of this constructed word for beech outside of the late Northwest Proto-Indo-European dialect continuum? In the meantime, I will provide citations from the EIEC, Calvert Watkins: "The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots", and Beekes Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Calvert Watkins was not part of the Leiden school as far as I'm aware; nor is Douglas Q. Adams, who was one of the main editors of EIEC.Rigognos Molinarios (talk) 12:23, 11 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

• This entire question is a bit of a mess, especially as some of the associated reconstructions are dubious, but I believe that the original posting user has made several critical errors, although the associated page should be updated.

The range of the beech tree not being within the hypothetical homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, as mentioned earler, is irrelevant to whether the word occurs in PIE. Since the descendent languages cannot seem to agree to what tree it refers, which is not that unusual for tree or animal words that are not highly general, it could also originally have referred to a tree other than a beech, but seemingly one which is usable as a food source (per the different meanings for hypothesised descendents being 'elder', 'beech', and 'oak').

The Proto-Slavic word being properly *bъzъ does nothing to detract from the reconstruction, as Proto-Slavic *bъ- as a cluster regularly comes from PIE *bʰe-. The real question is whether *bъzъ can result from bʰeh₂ǵ-. *pazъ from *peh₂ǵ- suggests no, however, *bogъ being derived from *bʰeh₂g- suggests that the vowel a derivative of the word *bʰeh₂ǵos would reflect in Proto-Slavic is uncertain (admittedly the following consonant here is velar and not a palato-velar, but point is still relevant), so this is still a possible derivative. If another aspirate-eh₂-palatovelar cluster derivative could be found in Proto-Slavic anywhere, that would be helpful.

The Germanic reconstruction is an absolute ludicrous mess, agreed, and the attempted connection between 'beech' and 'book' is completely silly, plus one would expect a Proto-Germanic *bōkaz to come from *bʰeh₂ǵos and not *bōkō. However, the Proto-Germanic word for beech is apparently more appropriately reconstructible to *bōkijā, or more credibly neuter *bōkiją which is easily derivative of *bʰeh₂ǵos. Also *bʰeh₂- appears to regularly become *bō- in Proto-Germanic from a quick check of Proto-Germanic lemmas, so the additional attempted phonology points from the original poster are also spurious.

Agreed, the Gaulish word is not credible as it is derived purely from onomastics. However the Albanian word is only listed as possibly related, as it may possibly be, and it means 'oak' identically to Greek φᾱγός, so it is fair as a tentative or hypothetical relation given the difficulties inherent in Albanian reconstructions. Dismissing it out-of-hand is childish.

If the Latin word fāgus were an EARLY Greek loan from the more conservative Doric dialects, one would expect pāgus or phāgus in Latin and NOT fāgus as the Greek aspirate did NOT sound like a fricative in Latin even into the reign of Augustus, therefore it is near-impossible that the Latin word is a loan from Greek, and it is more reasonable to conclude genuine common descent. The beech not being immediately in the area of Rome but in the mountains a few dozen miles away is also completely spurious as an argument as this implies Latin speakers never left home, nor had need of a word for things not immediately in their environment but which were plentiful close by. Rome is also not on the sea coast, yet Latin also magically has more than one indigenous word to describe seas and seaborne fish! Plus, the Greek φᾱγός means 'oak', so magically the Latins would also have to inherit a Greek loanword with a completely different meaning to the Greek word for no discernable reason.

So to conclude, a credible word reconstruction in at least Latin and Greek, which is more than enough to posit a PIE origination, and additionally with plausible Germanic and Slavic derivatives, although the Slavic is on shaky ground. I'm inclined towards allowing the page for *bʰeh₂ǵos to stand, but the *bazъ page is spurious and should be deleted, and the Proto-Germanic 'beech' and 'book' derivations need serious attention by someone more capable than me at Proto-Germanic research, as they are in a completely silly state currently. I somewhat doubt any Indo-Iranian derivatives will be found given that beech and oak trees are not exactly plentiful on the Iranian plateau or in northern India, but otherwise at least four major families are covered. Someone could additionally look into Armenian as its word for beech, hačari, seems at face value to be similar-looking, but I am also completely unskilled at Armenian phonology and it would have to involve some manner of special cases as 'h' normally results from PIE *p in Armenian as I understand. This is still less sketchy than the still-existent page for PIE *h₂éyos, which is almost certainly an accidental fabrication, but nonetheless mistaken. Andecombogios (talk) 04:47, 22 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

Mallory and Adams also accept the existence of a proto-indo-european term for beech, in their Encyclopedia of indo-european culture, (its on pages 58-60), so this isn't even limited to leiden school Ioe bidome (talk) 21:02, 7 August 2023 (UTC)Reply

• I am of two minds. I do not believe in the beechstave etymology and have to doubt the reconstruction. My opinion has not changed since I read this thread a year ago, noting that Fay Freak and Victar make compelling arguments. It is bogus, literally. Nevertheless, usually reliable sources are claimed to support this term.

1. Kroonen is expressly "skipping well-established Proto-Germanic lexems" and is focused on "more rigorous" implementations of sound laws and regional grouping (Kroonen, Guus (2013) Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 11)‎, Leiden, Boston: Brill, →ISBN, Preface). This does of course not take away from its value. Note that he discusses *bʰh₂ǵʰ- > *bagmaz (“tree; beam”) on a different page, admittedly controversial, and he notes that /ǵʰ/ and /ǵ g/ do not match when he mentions боз (boz) under *bōk(j)ō- in order to reject "any direct connection". He does not mark his reconstruction is IE but EUR.

2. Ringe 2006 and Ringe & Taylor 2014 do not mention it (though the latter mentions "books" shy of a PIE root).

3. Adams & Mallory 2006 note the North-Western or Central distribution, noting the irregularity of Ru. buz.

More citations in the entry:

4. De Vaan agrees with Kroonen. He notes especially that Albanian bung and Slav. *buzt "elder" are unrelated.

5. Trubachev has pre-laryngealist *bhuǵ-, *bhāǵ-, *bha(u)ǵ-. Kroonen discusses the Germanic evidence of rounding away as internal borrowings after vowel changes.

Remarkably, Derksen does not have it. Other sources follow IEW.

6. Fortson 2004 includes Russian, remarks on the distribution (as does de Vaan in more detail). It is a rare example of a feminine o-stem.

7. Wodtko, Dagmar S., Irslinger, Britta, Schneider, Carolin (2008) Nomina im indogermanischen Lexikon (in German), Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter with *ah₂ (?), without Slavic. Laryngeal and palatal are not secure. *bʰāg- may be lengthened grade of **bʰag-, viz. *bʰeh₂g-? Ha!

8. Kölligan (Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics, page 2236-2237) sets side by sidy *bheh2go-, *bherHg̑-, *perku̯us ‘oak’, *peu̯k̑-. Gaitzsch & Tischler (op.cit., page 86) plainly claim the word meant "beech", that the beech-argument which places the urheimat in the west is disproved (not cited though), and they include the Slavic word and a Kurdish būz "elm" too.

Gaulish is sometimes included based on toponyms but not discussed much. In sum, there is wide agreement in the literature. The only disagreement is about the random weights in the network or the nodes in the date tree, depending on how primitive you want your models to be. DurdyWendy (talk) 19:49, 12 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

@DurdyWendy: For Kurdish, you see its more pertinent connections in Chyet s.v. bizî and بُوقِيصَا (būqīṣā) (nobody explained the Arabic barring my guess and Arabic etymological dictionaries don’t exist). Henning’s 1963 paper on The Kurdish Elm also touching the beech-argument is in Henning, W. B. (1977) Selected Papers (Acta Iranica; 15), volume 2, Tehran and Liège: Bibliothèque Pahlavi, page 577.

This is not what agreement is. Again I stress that in this science one cites previous attempts without taking position; if one expands upon it the way you have done, it will conclude with a remark about a “highly uncertain reconstruction” or something in that direction; you see that academics write too polite to speak of bogus, but on the internet there is a higher necessity to reproach people that they have lost the plot. Fay Freak (talk) 21:31, 12 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Incorrect on the second charge, but not completely wrong. Scholarly debates are full of polemics, tending to be specific and well versed in the language. A notable example of polemics is Pereltsvaig & Lewis, "The Indo-European Controversy", who discuss the Buchenargument: "German philologists in the first half of the nineteenth century were preoccupied with finding the PIE Urheimat through tree names, favoring – unsurprisingly – a more northern homeland." (page 185). I lol'd. They consternate that only five roots which appear in Anatolian can be reconstructed for PIE and only one of them appears in Tocharian (viz. *dóru-, but here as in Slavic the meaning is "wood"), and they conclude, "Consequently, the majority of the reconstructed tree names can only shed light on the homeland of one of the main branches descending from PIE, not of PIE itself." (page 191). They agree that this is inconclusive (page 192), as do Gaitzsch & Tischler in the end. If that's what you mean, I stand corrected. Unfortunately it only proves the point: the sources agree to the extent that we usually concern ourselves with (WT:CFI).

I want to stress that the argument of a Latin loan is a possibility because Doric φᾱγός is less well attested and obviously a better match than φηγός. DurdyWendy (talk) 15:35, 13 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

This case is a rather of the problems of Wiktionary at the moment. You people really have to make up your minds on whether you want this wiki to be based on verifiability and reflection of the current scholarly consensus, like Wikipedia, or whether you want it to be a place where a couple of anonymous editors get to play at being scholars themselves and the whole world is treated to the fruits of their (non-certified) wisdom and competence, filtered only through the principle of 'truth by consensus' (Stephen Colbert's notion of 'wikiality' may not describe current Wikipedia fairly, but it may still turn out to be quite fitting for Wiktionary). It's perfectly clear that multiple mainstream scholarly sources agree with the entry's reconstruction of the PIE term that 'beech' originates from (The Fay Freak's claim that they just mention it is wrong, as obvious for anyone who checks them), it's just that The Fay Freak and Victar don't agree with it, and the real question is whether Wiktionary is supposed to reflect the position of actual scholars or that of The Fay Freak and Victar. (AFAIC, most of the objections of the professor anon to The Fay Freak were compelling, and The Fay Freak's long-winded rant in response was both unacceptably aggressive and poor in actual counterarguments.) Ditto for the 'beechstaves' - this is the standard view, but DurdyWendy doesn't like it for whatever reason (this is actually a completely separate theory that The Fay Freak explicitly didn't dispute, but she apparently sees getting rid of the whole PIE reconstruction as a way to get at the etymology of 'book' that is her own personal bête noire). Again, the question is if Wiktionary is meant to be the place where DurdyWendy tells the world what she feels is true or whether it is the place that informs them about what the current consensus of actual credentialed scholars is. As far as I'm concerned, if you want to overturn the scholarly consensus 'with facts and logic', you should go publish your views in a peer-reviewed article and if you manage to convince actual scholars, then cite it on Wiktionary (not as the only truth, mind you, but just as one position). Instead of satisfying your ambitions to be a scholar here, be a real one. Just the fact that someone has a lot of spare time on their hands that allows them to spend time on Wiktionary doesn't give them the right to used it as a tool to push their pet theories and their version of the truth on the entire world while bypassing the standard 'screening' processes for such a thing. And in case some of the editors here do happen to be actual academics IRL, this doesn't change anything - they may have worked on something, but they clearly either haven't worked on the specific issue discussed or their contributions pertaining to it haven't managed to convince most other scholars and to overturn the prevalent views in the field - otherwise they would have been able to rely on published sources instead of embarking on imitations of scholarly debates here. Being that rare academic who happens to have a lot of time to spend on Wiktionary doesn't make your view on a specific subject more authoritative than that of the majority of your peers - it may still be highly deviant on that specific subject, and the question is what the predominant view among experts on a given issue is.--62.73.69.121 18:58, 14 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

No idea what you are trying to say. See for yourself:

> “Objections to this etymology have been made on several grounds.” -- “book”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.

> “not of known relation to beech, as is often assumed” -- “book”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.

> “Diese Bedeutung ‛Buchstabe, Zeichen’, aus der sich alle anderen herleiten lassen, kann mit dem Wort Buche (so die übliche Etymologie) aus formalen und sachlichen Gründen nichts zu tun haben” -- Friedrich Kluge (2011) “book”, in Elmar Seebold, editor, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (in German), 25th edition, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN

> “Etymologische samenhang met → beuk¹ ‘boom’ is onwaarschijnlijk” -- Philippa, Marlies, Debrabandere, Frans, Quak, Arend, Schoonheim, Tanneke, van der Sijs, Nicoline (2003–2009) “book”, in Etymologisch woordenboek van het Nederlands‎ (in Dutch), Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

> “Determining which etymologies must be rejected, and which are actually correct and must therefore be retained, remains an ongoing task for the historical linguist.” -- Pierce, Marc. “The Book and the Beech Tree Revisited” Historische Sprachforschung / Historical Linguistics 119 (2006): 273–82.

Last but not least the Fay the Freak the luminary himself stands unchallenged -- diff.

So much for consence. Anyhow, it hardly even matters for the topic at hand. IncrediblyBendy (talk) 20:30, 18 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Keep, clearly. Sources and arguments that question its existence may be noted on the entry under reconstruction notes or some such header. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 11:43, 19 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

• Keep Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/bazъ at least since Lower Sorbian baz can't come from *bъzъ. I'm pretty sure strong ъ never becomes a in Lower Sorbian (though strong ь sometimes does). —Mahāgaja · talk 12:25, 24 March 2024 (UTC)Reply
  • It can, arbitrarily—like the leading East-Slavic forms have у (u), which can’t come from *bazъ. You know well that language has arbitrariness as a principle. Reconstructing from the descendants, without prepossessed resolution to gather support for an even more remote reconstruction, this Proto-Slavic reconstruction would not have been created organically. Rather there is room for descendants of one form having some variation. Per Occam’s razor there is little reason to assume an alternative form in Proto-Slavic. Fay Freak (talk) 13:28, 24 March 2024 (UTC)Reply
• Keep. Until a consensus can be reached within and between all relevant fields (esp. Slavic, Germanic, Latin). Distribution issues have been mentioned. Thanks to the Fagus-Quercus sp.-Sambucus incongruity, an interdisciplinary approach is unlikely to solve the issue unless the linguists can agree on Sambucus as a secondary shift or an independent loan. Even if, as is likely to happen, a more detailed pollen analysis than those of Giesecke et al. 2007 and Magri et al. 2006 concludes Fagus was not present in the relevant region and time, or an admixture dating analysis is performed that concludes the ssp. orientalis introgression in ssp. sylvatica that formed Fagus × taurica did not extend even close enough to the time of formation and diversification of PIE, there is still the Quercus sp.>Fagus possibility, not to mention the biogeographical compatibility of Sambucus as the original meaning in PIE (should it be accepted as an inherited cognate). The phonetic and semantic issues associated with my own opinion notwithstanding, the lack of agreement between linguists justifies the entry's continued inclusion for the time being. Иованъ (talk) 15:57, 18 May 2024 (UTC)Reply

Relevant for the history of the Germanic cognate is the recent confirmation of a longstanding hypothesis that the spread of Fagus sylvatica to Scandinavia was anthropogenic, with absolutely no presence in Northern Denmark until about 2500 kya, remaining an extreme rarity for several centuries thereafter. This matches the 3.2-2 kyr cal date range for the proliferation of F. sylvatica in Scandinavia given by Magri et al. 2006, including samples as far as southernmost tip of Sweden just before the beginning of that period; the same study however already detected the species in the macrofossil record of Zealand in the 5.7-4.5 kyr cal period ("predating pollen records by 1000 years"). So at the very least, *bōkō (“beech”) in Germanic can hardly descend from the component that spread with "East Scandinavian Corded Ware", decreasing the robustness of a semantic argument for "Fagus" being the original PIE meaning as it increases the plausibility of a "southern" origin for the term within Germanic and therefore of it being a loan acquired by a descendant of PIE rather than PIE itself.

And since the current evidence favours there having been no Fagus on the steppe between the Western and Doric attestations at the time PIE spread but there is a closer semantic relationship between the Western and Doric cognates than the contentious Slavic cognate, separate loans from one or more non-IE families ought to be the preferred explanation (or a semantic shift from an otherwise unattested PIE term, but this is less likely where phytonymy is concerned). Иованъ (talk) 15:57, 18 May 2024 (UTC)Reply

RFD kept, no consensus to delete. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 19:50, 12 December 2024 (UTC)Reply