SAUVAGE NOBLE.

Angelo Mercado, a doctoral student in Indo-European studies at UCLA, has a blog called sauvage noble ("an austronesian’s adventures in altertumswissenschaft and indogermanistik") that makes me nostalgic for my graduate days spent rummaging in old books in foreign languages. I wish in particular to call attention to his post on the two Indo-European roots meaning 'fart,' *perd- and *pesd-, which contains this excellent quote from J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth:

Indeed, it is bizarre recompense to the scholar struggling to determine whether the Proto-Indo-Europeans were acquainted with some extremely diagnostic item of material culture only to find that they were far more obliging in passing on to us no less than two words for ‘breaking wind’.

I should add that he gives all the forms derived from each root (from Rix's Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben), in case that's a further attraction.

Posted by languagehat at October 10, 2004 06:16 PM