Etymology things

[xiphias]

This morning, as I was driving Lis to work, we were wondering why so few English words have "lk" sounds in them, yet the phoneme is easy for English speakers to say. The only common words that end in "-ilk" are "milk" and "silk", with "ilk" being not-really-common and "filk" being technically jargon, and then you're into things like "wilk", which is an obsolete form of "whelk" that we only found because Lis started using her phone to look up words that end in -ilk. Yet we have no trouble saying "-ilk". So we started looking up -ulk, such as "bulk", and "hulk", and one thing led to another.

Did you know that the Yiddish word "yenta", meaning a gossip and busybody is from the name of a character in a 1923 comic strip that ran in the Forward?

Anyway, does anyone know of a dictionary of proto-Indo-European words that have been deduced?

Comments

[ron_newman]

"bilk" is not exactly a common word, but most people know what it means.

Can you link to your reference re "yenta" ?

[cheshyre]

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=yenta