----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, July 28, 2000 8:22
AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: The English
Language.... ou la langue francaise
The more primitive meaning of the root is
no doubt 'daylight, (blue) sky, day'. There are related stems like
*di-n-o(/i)- or *di-w-ot-,
meaning 'day'. There are enough morhological parallels, IMO, to hypothesise that
at a very early stage there may have existed a u-stem neuter *d(e)j-u
'day, daylight' based on *dei- 'shine' (the phonetic
similarity to English day is accidental!), converted into
animate *djeu- (*dié:us,
*dié:m, *diwós, etc.) to become the name of
the Day/Sky God. As the IEs had a number of major and lesser gods rather
than one God, it's not quite clear if they needed a word to refer generically to
the entire class of immortal beings (or if they did, what about
*n-mrtó- 'immortal' used as a noun?).
One generic term possibly dating back to
PIE is *deiwo- 'deity < a diurnal being (??)' with the
associated vrddhied adjective *de:iwo- 'divine', referring, it
would seem, to a clan or a generation of gods with *Dje:us at
the centre. In the attested pre-Christian religions there are often gods
who don't belong to this central clan (or who stand in opposition to it), plus
miscellaneous dragons, giants and other supernatural beings who are neither
human nor, strictly speaking, divine.
Piotr
Glen asks:
> Hmmm... Question: Does the word
*dye:us mean "god" or "sky" in the earliest
> stage of IE? If the latter,
then what was the _real_ IE word for "god"
then?