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

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hee, I like that: I have indeed never felt that the l's were missing, exactly...

But - reminded by a conversation elseweb - I have another one for you: the w in whooping cough. In England, we pronounce it "hooping cough"; in America, I find, it's pronounced as spelled. Is this an instance of your speaking written English, or something else...?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Do you think that the intake sounds more like "whoop" or "hoop"? It's an onomatopoeic disease name...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I don't believe I've ever actually heard a sufferer in mid-whoop, so I honestly don't know. Though I am rather attracted by the notion that we hear different sounds on either side of the pond, if that is actually what's going on. I'm equally but differently attracted by the alternative notion, that the spelling and the sound of the disease and the sound of the word became divorced from each other at some point, and the US went with the spelling regardless, or else the Brits decided that must be a silent W for reasons that only a Brit could find good...