Re: Odp: Odp: girls

From: Piotr Gąsiorowski
Message: 69
Date: 1999-10-12

 
----- Original Message -----
From: ivanovas@...
To: cybalist@eGroups.com
Sent: Monday, October 11, 1999 11:12 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Odp: girls

Hello,
Pjotr, you wrote: >. The ultimate IE base of all these forms is *xoju,
Gen. xjou-s (Skt. a:yu, yoh) 'life, vitality, vigour [not to mention
various secondary meanings]', and the words cited so far comprise only
a small part of the lexical family derived from it (my fellow Slavs on
CyBaList would not forgive me if I forgot to mention juny, junost',
junak etc.). Individual languages have various feminine derivatives
from *xjuho:n. <
It is some time now that I wondered about the feminine suffix *-ia in
various eastern Aegean languages, often expressively denoting a goddess
(cf. ancient Hittite demons/goddesses of the underworld). This feminine
'suffix'is still productive in ancient Greek, but is it possible it
meant originally something like *-goddess ? Or was nit just, as you
said, a general epitheton of vitality? I'd like to remind you of the
unclear origin of words of the Dionysos perimeter: Iakchos,
Iakinthos(or Hyakinthos, the pronunciation must have been pre-Greek and
unclear for Greek speakers), Iobates, Iao, Ianus, Iapethos (in
different spellings)- referring to male principles of vitality. And
also Eileithyia, Hyades, Iahu, and the strange words belonging to the
root *yo/a (because, if I understand current lingusitics correctly, not
fitting -Hyos- /*sua/= sow, but mythologically a very ancient root for
swine, the main holy animal for the prehistoric mother goddesses, and
an adjacent herb -hyoscyamos, a narcotic Circe used to change Odysseus'
friends into swine), Amph'io'ne, Hittite Iyaya. I'm aware of the fact
that *ija- in Anatolian languages means to make/produce as well as to
go. 
Is there an inner connection for all these name-sakes?
Greetings from Crete
Sabine
Dera Sabine,
 
Your words are a motley collection, and most of them, for various reasons, can't be related to the "life/youth" root.
Hyacinth (huakinthos), however, has been suspected of belonging here by serious scholars. It is derivable from *xjuh@...- = Latin iuvencus, English young, with the -inthos suffix, itself mysterious but often found in Greek plant-names. The semantioc match "hyacinth : boy-flower" is impeccable (the flower, as legend has it, sprang from the blood of a youth inadvertently killed by Apollo), though the derivation has also been criticised as far-fetched and verging on folk etymology (in its most sophisticated form, practised only by experts). It is certainly perfectly POSSIBLE if a little fanciful. The historical Greeks couldn't know, of course, what the huak- part might correspond to, as Greek had lost *xjuh@...- (though it had others, non-transparently related cousins of *xoju, such as aio:n 'aeon' and, believe it or not, the negative particle ouk).
 
The Hyades are more plausibly connected with the verb huein 'to rain'.
 
The suffix -ia is the Greek development of stem-final -i plus a laryngeal consonant (*x); the latter was the proper feminine ending. Most other languages have just long i: for the whole sequence, and there is frequent variation with -ja:. My own personal suspicion (I've published an article to justify it) is that the original PIE ending was even more complex, *-ei-x (alternating with *j-ax-), which gave *-i:x already in PIE and eventually turned into -i: or -ia after the loss of the laryngeal. Whatever the true details of the story, there is no connection with *xoju- except the chance occurrence of similar sounds (in a different order). Nor did -ia mean 'goddess', though of course it could be found in goddesses' names, being a feminine suffix! E.g. Muse (Gk. Mousa) is from *mont-ja: ('she of the hills').
 
The "swine" word is supposed to contain the verbal root *s(e)u- (perhaps *seux-) 'give birth to' (pigs typically have large farrows of piglets). The individual branches of IE show a variety of derivatives, such as *su:-s (Latin su:s, Greek hu:s) or *su-ei-n-om/*su-ei-n-i- (Old English neuter swi:n, Slavic feminine svini-). The same root is presumably found in *su:nus 'son', but not in youth. Hyoscyamus (the henbane) has everything to do with it, being etymologically (and very transparently, too) huos+kuamos 'pig's bean'; it was, quite rightly, thought to be poisonous to pigs.
 
Piotr