I’ve somehow found some free time and have added several more glosses to the database. These new glosses are: ankle, badger, bird cherry, blanket, brick, calf, candle, clay, cradle, cream, dough, fast, flour, footprint, frost, grow, hail, hedgehog, hemp, lead, maple, marmot, millet, moss, mulberry, naked, oak, oats, owl, pillow, pine, poplar, rib, rice, ring, rye, silk, sword, thread, tin, turtle, urine, wax, well, willow, wrist.
I was very inspired by Stachowski’s 2008 Names of cereals in the Turkic languages when I added all of the grain terms. I thought it would be interesting to do a few other common cultural terms, such as metals and tree names. The metals in particular follow similar Wanderwört-like patterns as they have made their way through Eurasia. I already had iron, gold, silver, and copper; I have now added lead and tin, completing the list of common iron age materials.
Bird cherry was added because I kept running across it every time I searched for “egg”. It’s very similar in form, which is intriguing. I have no theories on their relationship yet.
It’s been fascinating to see what technologies can be reconstructed based on vocabulary. The ancient Turks definitely had metallurgy, bricks for building permanent structures, and grain production. But they seem not to have had apiculture judging by the lack of reconstructable terms for wax. They liked honey, but didn’t work with wax. Interesting.
I’ve also added the latest update date to languages, so you can see if I have searched for the most recent glosses. Not all languages have this yet, as I haven’t been able to work on many of them.