Needless to say, I made no such fantastic claim as that -ing removed the final consonant in climb, comb. Rather, I said that while a derivational suffix might protect a derived word from loss of a final consonant, as -or protects contemnor (one who is in contempt, usually of court) from the loss of final n seen in contemn, an inflectional suffix such as -ing does not.

Indeed, derivational suffixes of broad application, such as the -er that makes deverbal nouns, usually do not protect either. Hence climber has no more b than climbing does. There are, as always, exceptions: the (inflectional or derivational, pick your theory) -er and -est that make comparatives and superlatives do protect longer/longest, younger/youngest, stronger/strongest from the usual transformation of final -ng, but not the marginal wronger/wrongest.

Finally, I certainly do not claim to be a scholar, but I have not heard that in the language of scholars presenting two pieces of evidence amounts to a claim of certainty.

The question is of course quite simple but methodologically important: When there is an inner-indo-european etymological possiblity for a word in an indo-european languange what arguments are there really to say that the word was borrowed from an unknown language we really don’t know anything of.

In the case of ship: How can we be sure that this language (waht language are we speaking about?) had a word for ship at all, aside from the question – why did the Germanic speaking people(s) borrow a word for it when 1. they had an inherited word (this can only later have become archaic), 2. it is not difficult at all to form words meaning ship of what kind of type from the inherited word-material (as they did, cp. oe. lid or even the verb goth. farjan and so on) – the case would lie different when in the Germanic languages there wouldn’t a word for it because they didn’t know the object at all.

For the semantics and the time of the word-formation I would be much more cautious and simply say: we just don’t kno. The statement “I assume that ship could not have been coined too early, and I doubt that it designated a primitive dugout” is in my opinion quite difficult to prove. In the Germanic languages there are of course more cases where the explanation of the semanctics must start from the indo-european meaning of a root because, because the semantics of the word differs from that of other words belonging to the same root.

At least semantically there is just no problem: it parallels the semantics of the wordgroup of ‘boat’. That already ‘boat’ (looking forward to it) is semantically a ‘dugout’ that doesn’t of course rule out the possibility that there is a second boat-word with the meaning ‘dugout’.

For the ablautgrade I don’t see the point in the moment (could be because I’m a bit tired): the verb in the Germanic languages (*skipje/a-, *skipôje/a, *skiftije/a-) shows a zero-grade just like the noun. Even if not – the ablauting system must in the Germanic languages have existed much longer as is generally accepted (cp. now the book of Mottausch [if his accent-theory is accepted or not is for this point not important] – also scholars like Schaffner or Hardarsson are in agreement with this]) – so the word could have been formed fairly late (or very early if one likes – because we don’t know).

Point 4 seems in my eyes a bit circular. Of course, when one starts from the obscurity of the Germanic maritime vocabulary, this is true. But at least I’m not willing to start a priori from this assumption. When two Baltic verbs cannot “tip the scale” I wonder what one should do in cases like nhg. Käfer, oe. ceafur, where inner-germanic correspondences stand semantically aside and balto-slavic verbs are adduced, or ne. stone, where there is no inner-germanic connection at all – and still there is general agreement that the baltic and slavic correspondences are good enough in these cases to assume an indo-european etymology.

The new Dutch dictionary is indeed not very inspiring, but, when a group of etymologists particularly fond of assuming substrate words in Germanic, in this case don’t even mention this possibility, it seems worth at least thinking about this indo-european etymology for ship.