Beech Reading

NIL 2-4 treats the PIE Etymon *b^hah₂g-ó- "beech". They mention that some scholars reconstruct long /a:/ and some (not always the same) scholars link it to the previously discussed *b^hag-. In general I don't see any reasonable link between a tree name and a root meaning "share" etc. But there is a possible connection for the Germanic cognates meaning "book, letter".
NIL also mentions (FN 2 on p.3) that there are doubts about the relationship between the words meaning "book, letter" and the continuants of this root meaning "beech". The main formal problem is that the words meaning "letter / rune" seem to go back to a root noun, that actually is attested in Old English, while the beech words are eh₂ stems (or n-stems derived from them). So we have derived morphology for what is supposed to be the original meaning ("beech") and a root noun for what is supposed to be the derived meaning ("book, letter").
Elmar Seebold, addressing this issue in his "Etymologie: eine Einführung am Beispiel der deutschen Sprache", (München : Beck 1981, quoted herafter as "Et."), also mentions that the proposed writing on beech tables that is supposed to be behind the change of the meaning from "beech" to "letter" is actually not attested, neither archaeologically, nor in written sources; Germanic runes are attested only on bark, stone, and various household objects (Et., pp. 290-291). It is also clear that the original meaning was "letter", not "book" - the oldest attestations mean "letter" in the singular and "document, book" in the plural, an obvious calque from Latin (littera - litterae) and Greek (gramma - grammata) (Et. p. 290). Seebold argues that the meaning "letter" is derived from the compound Norse bókstafr, Old Saxon bōkstaf, OHG. buohstap, whose second member means "staff". The writing of runes on staffs is widely attested (here Seebold is undermining his previous argument somewhat, as these staffs could of course have been made of beech wood, but the written source he quotes actually mentions ash wood).  
He then adduces a parallel from Welsh, coelbren "sign-wood, lot-wood", composed of coel "sign, omen" and bren "wood", designing a piece of wood covered with signs used to throw lots, a custom also attested for the Germanic people. He takes this parallel as an indication that the first element of bókstafr etc. originally meant "sign, omen, lot", and links it with our old acquaintance, the root *b^hag-, reconstructing a root noun Proto-Germanic *bōk-s "lot, portion" (Et. pp. 291-292). That would mean that the word family of "book" is not related to "beech", but that the purported writing on beech tablets is only a folk etymology. (A shorter version of these arguments can also be found in Kluge(-Seebold), "Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache", s.v. Buch).
In general, I find this argumentation attractive. A formal problem is that the proposed root noun is attested only in Vedic, as a second part of compounds, with an active meaning "enjoying" (NIL p.1), but not as an independent word with a resultative meaning "allotment, lot", and that it would be the only continuation of *b^hag- in Germanic. The same problems woud also arise if, as I proposed,  we eliminate the root b^hag- and take its purported continuations as derived from the root b^heg- "break"; that root also is not continued in Germanic (at least according to LIV p. 66/67 and NIL, p. 6; the forms with nasal infix mentioned in IEW p.115 look onomatopoetic, for which reason Pokorny himself states that they don't belong to *b^heg- ). There is also no root noun formed from *b^heg- attested in NIL (p. 6); if we eliminate *b^hag-, we would have at least the Vedic root noun mentioned above, but still with the same problems. On the other hand, an isolated root noun from a root that otherwise doesn't have any cognates in Germanic is a perfect candidate for the kind of folk etymology discussed.   

PIE *bhag- and Armenian bak

This is a follow-up on my thoughts on PIE *b^hag. I’ve come across an article by Hrach Martirosyan (“The place of Armenian in the Indo-European Language family: the relationship with Greek and Indo-Iranian”, Journal of Language Relationship, No. 10 / August 2013, p. 85 - 138), PDF here, where he adduces Armenian bak “courtyard; sheep pen, sun or moon halo” (missing in NIL) as a cognate of Indo-Iranian *b^ha:gá-: Sanskrit bha:gá- m. “prosperity, good fortune, property, personified distribution”, Old Avestan ba:ga- “part”, the descendants of which took on the meaning “landed property, fief, garden” (p.99, §5.1.3). Martirosyan admits the possibility that this is not a cognate, but an old loan from Iranian; he names one argument for it being a loan, namely the fact that the Armenian word is an a-stem, while the Indo-Iranian correspondences are o-stems; incorporation as an a-stem seems to be the expected outcome for an Iranian *ba:ga-; as another argument for a loan I would also see the fact that there seem to be no other formations from a root *b^hag- in Armenian. On the other hand, it would have to be an old loan from before the Armenian consonant shift, but Martirosyan admits that there are other such loans.

If this is not a loan, but a cognate, it would require a proto-form *ba:g-a:-, which could be explained as a Vrddhi-formation from *b^hag- or point to a PIE *b^heH₂g-eH₂- (Martirosyan’s reconstruction). Therefore, accepting bak as a cognate would in any case require us to posit a root PIE *b^hag- or b^heH₂g- separate from *b^heg- “break” (continuants of the latter root are well-attested in Armenian).

Thoughts on PIE *bhag-

In my haul of presents this year there was a copy of NIL, so I embarked on reading it root-by-root. The first one is *b^hag (NIL 1-2), and looking at the evidence for nominal derivations listed, I got a few ideas, which I’ll share below.

1)    The root has abundant nominal derivation only in two families, Indo-Iranian and Greek. These are the same families where, according to LIV 65, verbs formed from said root are attested. Interestingly, there are no matching derivations shared by both Indo-Iranian and Greek, except the o-stem *b^hago- (m.): Sanscr. bhaga- “wealth”, Iranian baga- “god, allotment“, Greek phagos “eater” (originally only found as last element of compounds).

2)    Outside these families, the only attested formation is the above mentioned o-stem *b^hago- (m.), found in Slavic bogъ “god” and the adjective compounds nebog- (and ubog-, not mentioned in NIL) meaning “poor”, and in Tocharian B pa:ke A pa:k “share”. Slavic also has a secondary derivation bogat- from *bagho-, formed with the productive suffix *-eH²to-. On the surface, therefore, we have three branches (Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Tocharian) showing a meaning “share, allotment, wealth”, and one branch (Greek) showing a meaning “eat”. Both NIL and LIV, following IEW and the communis opinio, take the meaning “share” to be the basic one and the Greek meaning to be a later development.

3)    According to footnote 1 in LIV, the Tocharian cognates are the main reason for positing *b^hag, not **b^heg with a schwa secundum as the source for Greek  ephagon ("ate" - suppletive aorist to esthio: "eat"). But as per footnote 8 in NIL, at least Adams in his Dictionary of Tocharian B classifies pa:ke as an Iranian loanword due to it having a plural in -nt-. Now, as, NIL states in footnote 6, it is widely assumed that Slavic bogъ loaned the meaning „god“ from Iranian. But it is also possible that the word itself with all its meanings is a loan from Iranian; after all, both meanings “god” and “wealth, allotment” are present in Iranian as well. The sound laws of Slavic don’t allow us to decide between loaned or inherited. But the fact that there are no old verbal formations based on bog- in Slavic and the absence of any cognates in Baltic, together with the identical dual semantics as in Indo-Iranian, speak, in my opinion, for bog- being a loan, not a cognate, in Slavic.

4)    In that case, the Tocharian forms could not be used as evidence for the existence of  /a/ as the root vowel. And instead of a three-to-one preponderance for the meaning “share”, we would have two different meanings in two different branches, as the Tocharian and Slavic correspondences to the Indo-Iranian formation, being due to loaning, not inheritance, should not be taken into account for reconstructing the original meaning.

5)    If, accordingly, there is no need to reconstruct a root containing /a/, it is possible to trace both the Greek and the Indo-Iranian words back to the root *b^heg “break” (LIV 66 / IEW 114-115 / NIL 6). The development “break” to “share out” in Indo-Iranian is straightforward; in the verbal system of Indo-Iranian, we would have a neat case where the meaning “break” became associated with the nasal present which, as in Baltic, was spread also to the non-present stems (at least in Vedic), while the non-nasal forms took on the meaning “share”; in Greek, the meaning changed from break” to “eat”, either via the idea of sharing food or via the idea of cutting / chewing it; in any case, the assumed development in this case is not more tortuous than the assumed development “share” > “eat”. In Greek, the family of phag- would seem to be the sole continuant of *b^heg.

6)    In summary, it is possible to eliminate the root *b^hag “share” from the reconstruction of Indo-European, if one assumes that the Slavic and Tocharian cognates are actually loans from Iranian and that the Indo-Iranian and Greek cognates actually continue *b^heg “break”.

I can’t say whether anything of the above is truly original, as I don’t have the means and the time to chase up even the references mentioned in NIL and LIV in order to see whether these thoughts have been discussed before. But as neither NIL nor LIV even mention such a possibility, I’d appreciate my readers to tell me if this has been addressed before and to point out any flaws in my reasoning.