Re: [tied] Re: About the etymology of *nepo:t- "nephew/grandson"

On Mon, 15 Jan 2001 15:41:16 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<gpiotr@...> wrote:

>It would have had to be the first privative compound ever, so exceptional it is. I sincerely doubt if you could quote a single parallel case.

Nie powinienes watpic. It'd have to be a form with skeleton
*ne-C(V)C, and a quick look in Pokorny yields only one such. A nice
one though: *nekwt-/*nokwt-, "obviously" from *ne- and *kw(e)it- "to
observe, to see" [half a :-)].

>Old Indic and Greek compound accent is later than PIE vowel reductions, cf. aks.ita- and aphthiton, both with initial accent (on the reduced negative prefix). You didn't address my objection to reconstructing PIE *po:ts 'powerful (?)' rather than *poti-.

You know I reconstruct *pot-n^- (i/n-stem). There are forms without
-i or -n in compounds (e.g. Latin com-pos), and in the emphatic
particle *-pot (attested in Hittite and elsewhere). From a semantic
point of view, "powerful" would indeed be *potn^-, with an adjectival
extension. The simplex *pot- could be "power, might".

>The alternating part of *nepot- is invariably the second syllable: *nepo:ts, pl. *nepotes, Gen.sg. *nept-os, fem. *nept-ih2-, adj. *nept-ijo-.
>
>The fact that Germanic has *nef-o:n- makes me suspect that the real internal division (if any) is *nep-ot-.

I think in Germanic, the Nom. *nepo:s was simply transferred to the
n-declension.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...